CUSTOMER TMC Labs Innovation Awards: Here Are Some of the Latest and Greatest Solutions in the Customer Experience Arena

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CUSTOMER TMC Labs Innovation Awards: Here Are Some of the Latest and Greatest Solutions in the Customer Experience Arena

By Rich Tehrani, Group Editor-in-Chief, TMC  |  August 31, 2015

We have a diverse group of winners this year. Drishti-Soft wowed us with tech innovations, the RightAnswers Knowledge Hub supports seamless video, HP Qfiniti 10 boosted browser support and analytics, NICE Systems is making contact centers more efficient, SAP is really bringing it in the war on Salesforce, Five9 is taking design cues from Facebook, and there’s so much more that’s interesting here. This is perhaps one of the most diverse groups of winners we have had, and we especially were interested in the new category created by Cyara. Read to the end to learn more.

Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Ameyo

www.ameyo.com

Ameyo is an all-in-one software-based communication solution managing customer interactions enabling its customers to serve their customers more effectively. The solution lets users have  personalization across multiple channels, which is helpful in today’s omnichannel world.

Ameyo is a product of Drishti-Soft Solutions, which was founded in 2003 and has boasted some interesting innovations over the years. It transformed its platform to multi-tenancy at the application level with a distributed architecture based on MDA or model-driven architecture in 2009. In the same year the company launched Ameyo Nodeflow designer and accompanying GUI for developing IVR systems and extended communication applications used in intelligent networks of large enterprises and telecom companies. The solution has inbuilt support of advanced application interfaces like web services or IN API. Adding to the USP of Ameyo Nodeflow 2.0 is its modular design that enables creation of independent IVR templates, which can be a part of the main IVR call flows. Any changes in this template would automatically reflect in the IVRs where this has been included. This type of design is a mandate for the intricate network of IVRs found in customer service infrastructure of large enterprises like telecom companies.

In 2012, the company launched the Agent-Assisted IVR API. The solution took inspiration from processes like surveys or feedback collection where much of the agent-side conversation is repetitive in nature. With the help of this agent-assisted API, the system would be empowered with customizations in the form of pre-recorded voice prompts with multi-media operations to control their exact positioning in a live conversation. Ameyo Agent-Assisted IVR API proved particularly beneficial for BPOs in tier-2 or tier-3 areas where skill upgrade of the agents is a major requirement to improve service quality levels.

The company includes lots of innovation in its solutions – perhaps our favorite is the service-oriented architecture with very powerful and granular API Structure and drag-drop based user interface. This eliminates the need for writing custom code for each business requirement. This approach enables the business user to view, manage, extend, and scale the technology to meet constantly evolving business requirements effectively, which results in a faster time to market at a lower cost. This feature allows the company to service enterprise clients where you can use the XML-based integrations that enable users to do less coding and faster integration. In addition we like recent additions like the specialized solution for foodtech or delivery companies as well as the engagement hub, which syncs the view of the agent with that of the customer’s web browser for more seamless service.

RightAnswers

RightAnswers Enterprise Knowledge Hub

www.rightanswers.com

RightAnswers Enterprise Knowledge Hub is a combination of cloud-based software, services, content, and knowledge automation specifically designed for organizations to manage and share departmental knowledge across the enterprise, beyond just the support organization. All support channels – agent-assisted service as well as web, mobile, and email self-service – access the knowledge in the Enterprise Knowledge Hub with the ultimate goal of transforming support operations to provide customers with frictionless, omnichannel support experiences.

The latest version, 8.2, released in April 2015, focuses on helping companies increase knowledge usage and adoption by both support agents and by customers – since the more people contribute to and use the knowledgebase, the better the customer experience.

RightAnswers recently introduced knowledge gamification with three out-of-the-box games that clients can use to increase agent adoption of the knowledge, reward the creation of more knowledge, and improve self-service usage with the ability to assign users and teams, define goals, set points, and track progress. RightAnswers tracks 12 different knowledge-related activities that can be selected for any new games clients create.

