Voxeo Talks

BarCamp Orlando is back again, and this year it’s being hosted at the Plaza on the 10th and 20th floors!

An annual event that facilitates cooperative learning, sponsored by some of the coolest companies in town like our friends at Envy Labs, BarCamp Orlando brings together techies and creatives of all kinds – so whether you’re a coder, graphic designer, photographer, or new-media professional, you’re encouraged to attend and especially to share what you know.

The “first rule of BarCamp” is that all attendees should consider giving a demo or leading a session, or assisting with one. There are four presentation rooms available, one of which is in Voxeo‘s 10th floor Town Square. No need to schedule ahead of time – BarCamp Orlando builds the talk schedule on a whiteboard on the morning of the event. Just pick a subject you’re passionate about, whether it’s a new app, a programming language, a Photoshop technique or anything else that strikes your fancy, and spend twenty minutes sharing what you know.

For more info and a preview of what you can expect at BarCamp Orlando, check out this video:

BarCamp Orlando runs from 9:30am to 6pm on Saturday, April 14th, 2012, with talks from 10am-12pm and 1pm-6pm, and lunch at noon. To register, visit barcamporlando.org.

Waterfield Technologies is a leader in voice, web and mobile solutions for financial services customers and other enterprises worldwide, providing leading-edge self-service solutions and robust database and application integration services that synchronize and optimize the end-to-end customer experience. Some of Waterfield’s clients include GE, Citibank, and CenterPoint Energy. We recently spoke with John Marino, President and CEO of Waterfield Technologies, and asked him about Waterfield’s history, focus and method for integrating multichannel communications within these industries.

Overview:

Waterfield has been providing voice solutions since the mid-80s. The company’s legacy hardware focus on infrastructure solutions has evolved over the years to now support a myriad of software based applications include IVR, web and mobile solutions, and other, multi-channel (voice/email/SMS) capabilities.

How are you specifically addressing the key concerns in your markets?

Especially in the financial services industry, and in other regulated industries as well, there are specific issues that clients need to address: data security, regulatory issues and disaster recovery and response. Given our long history of working within this industry, we are able to customize solutions that interface with the core platforms that financial services companies use for data management, while keeping a targeted focus on building application solutions that address the current trends facing banks and credit unions. Many solution providers are focused around how to deliver technology (voice, mobile, web, etc), we are focused on how to use technology to solve business issues and move the needle from a customer service perspective, ideally bringing real change and a platform for evolution in a history stagnant part of most financial service organizations.

Also, our deep understanding of the business allows us to take a more consultative role with our clients, functioning not just as a voice solution provider but as a company that embraces multichannel solutions, building a strategy and road map, and helping our customers gauge progress towards their respective automation objectives.

Why did you partner with Voxeo?

Most solutions being used to provide inbound and outbound customer service in the financial services industry have stagnated, and implementing a true multi-channel solution on top of old infrastructure would yield suboptimal results. We partnered with Voxeo so that we could offer solutions that were built for multi-channel communications from the ground up, with the capability to support what’s next in terms of customer communication preferences.

What’s up next for Waterfield?

We’re working on additional ways to leverage our partnerships to create solutions that are innovative and unique to the market, such as increased mobile optimization. Fundamentally we believe that the clients looking for solutions are tired of being forced one technology platform after another while yielding very limited results. We are focused on taking vertically focused, consultative solutions to our clients and working with them to use technology to solve problems, and create true change. Having a “newer, updated” solution is great – but as fast is the market is evolving, we feel that we can be doing more with the tools available and look forward to helping our clients embrace a holistic mindset towards customer self service and smart-automation.

For more information, check out the Waterfield/Voxeo whitepaper “Slashing Costs and Improving Customer Care in Financial Institutions”, and visit Waterfield Technologies’ website.

Digital DataVoice (DDV) deploys customized, scalable call center solutions which increase operational efficiency and ROI, create personalized customer communications and identify profitable cross-selling and upselling opportunities across your existing client base. We recently spoke with Matt Bashaar, Strategic Account Manager at DDV, to learn more.

Overview:

DDV is one of the largest and most experienced independent IVR, CTI and multichannel integrators in North America. Since 1987, DDV has provided business-to-consumer communications solutions including application development, comprehensive maintenance and support. They specialize in self- and assisted-service technologies for call centers and have longstanding relationships with many Fortune 500 companies.

How are you specifically addressing your market?

DDV’s decades of experience in a wide range of vertical markets help us to understand industry best practices. However, we know each company is unique and we go to great lengths to study your business and discover the needs of your customers. This process allows us to deliver personalized and consistent interactions to improve customer satisfaction. Digital DataVoice’s clients have seen dramatic improvements in ROI, customer satisfaction and reduction of total cost ownership. We help you use technology and state-of-the-art communications tools from companies like Voxeo to do the same. We use automated call center solutions so you become more productive, provide exceptional customer service and save money.

