Voxeo Talks

As part of Voxeo’s partnership with Integrated Voice Solutions (IVS), we’re announcing the ability to automate migration from existing legacy and end-of-life interactive voice response (IVR) systems to the more flexible and powerful open-standards technology of our communication platforms, Prophecy and VoiceObjects. When an end-of-life or legacy system is migrated to our more advanced Voxeo platform, businesses will be able to create just one single application and deploy it across any combination of voice, text or mobile web-based communication channels, giving their contact centers the ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences that aligns with customer communication preferences.

From the press release:

Businesses understand the importance of exceeding customer expectations, yet many contact centers have been stymied by the time and expense it takes to re-develop their existing voice applications to support the latest functionality and communication preferences. IVS uses Arca+ to facilitate these migrations quickly, easily and cost-effectively, which means businesses no longer have to maintain obsolete technology and pay high support and service fees.

Arca+ automates the migration from outdated, end-of-life Intervoice IQTalk and Edify EVIP platforms to Voxeo, so applications can easily be transported and maintained in a modern, standards-based development environment that mitigates the risk of future lock-in to any specific platform. The Voxeo platform supports multi-channel self-service interactions across mobile web, smartphone apps, live chat, text and social networks like Twitter. IVS will add migration options for other platforms as client needs demand. Voxeo also offers its own Migration Manager tool for Nortel/PeriPro users who want the flexibility of Voxeo’s powerful open standards technology.

“Enterprise contact centers no longer have to suffer with their existing, end-of-life IVR applications while the competition leaps ahead with cutting-edge customer outreach,” said John Amein, senior vice president of product management at Voxeo. “Arca+ provides a path for these companies to migrate to the number one platform in the communication application industry faster, easier and with less cost than rewriting.”

For more info on IVS’ Arca+ solution including demo videos of how an application can be imported into the Arca+ system, then exported to Voxeo VoiceObjects, check out our Voxeo Partner Spotlight on IVS. IVS also offers a free, no-obligation application audit and cost analysis, so companies can best understand their cost savings and options. More information on the free cost analysis can be found at http://www.voxeo.com/migration.

Smart businesses know their customers and can leverage that knowledge into personalized and efficient self-service channels that build loyalty and improve customer satisfaction.

Join Voxeo and Digital DataVoice on Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 1 PM Eastern time to explore how personalized customer self-service leads to happier, more loyal customers and contact center cost savings. Hear from some of the industry’s leading experts who will explore the design, development and business benefits of modern, personalized IVR and multi-channel self-service.

Best Practices Covered Include:

-Personalized multi-channel self-service design and development

-How to deliver dynamic, relevant and specialized content to the caller

-Using personalization to provide proactive outbound service

-Using personalization to more effectively cross-sell and upsell

-Metrics from companies that have improved their customer experience with a well designed IVR

An informed and engaged customer is the best kind of customer. Are you proactively communicating with your customers?

Join Ovum, MicroAutomation and Voxeo for our upcoming webinar “Turning Customer Service Inside Out with Proactive Customer Engagement” on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 at 1 PM Eastern. We will share proven best practices and examples of how businesses are using outbound communications, such as proactive customer service and notifications via IVR and text, to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and remain competitive.

Join us to learn:

• How to use industry metrics to assess the benefits of moving from reactive to proactive, with illustrative case studies
• Application of best practices in designing a successful outbound solution that balances both customer expectations and company business needs
• How to use outbound to effectively manage call volume and spikes
• The advantages and trade-offs to consider with the supporting platform and infrastructure decisions
• How to best identify high-value and high-priority applications for maximum short- and long-term measurable ROI

Click here to register today!

All attendees will receive a copy of Ovum’s new white paper: Best Practices in Proactive Outbound Customer Contact

Founded in 1991 by the lead architect of IBM’s CallPath product, MicroAutomation designs, develops and deploys contact center solutions for commercial, government and E911 customers. MicroAutomation focuses on solutions that enhance the customer experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention, improved efficiency and demonstrable ROI. Through continuous testing and optimization in its state-of-the-art lab, MicroAutomation’s team focuses on integrating new technologies into new and existing call center infrastructures. We sat down with MicroAutomation’s Scott Fischer to learn more about MicroMessenger™, the first Voxeo Connect Certified Partner Application, and why MicroAutomation partnered with Voxeo.