Management wants confirmation that the knowledgebase is populated with useful knowledge, but checking for knowledge quality can be a tedious exercise for support managers. This is why there’s an automated Knowledge Quality tool that calculates article quality based on more than a dozen criteria, easing the work for knowledge and support managers while assuring them that the organization is developing useful, high-quality knowledge that meets its customers’ needs. The new Knowledge Quality tool also checks articles for compliance with the Knowledge-Centered Support article quality index.

Other unique capabilities of RightAnswers include a built-in video creation tool that lets agents create videos on the fly as they are working with customers and deliver them as solutions, improving customer engagement.

Our favorite attributes include federated search, which enriches the knowledgebase by incorporating solutions from public third-party websites, dashboards, more than 40 standard reports, an ulimited number of custom reports, and the Knowledge as a Service offering, which provides services including knowledge review, authoring and maintenance, knowledge analysis, and improvement.

HP WFO Software

HP Qfiniti 10

www.hpengage.com/solutions/wfo/

HP Qfiniti 10 is HP’s workforce optimization suite of unified products designed to optimize the costs associated with people. The Qfiniti 10 product suite includes tools for workforce management, quality monitoring, liability recording, coaching and eLearning, performance management, surveying, and multichannel analytics. 

Benefits include improving operational efficiency, driving interaction effectiveness, providing improved customer service, and reducing the cost of ownership.

The product allows contact center supervisors to understand, measure, improve, and track performance while managing all contact center data through a centralized system. Call logging and intelligent archiving deliver full support for compliance and quality monitoring strategies. A wide range of metrics can be monitored from a single interface, such as customer satisfaction levels, first-call resolution, handle times, and effective scheduling.

The HP Qfiniti 10 omnichannel analytics module, HP Explore, leverages the HP IDOL platform that was built to enhance enterprise search and provide connectors to more than 500 different data repositories and more than 1,000 different file types. In essence, this is a technology that was built to extract meaning – and therefore value – from the explosion of all the unstructured data that enterprises must now manage. And the contact center, the front line of real-time customer care, is a great beneficiary of this now-searchable data.

This past February, new features were added to the HP Qfiniti 10.3 release, all of which should be quite useful – especially the last feature listed, allowing better cross-browser functionality:

  • Additional call recording connectivity: In addition to broad telephony switch support, HP Qfiniti 10.3 has added support for contact centers using Genesys’ SIP-based Active Call Recording Interface for a seamless recording integration. Support is now also provided for contact centers using Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express and Unified Contact Center Enterprise, which require encrypted communications to meet privacy and compliance regulations. HP Qfiniti 10.3 can record these calls using the Cisco Active Call Recording interface.
     
  • Improved agent performance management: Within the HP Qfiniti Advise module, contact center agents can appeal evaluation scorecards, supervisors can review and amend scores, and escalations can be managed. In addition, integrated analytics provide visibility into which agents are appealing scores, which supervisors are receiving appeals, and what issues are being escalated most often.
     
  • Superior desktop analytics: The HP Qfiniti Optimize module provides advanced, dynamic dashboards and reports that improve supervisors’ visibility into workflow processes and agent performance. Supervisors can monitor individual processes more easily, such as order entry or call wrap-up to identity opportunities for automation, or track specific processes that relate to key performance indicators.
     
  • Expanded browser support: HP Qfiniti now supports Google Chrome as well as Microsoft (News - Alert) IE, providing greater compatibility for contact centers running on these standard browsers.

Confirmit

Confirmit Genius

www.confirmit.com

Confirmit Genius is a text and social analytics solution that provides categorization and sentiment analysis for free-form text. 3.5 billion posts were collected through Confirmit Genius for analysis from social media platforms, forums, blogs and news media, at an average rate of close to 10 million posts per day in 2014. The company answers the rapidly growing need for organizations to gain insights from the large volumes of unstructured feedback and content they gather for all types of unstructured text, including verbatim survey responses, social media feedback, web analytics, call center records, CRM data, and more.

Two editions are available: Confirmit Genius Text Analytics, which provides categorization and sentiment analysis for free-form text, including verbatim and other unstructured survey data; and Confirmit Genius Social Analytics, which captures social media feeds, online media feeds, forum comments, blogs and more, and provides a powerful environment for analyzing this data.