We offer best-in-class solutions for call center compliance and productivity. DDV helps you reduce inbound call volume by anticipating and solving customer needs and offering self-service solutions. We also work to integrate your communications and legacy systems into your organization’s entire business management strategy to improve overall operational efficiency.

Why did you choose to partner with Voxeo?

After initially considering Voxeo as a hosting partner due to the carrier-grade offerings and uptime guarantees, we realized there was a significant technology advantage with Voxeo. We’ve worked with over a dozen other IVR platforms and none were comparable. VoiceObjects, in particular, is at the forefront of the industry for its unique abilities in reporting and analytics, which give us the ability to compare performance to benchmarks and assess and optimize solutions for maximum effectiveness.

What’s up next for DDV?

We’re increasing our focus on mobility – Voxeo’s platform gives us the ability to expand our mobile offerings and give a consistent user experience across channels. Building on our work with successful mobile strategies for self-service and increasing multi-channel ROI, we will continue to establish ourselves as the subject matter expert in this area.

In addition to mobility, DDV continues to refine our core delivery process and customized it to today’s industry needs; specifically, for shorter, more focused delivery cycles. We have adopted many Six Sigma principles to come up with a best-of-breed, quality-based methodology tailored for IVR and CTI delivery. DDV uses a comprehensive project management methodology based on Project Management Institute (PMI) standards and processes.

Our experience, honed over two decades, is evident in the complete solutions we provide to our customers. Our design standards are second to none in the industry and we deliver all-inclusive solutions. Our process is focused on achieving measurable business results.

For more info, visit DDV’s website or contact David Zweber, Director of Marketing, at 651-686-3000.

If you’re tired of rummaging in your pockets, cup holders, and under your car seats for change when you have to utilize metered parking, you’re not alone. New Parking was founded with one mission in mind: create the easiest, most error-free cashless way to pay for metered parking. Six years after starting operations in 2006, the company has done just that and is steadily growing year after year. We recently spoke with co-founder, President and CEO Thomas Janacek to get a feel for how New Parking got started and how Voxeo’s technology empowered them to build a system other IVR vendors found daunting.

Overview:

New Parking was founded to offer a solution to a common problem – the inconvenience of paying for parking via coin-based meters. We were based in Silicon Valley at the time, and a friend (who happened to have a background in telecom and SMS predictive text technology) went on a short trip into Oakland to pick up some bread. In the process, he got a parking ticket. We realized there was a need for a quick, easy and cashless way to pay for metered parking. With cellphones becoming more ubiquitous at the time, paying by phone seemed like a practical solution.

How are you specifically solving this problem?

We made the system simple, with as little time and user input required as possible. In cities where our technology is installed, once someone calls our system, all they have to do is indicate their parking meter ID number and they are registered as paid, and also given information on whether the meter has any maximum time limits. Meter readers can easily tell which meters are paid via New Parking. For first-time users of the system, we provide a free first hour of parking – our system sends them a text message so they can easily register on our system by calling back or going to our website. We have about 5-10% new users and a high conversion rate to regular users, due to the system’s ease of use and simple conversion process.

Why did you build with Voxeo?

We built the voice layer of the system with Voxeo technology because of the quality of the platform, and the speed of development. The IVR application we designed has a high level of complexity in terms of the interactions required with the voice layer.  Of the five companies we approached, Voxeo was the only one that ‘got it’. Larger telecom vendors had demanded a retainer to even spec out a workable version of the application. Using Voxeo, we were able to build the app in three weeks – for approximately the same cost that others had required merely as a retainer. Voxeo also makes it easy for us to set up local access numbers for each of our customers, such as a 561 number for the meters we manage for the City of Palm Beach.

What’s up next for New Parking?

We have begun exploring some other markets, including the ability to hook our technology up with electric vehicle charging stations, which would allow drivers of electric cars to pay for a recharge as easily as they pay to park.

To learn more, visit the New Parking website.

By now, you’ve assuredly heard about Pinterest. Social Media Club Orlando met at Voxeo last night and discussed the wide world of Pinterest, and how marketers might want to use this new tool.  Pinterest allows you to digitally collect and curate “pinboards” – sort of like digital scrapbooks – centering around a particular topic, with some of the most popular subjects on the site being food, travel, fashion, home design and other aesthetically-friendly topics.

Established in March 2010, the site has grown rapidly and logged over eleven million unique visitors in January 2012, with a typical visitor spending over 100 minutes on the site in the month. Researchers at comScore report that the site’s demographic is about two-thirds female, and the most popular region for using the site is the Midwest. If you’re into recipes, do-it-yourself home decor or planning a wedding, checking out Pinterest for your own personal use is a no-brainer. But given the rapid growth in users, the “stickiness” of the concept and the site’s demographics – it’s worth thinking about whether Pinterest is a right fit for your business, as well.