Overview:

Outbound IVR doesn’t have to be limited to the old, static dialer or simplistic notification application. While it’s completely different from a company’s inbound IVR solutions, outbound proactive customer engagement is critical in ensuring a cohesive customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction and retention by providing important notifications. These benefits are especially amplified when the outbound contact is then integrated with the return inbound customer interaction.

How are you specifically doing this?

Most customers have made considerable investments in their responsiveness to a customer contact – both with self-service IVRs and improved agent-based systems. We believe that a well-constructed proactive engagement application can dramatically extend these benefits and yield tremendous ROI with minimal investment. We built MicroMessenger with several key principles in mind including a very robust rules-based process to aide in compliance with government regulations and internal customer policies. The application was also created to be sufficiently intuitive so that the end user can create, edit and manage specific campaigns and overall use with minimal IT or outside assistance.

Why did you build with Voxeo?

Voxeo gives us a best-in-class IVR platform that was built by intent, in a unified way. The evangelists and architects of the Voxeo platform are still with the company and will ensure its continued development and success. We also feel Voxeo shares our values; the “unlocking communications” message particularly resonates with us and with our focus on finding the right tools to unlock untapped potential in our customers’ contact centers, whether premise-based, or in a hosted or hybrid model.

What’s up next for MicroAutomation?

MicroMessenger™ is constantly evolving – any client-specific features we develop are evaluated for their potential utility on a broader scale, which can lead to their inclusion in future versions of the product. Upcoming versions will include multi-channel support and hosting on a fully redundant network. We are also focusing on applying our core competencies of 360 IVR design and development, agent integration and telephony best practices – coupled with industry-specific requirements, to extend the incremental value our customers can expect from us.

Video Overview and Demo:

For more information, check out the MicroAutomation/Voxeo whitepaper on the business case for using Outbound IVR, then learn more about MicroAutomation MicroMessenger.

BlueFlame Industries, which focuses on many different industries and project scopes, founded Integrated Voice Solutions (IVS) in 2004 with a singular mission in mind: pairing world-class professional services with open technology standards to build best-in-class, self-service solutions for call centers, financial institutions, utilities, healthcare providers and the retail industry. We chatted with Jay Bolton of BlueFlame to learn more about IVS, Arca+ and BlueFlame’s latest projects.

Overview:

BlueFlame was founded as a vehicle for creating companies from our ideas. We started IVS, our first company, at the same time, and it has grown to 45 employees and $6 million in revenue. Now, BlueFlame serves as a launch pad for not just our ideas but for all ideas – connecting people to the resources they need, both in terms of finances and expertise, to get their ideas off the ground.

Arca+ is the next company we are launching, with a defined goal of giving our clients the ability to more easily migrate away from outdated technology.

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

Arca+ was created to ease the migration and cut the cost of moving applications to new technology. It was created for our clients, because we found it unfathomable for our clients to have to incur redevelopment costs every time technology advanced – or worse, that they remain stuck on that older technology. Today we have input adapters for Edify EVIP and end-of-life IQTalk and export adapters for Voxeo Prophecy or VoiceObjects. We will create other adapters as the market demands. When an application is designed using our Visio-like ARCA+ Designer tool, most of the development is done and can be exported directly to Prophecy or VoiceObjects to create the application. Using Arca+ we are able to cut timelines down by 75% and cost by 50%. There are no support, license, or service fees other than the project itself. This is a huge differentiator.

Why did you partner with Voxeo?

Voxeo’s culture and technology was an immediate hit with us at IVS. The Voxeo team and our team just “clicked.” Voxeo’s immense dedication to the customer is unmatched in this industry and the staff is always at the ready to hard charge in assisting us. We appreciate that and know that’s what our clients expect and deserve from us, as well. Voxeo allows us to offer lower platform support fees, better hosting options, a better IVR platform and better support. Additionally, Voxeo’s support for multi-channel service gives us the flexibility to know we have a solid partner for future BlueFlame products.

What’s up next for your organization?