Confirmit can be used as an on-premises or on-demand offering. For on-premises customers, all information is stored on their own servers. The on-demand or SaaS platform provides access to a shared, secure environment via the web. This environment is managed by Confirmit and hosted by Rackspace (News - Alert) at three locations: one in Dallas, one in London, and one in Sydney, Australia. Customers who choose to use this model do not require any equipment to sit on their own premises.

The two editions of Confirmit Genius are integrated so that all social media feeds can be categorized and have a sentiment associated with each category. Confirmit Genius Text Analytics also integrates with Confirmit Horizons, ensuring that any free-form text captured into Confirmit SmartHub, a customer engagement hub utilizing the same categorization model and same sentiment engine.

Confirmit Genius addresses the challenge by mining both solicited and unsolicited free-form content, organizing the feedback according to the categories important to each business, analyzing complex and sometimes conflicting sentiments held within each piece of content, and linking to other data sources to provide wider context.

Confirmit Genius is language and character set agnostic. However, it needs to be configured and trained for each language. Until recently, English was the only language supported for true sentiment analysis, but Confirmit just launched support for Chinese sentiment analysis, which will enable global businesses to add a new dimension to their social analytics.

Our favorite feature Confirmit developed is a new Model Builder module, enabling users to quickly and easily develop new categorization models. This adds greater flexibility to the solution as users are able to more quickly adapt to market changes.

NICE Systems

NICE Robotic Automation

www.nice.com

NICE Robotic Automation automates routine, clerical processes and by doing so, releases the contact center agent or the back office employee from performing mundane, time-consuming, error-prone tasks. It does so by imitating any user desktop activity, be it a mouse selection, field entry, screen navigation, calculation, database query, web query invocation, or other activity.

The solution is a client installed on a virtual server. The clients run each on a separate virtual session and execute the defined process steps from a to z. These clients can run simultaneously, so many processes can be handled at the same time. Each robot can handle any kind of process. Robots can work 24/7, are four to five times faster than a human employee, and they execute processes flawlessly.

A robot is invocated by any third-party application activity, and once a task is invocated, it is added to a queue on the server and is executed on a first come first served basis. When completed, the robots report back to the server and are immediately available for the next task.

The Robotic Automation Framework includes:

• Real-Time Designer: This code-free designer studio allows development of the automation processes by capturing screens, defining business rules, logic, and workflows.

• Client Invoker: The client invoker is responsible for adding tasks to the robotic automation queue.

• Robotics Server: This is the central control system responsible for distributing tasks across the robots, managing the queue, and handling errors and resiliency. This is the heart of the robotic automation framework.

• Robot Client: The robot software is installed on a VM workstation (Citrix, VMWare, HyperV). It is responsible for fetching new tasks from the Robotics Server and processing the automation locally.

• Database: The MSSQL server contains task data and status for further reporting.

• IBM Cognos: This is the reporting platform providing out-of-the-box reports for analyzing and gaining insights from the robots’ operations.

• Sentinel: This is an intuitive lightweight tool providing straightforward, meaningful alarms based on hardware and business metrics. Sentinel provides a real-time status of server health and outlines any task-related issues.

• Our favorite features include intelligent queue management and task distribution, the watch dog mechanism, monitoring and alarming capabilities, and out of the box reports. Moreover we like the Robotic Automation framework, which provides managers with visibility into the state of the robots and transactions.

ZOOM International

ZOOM Performance Analytics

www.zoomint.com/solutions/contact-center-performance-analytics

ZOOM Performance Analytics is a contact center business intelligence solution provided as a cloud service. The solution takes the important data from existing systems and provides the customer with one unified environment to mash up the data sets and help understand relationships between them.

Typical questions customers answer with the product are:

  • I measure AHT and FCR, but how does this compare to CSAT and schedule adherence?
  • Which agents have the best sales results, and how can speech analytics find specific behavior to replicate?
  • How does my service level influence customer satisfaction?
  • What is the relation of FCR and NPS I’m receiving?
  • Is my collections department using the best technique to maximize promise to pay?

