Voxeo Talks

If you subscribe to industry newsletters and frequent industry websites, you may have noticed an increased number of webinars and whitepapers on Outbound Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The recent flurry of activity isn’t surprising given analyst forecasts. For example, Datamonitor predicts the market for hosted Outbound IVR services in North America alone will more than double from an estimated $213 million in 2008 to $524 million by 2013.

Outbound IVR offers companies the ability to provide proactive customer service, deliver important notifications, expedite collections and more. But to truly put the advantages of this technology to work for you, it is important to understand the intricacies of successful outbound calling, how it differs from your Inbound IVR solutions, and the importance of delivering a cohesive customer experience.

At Voxeo, Outbound IVR is old hat. A large portion of our hosting business can be attributed to customers with high-volume outbound traffic. In fact, last month a Voxeo hosted customer made 1.3 million outbound phone calls in 1.5 hours. In our latest whitepaper, “The Ins and Outs of Outbound IVR,” we set out to share some of the knowledge we’ve gathered over the last ten years, including a few gotchas to be aware of, as well as success factors that will make your campaigns better and your customers happier.

Read Voxeo’s new Outbound IVR whitepaper now. You can also learn more about our Outbound IVR capabilities, including how to get started for free at www.voxeo.com/outboundivr

Today we are very pleased to announce that our IMified platform now lets you build applications that interact directly with Twitter. In fact, if you’ve already built an application (or “IM bot”) that interacts with the leading IM networks, adding Twitter support is this easy:

1. Register a Twitter name with Twitter
2. Add the Twitter name to your bot configuration (and go through the Twitter OAuth process)
3. Start receiving and generating messages to and from Twitter

That’s it.

Everytime someone sends a “@” message or a direct message (DM) to your Twitter account, the contents of that tweet will be sent to your application. Your app can reply back with more information, or really do anything else with that data.

Why might you want to do this? As we said in the news release:

As the volume of a company’s Twitter messages grows, an application on the IMified platform can scan incoming tweets and reply back as appropriate based on information in the message, speeding up the response time and allowing company staff to focus on more detailed inquiries. As another example, companies using Twitter as a customer service channel can create an application that will respond to Twitter inquiries late at night when customer service staff are not available. Similarly an application could scan messages and alert staff via IM or other channels when certain Twitter users contact the company or certain keywords appear in tweets.

“Think of all the typical information you gather at the beginning of a customer service interaction like the user’s name, account details, or a description of the problem they are having,” York continued. “Unlike phone-based IVR where a user has to work through menus, Twitter and other short-message communication services enable automated agents to supplement human support without putting a menu barrier in front of people. Automated agents can watch both public and private/direct Twitter messages and either respond with the appropriate information or make sure the appropriate person responds to the message.”

The IMified platform also supports outbound notification via Twitter and can be linked to other business processes and systems. A library, for example, can receive a query from a user about a certain book. When the book becomes available, the application can send the user a Twitter direct message with this information. In a similar fashion, a company can create a loyalty program that alerts users when specific sales or events occur. In both cases, the application can send automated messages from the same Twitter account used by company staff so that replies can be seen and handled by staff.

We’ve seen an increasing interest by companies in adding Twitter as yet another customer service / customer interaction channel. We want to help them expand and scale their Twitter usage.

For us it is all part of our broader “Unified Self-Service” vision where you can write an application once and have that application interact with customers in whatever medium they choose to contact you. I’ve drawn it this way:

That’s the vision we’ve been building for some time now… and we’re delighted to announce the addition of one part of the social messaging part of that picture today. Now… we’re excited to see what you all will do with it!

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, imified, twitter, microblogging, customerservice, enterprise, e2conf

Some days ago, we had our special-edition jam session

on the business advantages of personalization.

Michael Codini talked about how to:

·         Delight callers with personalization

·         Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs

·         Learn from customer behavior

·         Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, …

·         Deliver targeted offers

·         Leverage investments in business intelligence

You can find the pdf version of this presentation on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal.

Do you know about our monthly jam sessions? Upcoming topics are available on our developer portal, too.

As I mentioned previously, I (Dan York) am at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today through Thursday at the Westin Boston Waterfront in downtown Boston. The keynote panel I’m on, The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise, doesn’t happen until Wednesday morning at 9:15am… but I came down early as a good number of the sessions are of interest.

If you are at the show and would like to say hello, please do email me. I expect to also be posting updates to Twitter on both danyork and voxeo.