We are continuing to grow the BlueFlame Network, our social-networking tool for connecting entrepreneurs with venture capitalists and others with specialized knowledge needed to build and grow successful companies. Also, we are adding additional functionality to Arca+, such as adding additional channels including SMS functionality, a drag-and-drop design palette for applications, new input adapters for translating other application languages, and identity verification in conjunction with another Voxeo partner (ArmorVox).

Arca+ Import/Export Demos:

Importing a legacy application into the Arca+ Eclipse plug-in –

Exporting that application to VoiceObjects -

Contact info:

Visit IVS’ website for more info on Arca+. The IVS sales team (sales@integratedvoicesolutions.com) also offers a no-obligation cost analysis for rewriting an application from scratch vs. what it will take IVS to deliver using Arca+.

Chrysalis Software integrates sophisticated call center technologies to create inbound and outbound systems that empower customers to interact over voice and data channels – giving businesses the latest advances in hosted and premise IVR solutions, ASR, CTI and call center management and delivering exceptional experiences for customers that are specialized, on-time and on-budget. Recently, we spoke with Steve Hoffman at Chrysalis to learn more about their contact center integrations and how they leveraged Voxeo’s IVR platform.

Overview:

Chrysalis Software specializes in providing technical solutions and professional services for contact centers. The founders were part of the launch of the IVR line of business at Nortel, and leveraged that experience when founding Chrysalis to develop custom and packaged apps for contact centers that extend the functionality of commercially available contact center software. By simplifying call flow and utilizing natural-language functionality, we create solutions that unify communications and enable businesses to cultivate their relationships with their customers to provide a higher level of service.

How are you specifically doing this?

We integrate Voxeo’s IVR into the Avaya contact center to enhance that contact center product’s functionality. Some of the features of our solutions include computer/telephony integration that routes important data to the appropriate agents, the provision of realtime analytics such as wait times, the ability to use outbound IVR to call back when an agent is available, and to throttle outbound calls – such as appointment reminders – so that when transfers to agents are necessary, there are agents available to handle those calls.

Why did you build with Voxeo?

We’ve had a Voxeo ‘connection’ since 1999, when one of our founders met one of Voxeo’s founders at a Stanford alumni picnic. After exploring our options for IVR service providers, we’ve found Voxeo’s product to offer flexible IVR options that met our needs as a developer and our customers’ needs in highly competitive markets. We have also been impressed with the simplicity of working with Voxeo and the superior support they provide.

What’s up next for Chrysalis?

We already have a strong presence in the government and utility sectors, as well as healthcare. We are expanding our presence in these verticals and also in surveys – our upcoming offerings will allow us to provide additional specialized solutions to these markets.

This demo shows how easy it is to set up and execute a campaign in Chrysalis’ system:

For more information, visit Chrysalis’ website or contact sales@chrysalis.net.

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.

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 is at IQPC Call Center Week in Orlando right now, and we’re excited to make the announcement of our first Voxeo Connect Certified Partner Application: MicroMessenger, the interactive campaign management and outbound notification application from MicroAutomation. MicroMessenger’s certification as a Voxeo partner application represents the next step in the strategic partnership between Voxeo and MicroAutomation, which began in 2011 with MicroAutomation’s certification as a preferred Professional Services partner within the Voxeo Connect partner program.

MicroMessenger provides a standards-based, fully hosted solution for proactive, event-based customer care, with complete, turnkey campaign management for interactive, outbound service and notifications. The platform is extremely flexible, so whether you’re working on ad-hoc projects such as sending seasonal notifications, or powering core business processes like verifications and appointment scheduling, you’ll be able to develop campaigns easily, and quickly show a return on your investment due to MicroMessenger’s low-cost startup and on-demand access. And with MicroMessenger’s hosting on the Voxeo Prophecy cloud, you have a 100% uptime guarantee on a reliable IVR platform with no large upfront investment in on-premise equipment.

Sample applications include:

• Payment reminders
• Shipping notifications
• Targeted product offers
• Service changes/outages/interruptions
• Employee alerts
• Appointment reminders/confirmations/rescheduling
• Emergency alerts
• Personalized information delivery
• Seasonal campaigns

Looking for more info on best practices in outbound customer service and proactive customer engagement? Check out the Voxeo/MicroAutomation whitepaper on the business case for Outbound IVR, then learn more about Voxeo Outbound IVR /SMS and MicroAutomation MicroMessenger.