Altogether, there is connectivity with more than 60 data sources including Cisco, Avaya (News - Alert), and Genesys contact center infrastructure.

Our favorite feature is the ability to analyze both content (what is being mentioned in the calls or emails) and context (all the other metadata about that conversation from multiple data sources like ACD and CRM systems) to get a solid true view about what is really happening. ZOOM Performance Analytics integrates with the ZOOM Speech Analytics product, allowing customers to analyze both content and context in one single product.

SAP

SAP Digital for Customer Engagement

www.sapstore.com/solutions/99026/SAP-Digital-for-Customer-Engagement

SAP Digital for Customer Engagement is a simplified cloud CRM solution designed to meet the needs of individuals and small teams, but with enterprise-grade capabilities for both sales and customer service. The solution is provisioned immediately upon purchase and can be set up in minutes by following simple, in-product walk-throughs. An individual customer service manager, for example, can go through the entire purchase and set-up process, and then use the system to answer a customer inquiry and prepare a service ticket in a matter of minutes. An important point is it  grows with a business and can be upgraded to the SAP Cloud for Customer solution anytime, using the same tenant.

SAP Digital for Customer Engagement is the first digitally native offering from SAP. It is sold directly to individual business consumers and available only on the SAP Store (www.SAPstore.com). Individuals across both large and small organizations can now buy from SAP without the need for a purchase order, invoice, or lengthy RFP process. They can simply purchase as soon as they want and across multiple devices with the ease of a credit card. The SAP Digital organization has streamlined contracts for its offerings down to a simple one-click online agreement and transparent pricing. Individuals can configure their new applications in minutes without requiring the aid of their IT department or outside consultants.

Some of the features we liked included:

  • contact, lead, and opportunity management to track all customer information and interactions in one place;
  • email service ticket management to improve customer satisfaction by quickly responding to customer inquiries;
  • the ability to import contacts from Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or CSV to get up and running quickly;
  • collaboration using built-in tools that help organizations sell as a team; 
  • the ability to personalize the solution;
  • the ability to sell anywhere with included mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows devices; and
  • the powerful, out-of-the-box reports and dashboards to gain the insights needed to make smarter business decisions.

Infinite Convergence Solutions

Enterprise Messaging Service

www.infinite-convergence.com

Infinite Convergence’s (News - Alert) EMS allows enterprise businesses to communicate with customers, partners, and clients globally via text, picture, video, and audio messages, push notification and chat messages in a cost-effective manner. By exchanging information with customers via EMS, businesses develop customer loyalty and increase business revenue.

In addition, the IP Delivery Plus provides enterprises the ability to prioritize message delivery via IP Push, which is lower in cost than SMS.

Via the web-based EMS portal, a sales or marketing team can easily manage mobile messaging campaigns through a guided, step-by-step process and monitor valuable analytics to understand customer interests and develop targeted mobile-based customer engagement strategies.

EMS leverages the exact same back-end technology that powers tier-1 global mobile operators – they use wireless technology that was traditionally used for carriers to power their EMS offering. This includes the same security, reliability, scalability, and reach. With EMS, enterprises get carrier-grade security with cost-effective customization – that’s good news as most companies don’t have service provider budgets.

Some features of note include:

• comprehensive delivery analytics and customized reports to provide detailed visibility into service usage and message delivery;

• campaign management to create and manage communications and broadcasts to customers, employees, and partners, simplifying the launch of an SMS-based campaign;

• the use of powerful, real-time APIs and industry-standard interfaces including HTTP(S), SMPP, SMTP, and XML to ease integration with enterprise applications;

• secure messaging that securely delivers sensitive information and files to smartphones and feature phones;

• detailed message tracking and billing that maintains and reports detailed logs for each message sent and received ensuring accurate billing;

• a service management portal that makes it easy for enterprises to view analytics and launch communication programs; and   

• role-based access control that tightly controls user access to web interfaces using assigned roles and responsibilities.   