A few questions you might ask yourself before you start pinning on a professional level:

- Do I have a product I want to showcase? Pinterest isn’t a site for tons of marketing verbiage or a hard-sell message – in fact, pushing your own material too aggressively is against the site’s terms of service – so you stand the best chance of doing well if your core product has a lot of visual interest. Indie and vintage marketplace Etsy is an excellent example, using Pinterest to curate a mix of products offered for sale on their site in addition to art, fashion and other related ideas. Etsy now has over 50,000 followers on the site. Many retailers are seeing referral traffic from Pinterest as they and others share their products, and large brands like Gap are also getting into the mix with their own Pinterest presences.

- Am I part of someone’s planning process? If you provide services, photos of your final product can inspire a potential customer to click. This would be equally true if you were in event planning, construction or even if you were just trying to help someone decide what’s for dinner (a personal favorite: Saveur, whose pinboards can help you pick out drinks and dinner, then get you the recipes when you click through). And those in the design business, from graphic designers to wedding planners, can consider Pinterest another form of a portfolio.

- What can I create that someone will inherently want to share? If you don’t think your product or service lends itself to one of the first two points, take a look at what your customers are doing. If it qualifies, re-”pin” them and then re-think what you can share around those concepts. Another popular item to share on Pinterest is an infographic, so brainstorm how those might showcase what your business does in a unique and visual manner.

Even if you aren’t out there ravenously “pinning” everything in sight, you can always use Pinterest to get ideas or to create curated collections that support your own business processes. Our Marketing team is all over this concept – for example, our marketing director Kim created this Voxeo Party Planning pinboard to collect some of her favorite items we’ve used at events like our Customer Summit.

And once you’ve started with Pinterest, the next step is to make it as easy and fun as possible for your customers to get out there and Pin, as well, particularly if you’re a retailer. Just like Twitter’s “tweet” and Facebooks’ “like” buttons, you can add a Pinterest “pin” button to your pages to encourage sharing. Some brands have also created contests specifically for those sharing the brand’s content on Pinterest.

The Wall Street Journal wrote up Pinterest this week, citing several businesses that were starting to see a return on the time they invested in the site, such as this wedding-related retailer:

“Our traffic converts to sales,” said Amy Squires, co-founder of The Wedding Chicks LLC, which posted about $540,000 in revenue last year, up from $340,000 in 2010. The four-year-old online retailer of wedding-party gifts, which joined Pinterest last summer, said Pinterest now brings in more than double as many monthly visitors to its website than Facebook and Twitter.

Like many startups in the social sharing arena, Pinterest itself doesn’t have its strategy yet in place for how it plans to monetize its own site, but with its rapidly growing user base it may be an area of opportunity for your business to get more engaged with your customers in a highly visual, interactive manner. Have you given Pinterest a try either personally or professionally? If so, let us know what you’ve found useful (or not useful) about the Pinterest experience!

We’re excited to host the February meeting of Social Media Club Orlando!

This month’s meeting features a presentation on Pinterest – now the fifth largest social media network, which recently logged over ten million monthly unique visitors – and discussion of “The Social Media Strategist,” by Christopher Barger. Social hour will follow at one of downtown’s fine establishments, located within walking distance of our offices.

The details…

When: Wednesday, February 15, 2012 – 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Where: Voxeo, 189 South Orange Avenue, 10th Floor, Orlando

If you plan on attending, please RSVP on Facebook (and follow Voxeo and Social Media Club Orlando on Facebook, too).

Also just around the corner on February 21, 2012, Voxeo is hosting the Venture Lounge event for all entrepreneurs, designers, developers, social media professionals, bloggers, investors and students. Further afield, we’ll also be involved with BarCamp Orlando, hosted at the Plaza – more details to come.

We hope to see you at one or all of these upcoming events!

Are you looking for an easy, customizable solution to communicate with your customers across voice, text messaging, email and other channels? OneReach uses Voxeo’s carrier-grade platform to unify these communication channels and let you reach customers with meaningful information, in the way they want to be reached – giving small and medium businesses the same kind of access to multichannel messaging as enterprise customers.

Overview:

OneReach was created to make digital communications accessible to the common business person. We were faced with a client who needed a custom communications solution to handle their inbound phone calls without losing any prospective customers. There was nothing readily available: all of the solutions were costly, technically complex and didn’t fully support multichannel integration. After building a solution for this client, we realized there were probably many other SMBs in the same situation that would benefit from having a streamlined, simple way to access the kind of communications technology previously reserved for big businesses with large development budgets.