You can also follow along with the conference “backchannel” on Twitter by following the hashtag “#e2conf”. Here’s an easy search URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=e2conf

We expect to have a very cool announcement out on Wednesday, too… but more on that then…

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Technorati Tags: e2conf, voxeo, danyork, dan york, enterprise 2.0, boston

Yes, Jose de Castro, Senior Engineer at Voxeo, will be giving a talk at this years service-oriented architecture conference SOA World East held in New York June 22 – 23.  Jose’s talk is titled “The AJAX Impact on Telecom: This Ain’t Your Father’s P.O.T.S.” The abstract is below:

Scripting languages have revolutionized how users interact with the Web. They allow developers and business owners alike to remain agile in the face of ever-changing requirements. Jose will demonstrate how developers can leverage their existing AJAX skills to develop real world SIP applications. Examples will be provided in Groovy, JavaScript, Ruby and Python. (BTW “POTS” = Plain Old Telephone System.)

If you are planning to attend SOA World in New York or are in the area and would like to coordinate a meeting with Jose drop us a note!

I sadly heard the news that my former adviser, Prof. Rajeev Motwani, at Stanford University passed away on Friday in an accident.

During my graduate study at Stanford, I truly appreciated his willingness to reach out and help to off-campus students like me.

In recent years, Prof. Motwani has become well known among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs due to his early involvement in Google, Paypal, and other start-ups in the valley.

It is a huge loss to Computer Science at Stanford, and the industry as a whole.

My sincere condolence to his family.

A Voxeo customer, Evolv On-Demand, has developed a cutting-edge solution that helps customer contact centers efficiently recruit and hire agents who stay longer, are more productive and provide superior customer service.

In an industry plagued by traditionally high agent turnover rates, contact center managers find themselves in a continual, expensive and time-consuming hiring cycle. Evolv eases the pain with a web-based application and screening process, and Voxeo-powered outbound calling.  

A joint press release issued today by Evolv and Voxeo includes these impressive stats:

Evolv’s end-to-end sourcing, selection and hiring solutions have helped leading call center organizations reduce agent turnover by 15%, boost hourly agent productivity by 20%, cut cost-per-hire by 35% and improve customer satisfaction, resulting in annual bottom-line impacts of seven to eight figures.

Evolv’s web-based software-as-a-service solution integrated quickly and tightly with Voxeo’s hosting platform. Before making a purchase decision, Evolv was able to prototype and trial their solution using Voxeo’s free hosted developer portal. Use of open standard VoiceXML significantly streamlined development and integration with Evolv’s backend systems.

Voxeo’s call progress analysis technology and methodologies for answering machine detection improve the success rate of outbound calls and streamline the user experience. Information provided by the job applicant can be used to trigger different versions of the outbound calling application. For example, an applicant’s indicated language preference or a client’s specific hiring requirements can be used to serve up call scenarios in languages such as English, Spanish or French. 

Advantages of the Evolv solution include:

• Eliminates dependence on the availability of the interviewer and applicant with an automated, 24×7 solution, thereby saving valuable time in the hiring process
• Provides accurate, real-time insight into applicants’ phone presence
• Frees recruiters to focus their energy on strategic sourcing, candidate management, and final selection as opposed to candidate screening
• Contributes to reducing the average hiring timeframe from weeks to days
• Reduces subjectivity and bias in the hiring process

Read our case study to learn more.  To optimize your call center workforce, performance and profitability, visit www.evolvondemand.com or contact Evolv On-Demand directly at (866) 971-4473.

While Voxeo holds regular technical Jam Sessions for our VoiceObjects developer community, this month we’re really jamming with a special-edition session on the business advantages of personalization. With personalization, self-service applications can automatically adapt to individual preferences and recent transactions for an improved customer experience, lower costs and untapped revenue opportunities.

Industry veteran and VoiceObjects founder, Michael Codini, will talk about how you can:

• Delight callers with personalization
• Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs
• Learn from customer behavior
• Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, recent transactions and more
• Deliver targeted offers
• Leverage investments in business intelligence

The online Jam Session will take place on Tuesday, June 16^th at 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 AM PST, 5:00 PM CEST.  You can register here.

Click here to learn more about our regular, monthly technical Jam Sessions.

Voxeo Prophecy has received a 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC). The award recognizes products that benefit the customer experience as well as deliver ROI for the companies that use them.

See the complete list winners here on the Customer Interaction Solutions Web site.

Download Prophecy for free or sign up for instant access to our online developer portal and hosting.

While we regularly talk about the capacity and scalability Voxeo’s cloud platform has for delivering calls, it’s always fun to see specific examples. Last week, one particular example caused our CEO Jonathan Taylor to tweet:

1.3 million calls in 1.5 hours… let’s look at that number in other ways – it is also:

• 14,444 calls per minute

• 241 calls per second

Okay, so yes, I’m an employee… and I’m the head of marketing so you would expect me to say this… but I still find that number pretty darn amazing!

The cool thing is that customers like this routinely put such demands on our system – and it’s just part of what we do.

P.S. And before you ask, no, I can’t share the name of this customer nor what they do. (Believe me, I’d love to!)

P.P.S. And yes, our CEO is indeed on Twitter. Feel free to follow him. (On Twitter, of course… not in real life…)

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