Our favorite features include recent additions: Location Aware Messaging Service enables enterprises to provide valuable services, timing, relevant content, as well as superior experiences, to their customers and clients. The service leverages geofencing and GPS. Also, the Chat API provides an end-to-end solution enabling enterprises and app developers to quickly and easily add chat experiences to their existing and new applications with simple REST-based APIs.

Five9

Five9 Freedom Release

www.five9.com/products/whats-new

Freedom is the newest software from Five9 and it focuses on the agent user experience by offering a completely redesigned agent desktop application. Taking design cues from consumer web applications like Facebook and LinkedIn (News - Alert), the modernization effort began with underlying renewal of the Five9 architecture, enabling redesigns of the VCC desktop application, the Salesforce integration, and the availability of new REST-based APIs.

At its core, Freedom is a tool to increase agent productivity and optimize multichannel solutions. The software is web browser-based, with a modern, intuitive design. The design guides the agent visually through all interactions, using a universal interaction model that makes it easy and familiar for agents who work in more than one channel.

Freedom gives agents easy-to-read visual displays of relevant customer profile information – personalized dashboards, customizable gamification metrics, and open APIs to easily integrate with other enterprise applications.

The Five9 Agent Desktop Plus, within Freedom, includes a modern design that is more intuitive and requires fewer clicks to complete tasks. Visual cues guide agents through resolving interactions. Instead of flipping through multiple applications and screens, Agent Desktop Plus uses a universal interaction model across all channels, making it easy for agents to switch between channels. Unified cross channel interaction history can be seen in one place, and relevant customer profile information is shown in a simple to understand visual format.

Included in the Freedom update are adapters for both Oracle and Salesforce.com.

The Five9 Adapter for Salesforce has been enhanced and optimized for the Salesforce Service Cloud console view with embedded call controls. The new adapter provides presence management, single sign on, integration to Salesforce Knowledge, and assignment of interactions. The enhancements go beyond OpenCTI and are the deepest integration any contact center solution has created for Service Cloud. It is also integrated with Sales Cloud. Leveraging Five9 Connect – specifically the Natural Language Processing engine – the new Adapter is able to add rich customer insights such as sentiment analysis to email and chat interactions. The enhanced Five9 Adapter for Salesforce is also integrated to Salesforce Knowledge, to provide the agent with the right answer, quickly.

The Five9 Adapter for Oracle includes tight computer telephony integration and Five9 automated call distribution integration with Oracle’s Service Cloud (formerly RightNow Cloud Service) cloud-based contact center relationship management solution. This includes unified presence management, ACD routing, and channel prioritization. In addition, Five9 is able to intelligently route Oracle text channels, such as chat and email, while also leveraging Oracle’s knowledgebase.

The Five9 Freedom release was designed and optimized for contact center agents to accomplish more, and to do it faster, in a multichannel world. Freedom brings all of the channels (VoIP, social, web, email) and conversations into one place in a single, simple-to-use desktop. That’s what makes Freedom stand out.

Some of our favorite features include:

  • unified cross channel information;
  • easy-to-read visual displays of relevant customer profile information;
  • personalized dashboards;
  • customizable gamification metrics – a useful addition;
  • advanced search with easy integration to knowledge bases; and
  • open APIs to easily integrate to other enterprise applications.

MaritzCX

MaritzCX Case Management

www.maritzcx.com/what-we-do/technology/case-management/

MaritzCX Case Management is a control system for customer experience action. It provides a closed-loop system that automates CX workflows and supports dialog and follow-up with high-risk to high-potential customers. With it, users can continuously improve customer retention, conversion, and lifetime value.

MaritzCX Case Management lets users:

• actively engage their entire organization with a system that collapses the time to respond to customers and enables deeper, ongoing customer engagements and information capture;

• rapidly alert and arm customer-facing staff with the information they need to address problems, before revenue is lost or reputations are damaged; and

• coordinate outreach and satisfy any form of customer need including requests, complaints, and cross-sell.

MaritzCX Case Management closes the loop by highlighting trends that require attention. By identifying the root cause of a customer’s issue, and aggregating similar responses over time, valuable data is fed into dashboards and reports. This analysis helps pinpoint organizational changes that can boost customers’ satisfaction, such as simplifying the corporate website or implementing additional training for service agents.