How are you specifically solving this?

We built OneReach from the ground up with full integration of multiple channels (e.g., voice, email and text messaging). Our FlowBuilder visual development environment allows anyone, even non-technical people to build powerful communications applications, including the ability to integrate with an API or website. In order to increase relevance and value to the customer, our system allows for the integration of external data sources, the ability to set up  multi-message campaigns on a timeline and to leverage multiple channels to match customers’ communication preferences.

Current customer applications run the gamut from very traditional, marketing lead tracking through dedicated phone numbers, to multi-channel applications used to increase donations and event participation within non-profit organizations, to building out a communications infrastructure in rural communities in Uganda to provide health information and services.

Why did you build with Voxeo?

Voxeo offers us a carrier-grade platform with unmatched reliability, and also has the multi-channel integration we were looking for when we designed OneReach. The obsession with customer service at Voxeo has mirrored what we strive for at OneReach, as well. We also appreciated the ability to build and test at no cost when we were developing the solution.

What’s up next for OneReach?

We’re continuing to innovate and add new features to our core product. In future releases, we plan to deploy industry-specific templates, making it easy for businesses to choose a template that suits their vertical – retail, healthcare, financial – and quickly and easily customize voice and text message prompts to set up notifications, surveys and other common tasks. Additionally, we’re building a user community around our product, including the ability for businesses to build their own templates and then share them with other users. We’re adding seamless CRM integration, and we’re rounding out our integration with social network tools by allowing social network updates to be created and scheduled directly within the OneReach application.

Demo:

For more information, visit OneReach’s website, or contact OneReach at 866-709-0482 or sales@onereach.com.

Voxeo is excited to announce a partnership that will bring more sophisticated solutions to address customer care and communication challenges for banks, credit unions and other financial institutions. Waterfield Technologies – a leader in customer service solutions for the banking industry  – is joining Voxeo as a Voxeo Connect Certified Partner, combining Waterfield’s deep expertise in building solutions for financial institutions that increase customer retention, customer loyalty and engagement with Voxeo’s proven, carrier-grade platform that optimizes communications across IVR (interactive voice response), text, mobile and social channels.

The benefits of this offering are concentrated in five key areas:

• Customer experience: When institutions combine industry best practices with the latest technology, the quality of customer experience goes up while costs go down. This is particularly true for institutions which have not upgraded their financial IVR channels in many years. Waterfield and Voxeo provide a solution that dynamically adapts to customer communication preferences, streamlines common requests and reduces transfers to a representative, and unifies customer experiences across channels like voice, text, chat and mobile apps (both iOS and Android).
• Proactive customer care: With outbound IVR and SMS, your system can provide useful notifications to customers – such as payment reminders, and low balance alerts. Integrate with your current business-intelligence software and power personalized up-sell and cross-sell offers.
• Integrated business intelligence: Use built-in, powerful analytics to eliminate IVR bottlenecks that create customer frustration, understand customer behaviors and identify opportunities – yielding an overall improvement in service experience for customers and internal stakeholders.
• Self-service administration: With a system built on web standards, existing IT staff can make routine changes and updates as business needs change and customer communication preferences evolve, giving you more flexibility and control.
• Simplified security and compliance: Voxeo and Waterfield have created a system that is 100% standards-based and certified compliant, which supports two-factor authentication and in-queue PIN validation. This ensures the security of your automated customer interactions.

The banking and financial services landscape has undergone a seismic change in recent years, with mergers, acquisitions and other factors that encourage customer mobility – is your customer service keeping up with your customers’ needs?

Learn more and read our whitepaper, “Slashing Costs and Improving Customer Care in Financial Institutions” at www.voxeo.com/waterfield.

Voxeo will be exhibiting at Enterprise Connect 2012, at booth 1143, and we want to see you there! The Enterprise Connect Conference + Expo runs from March 26-29, 2012, at the Gaylord Palms Convention Center in sunny Orlando, Florida, and addresses all of the technology trends that shape collaboration and communications.

The conference has over 50 sessions and a variety of Keynote and General Sessions hosted by industry thought leaders, covering a full range of applications surrounding these key themes:

• Cloud-based Communications Services and Systems
• Managing and Securing Converged Networks
• Mobility
• SIP Trunking
• Social Apps and Networks
• Strategies for Communications and Collaboration
• Unified Communications
• Video

Interested in joining us? Take advantage of this promotional offer: Save 35% off the on-site price for the Entire Event and 3-Day Conference Packages or register for a Free Expo Pass with Priority Code CPHVVR278.

We hope to see you there! If you’ll be at Enterprise Connect and would like to set up a meeting or take a tour of our office, contact Samantha Seidman at sseidman@voxeo.com.