Moreover, users can automate case workflow with powerful, flexible alert rules, monitor survey and feedback forms with user-defined alert conditions and communicate effectively using highly configurable emails and case views. Specific instructions can be included in emails, including the customer’s contact details and the response that triggered the case, so the case owner can take timely and appropriate action.

Case Management supports multiple ways to improve caseworker follow through and timely response. Time-to-respond and time-to-closure goals can be prominently displayed for each case, including elapsed time and visual indicators when cases are past due or approaching past due. Automatic reminders and escalations to supervisors can be sent according to specific timeframes and other conditions. Caseworkers can process and close cases using whatever context is most natural for them including smartphones and tablets, web interface, or Salesforce. Perhaps what we liked most was the fact Case Management also supports other customer relationship applications via canned API integrations.

Star2Star Communications

StarCenter

www.star2star.com/solutions/products-services/advanced-call-center

StarCenter enhances the Star2Star communications platform with advanced voice call center functionality. Running on PCs and most Macs, StarCenter is a flexible, intelligent, and easy-to-manage system with capabilities to boost business operations. The solution is a complete, full-featured inbound contact center exclusively for Star2Star’s business communications system delivering advanced call routing, management, and reporting features.

StarCenter is scalable from a few users to hundreds of users, and it operates seamlessly across multiple locations. The simple, web-based user interface makes it easy to add and administer queues and agents.

Features Include:

  • agent login/logout;
  • skill-based ring strategies;
  • flexible queuing configurations;
  • agent barge, monitor, and whisper functionality;
  • real-time displays (optional);
  • in-depth reporting (optional);
  • cloud-based recording of agents’ inbound calls for quality assurance or archival purposes (optional); and
  • can be added to any existing Star2Star system with no additional hardware required.

Call center managers have access to:

  • a key performance indicator dashboard for an at-a-glance view of the most important call center metrics;
  • real-time queue performance to easily adjust to changes in call volume, caller wait times, and agent availability;
  • real-time agent performance, including agent readiness, answer rate, and talk time;
  • summary reports that simplify collected data, make it easy to spot monthly, weekly, and daily trends, and drill-down to the underlying queue, agent, and call detail; and
  • the ability to turn data from an advanced call center into information that helps drive business forward with StarView.

StarView leverages flexible and cost-effective StarCenter data by transforming it into valuable and actionable business knowledge. Administrators can choose to allow agents to view their own performance against their peers or against administrative activity thresholds to enhance motivation and productivity.

Our favorite feature is StarCenter SMART (StarCenter Monitoring, Alerting, And Reporting Tool) allowing call center managers to have the ability to monitor how well a system is conforming to a series of pre-defined parameters without constantly watching monitors. If an exception outside of desired business rules occurs, the system will trigger a notification email or an SMS message to select individuals.

Calabrio

Calabrio ONE

http://calabrio.com/products/calabrio-one/

Calabrio’s vision is to eliminate the complexity of WFO and analytics through a truly integrated suite of applications based on the Web 2.0 architecture.

This is done as follows, by:

• simplifying access to information through a widget-based interface that provides a clear and easy view of performance metrics, integrated from a wide variety of systems and sources, that is appropriate for each user;

•building an analytics layer that drives informed decision making by automating 100 percent transaction review;

•providing quick and easy access to the underlying transactions and workforce optimization engines that help contact centers manage performance, including transaction history for any channel, evaluations, coaching and training tools, workforce management and long-term strategic planning, etc.; and

• streamlining review and action by integrating metrics at the dashboard level and tying transaction management together through workflows at the engine level.

Calabrio ONE’s Dynamic Scheduling and Intraday Dynamic Scheduling offer users the opportunity to enhance and significantly streamline the process of creating and maintaining schedules. This in turn supports the contact center in achieving a significant alignment between business goals, agent performance, and agent work/life balance.

Calabrio ONE is built from the ground up and features a single, unified interface. Calabrio solutions are designed with humans in mind, not technology – ensuring organizations that seek the benefit of an integrated WFO suite have a consistent experience with drill-down capabilities and workflows across modules.

An interesting differentiator is that unlike other vendors in the WFO space, Calabrio is focused only on WFO solutions. Calabrio solutions are ACD agnostic and integrate with third-party, best-of-breed solutions, allowing customers to capitalize on existing technology investments.

Our favorite features include gamification, peer mentoring, dynamic scheduling, as well as post-call survey integration.

Support.com

Nexus cloud software for technical support optimization

www-admin.support.com/nexus

Nexus is a data-driven, next-generation customer support solution that increases customer satisfaction and loyalty while decreasing the cost of delivering support. Nexus offers intuitive tools for support teams, and enables IoT and other solution app providers to embed support directly into their products. When used by customer support teams, Nexus integrates with existing software platforms and allows team members to more quickly and effectively resolve complex technical issues. Nexus Guided Paths acts like a GPS, by suggesting next best steps during live customer support interactions. Sophisticated Nexus Connect functions include remote control and SupportCam, which uses the customer’s smartphone or tablet to show the support rep what the customer is looking at. For continuous optimization, Nexus software collects detailed data about every step of every support interaction, and uses advanced analytics to provide unprecedented insights into support practices and actual product performance.

The data-driven software solution allows tech support and customer support teams in hardware, software, IoT solutions, and tech support service-delivery companies to optimize their customer service by collecting data from the most successful problem resolution calls and sharing that data, live, during actual customer support calls, with each agent who is trying to resolve a similar problem on a live customer call or chat. Then Nexus collects all that data using analytics to present actionable insights via a dashboard to executives and management teams of both the service centers and the product manufacturers, for continual product and service improvement. This is especially important as the complexity of devices and products with data connections to the Internet grows to include cars; health bands; home entertainment systems fed by cable TV providers and Hulu, Netflix, etc.; all the way to industrial usage. The Nexus Connect SDK is also available for IoT solutions providers and app developers to build in access to premium customer and tech support at the touch of an icon.

Nexus Connect SDK, described above, as well as SupportCam, allow any customer to point his or her iOS or Android phone camera at whatever that user is having problems installing or running, so the tech support team member at the other end of the call or chat can see exactly what the customer sees without the need for an on-site visit, or long frustrating Q&A sessions between the two people, in which a non-technical customer tries to explain what he or she is looking at.

Cyara

Cyara IVR Crawler

http://info.cyarasolutions.com/crawler

Finding the answers to what’s been deployed in an IVR can be a frustrating manual experience of exploring the paths and options. Cyara IVR Crawler cuts through this time-consuming labor with automation that can crawl the IVR to discover what’s there, create an interactive visual map users can interact with to edit and add new IVR options and prompts, and create design documentation (automated development of test scripts) that organizations can use for development.

Crawler works by placing real phone calls and dialing the number for an IVR application, listening to the prompts being played, then attempting to extract the user options being presented and progress deeper through the IVR application iteratively by interacting with the IVR – all in a completely automated fashion.

The user can specify the number of levels or branches of the IVR that are to be crawled. Crawler travels through these branches recording the menu prompts that it hears, transcribing and documenting the prompts it hears, and extracting the available options using speech recognition and speech-to-text technology.

By progressively recording the paths through the IVR, Crawler produces an interactive, tree-like map of the IVR. A user may click on each item within the map to access each individual IVR option where he or she can read a transcription of the prompt and hear a recording of what Crawler heard. In addition to listening to the recording, the user can manually edit or add additional options or change/fine-tune the transcription of individual menu prompts. Crawler also has the ability to pause and alert an operator when human intervention is needed to enter data. For example, this might come into play if an ID or PIN or a zip code is required to proceed. Using the interactive map, Crawler can also generate test cases that can then be imported into the Cyara Platform, reducing the bulk of the manual effort involved in creating these cases, speeding innovation, and reducing development costs.

A tremendous amount of logic combined with speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies have come together to produce something extremely useful to companies that need to gain control of their IVR systems. What we like best about this new product is the idea and the ability it delivers to complete the task and bring a product to market.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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