Customer experience remained in the spotlight in 2015, and a bevy of solutions suppliers on this front advanced and expanded their solutions in this realm. Here’s a sampling of some of the best and brightest, which CUSTOMER magazine and its parent company TMC have recognized with 2015 CUSTOMER Experience Excellence Awards.
Benbria Corp.
Loop Mobile & Text Engagement
Loop is a mobile, text, and insight solution that allows staff and customers to connect instantly in real time throughout the entire journey resulting in improved satisfaction, more revenue, and better operations. It can help improve employee motivation, retention, and productivity by enabling communication between employees and designated management team members. It’s also ideal for use related to hotel events, hotel guests, restaurants, and retail applications.
BetterCloud
BetterCloud for Google Apps
BetterCloud for Office 365
BetterCloud for Google Apps provides automated management, critical insights, and intelligent data security for the Google for Work platform. That’s all presented via a web-based interface. No custom integration is required, meaning users can get up and running within minutes. And open APIs allow BetterCloud to connect with Google applications including Contact, Drive, and Gmail to build upon native offerings and present data in insightful new ways. The BetterCloud for Office 365 offers similar capabilities. It allows users to view activities on their tenant across key areas, from user inactivity to mailbox alerts. It helps businesses understand which users have each of the Office 365 applications like Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint Online enabled.
Calabrio
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. Calabrio allows for streamlined 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 ease the process of creating and maintaining schedules. Other features include gamification, peer mentoring, dynamic scheduling, as well as post-call survey integration.
Confirmit Genius
Confirmit Genius is a text and social analytics solution that provides categorization and sentiment analysis for free-form text. It 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.
CGS
Business Process Outsourcing
CGS offers call center service and outsourcing solutions that bring voice to its customers’ brands and add value to their businesses. Its specific offerings include back office solutions, channel partner enablement, customer support, finance and accounting, help desk solutions, and technical support.
ENGAGE.cx
ENGAGE.cx Relationship Cloud
This solution, which the company says re-invents CRM, connects disconnected interactions via a cloud to allow customers to be recognized in real time and to deliver superior brand experiences. The company provides CRM for the health care, hospitality, and retail sectors.
Five9 Inc.
Freedom Release
The newest software from Five9, Freedom focuses on the agent user experience – with a focus on productivity and multichannel optimization – by offering a completely redesigned agent desktop application. The software 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. It gives agents an easy-to-read display of relevant customer profile information including personalized dashboards, and customizable gamification metrics. Included in the Freedom update are adapters for both Oracle (News 
- Alert) and Salesforce.com.
J-Curve Technologies
J-Curve Technologies
J-Curve provides enhanced customer experience for clients’ internal and external customers; customized reporting; and comprehensive analysis of existing support infrastructure. Its solutions are offered via a shared services model to maximize efficiencies and minimize capital investment. Also, all interactions are digitally recorded and available at all times via J-Sync.
Magnetic North
Cloud Contact Center
Magnetic North, which was acquired this month by West Corp. (News - Alert), is a provider of cloud telephony, cloud contact center, and cloud call recording. It outfits organizations of all sizes with a high-availability, secure, enterprise-class solution at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems, together with transparent pricing, out-of-the-box integration, and continuous product innovation. As a registered carrier and ISP, with a direct interconnect to the London Exchange, Magnetic North also offers paramount reliability, and it can guarantee compliance.
MaritzCX
MaritzCX Platform
MaritzCX was established last year following the combination of Allegiance and Maritz Research, creating what the company said is the largest pure-play customer experience company by far. MaritzCX says it is the only customer experience company that combines one of the world’s most advanced CX software platforms with industry-leading research services and world-class CX and industry expertise – all working together to help businesses see important business issues and trends earlier, respond faster, and ultimately turn every customer experience into a clear competitive advantage.
NebuLogic Technologies
SaaS (News - Alert)-based CRM Application
NebuLogic is a fast-growing system integrator that brings extensive implementation expertise to deliver best-of-the-breed, customized CRM solutions to organizations. As a system integrator and a CRM solution provider, it provides a family of applications for a wide variety of industries and organizations. NebuLogic has successfully delivered more than 100 CRM implementations worldwide.
NICE Systems
Customer Engagement Analytics
NICE Customer Engagement Analytics solutions enable businesses to understand how to drive value from their customer data. That value could be delivering a better customer experience, unlocking operational efficiencies or driving value to the bottom line. By having a complete picture of customer interactions across service channels organizations can predict and act on the insights they gain.?
Package Concierge
Package Concierge
This is a solution for use in such settings as apartments and student housing that require locker systems for package delivery. The need for this kind of thing is especially important today, as online shopping and related deliveries account for a growing share of consumption, and as populations migrate to urban areas with more multitenant living.
RightAnswers Enterprise Knowledge Hub
RightAnswers Enterprise Knowledge Hub is a combination of cloud-based software, services, content, and knowledge automation 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.
Salesforce.com
Desk.com
Desk.com, a Salesforce solution that the company got via acquisition, is a customer support application aimed at small businesses. On the agent side the Desk.com interface can display voice calls, email, Twitter, and Facebook communications to and about the Salesforce client company. Salesforce this month announced the integration of Desk.com with SalesforceIQ, the salesforce app for small businesses that the company recently came out with.
Sitel
Sitel Intelligent Desktop
Initially planned to track agent notes, generic contact information, manage contact recording and quality listening, the Sitel Intelligent Desktop platform has evolved to allow front line agents to use more comprehensive contact management forms with consistent and accurate data sourced by client CRMs. Besides CRMs, integration with other systems like billing, IVR, and ticketing allows for faster issue resolution and improved customer experience.
SPLICE Software
SPLICE Outbound IVR Invitations for VIP Loyalty Programs
SPLICE works with its partner 3 Keys VIP to provide all the necessary elements for successful, turnkey, VIP events. SPLICE launches the event by sending personalized, human-voice invitations to VIP customers. The calls are localized by store, manager, and store caller ID. SPLICE provides best practices and insights for an effective invitation, while 3 Keys VIP provides high-value customer appreciation gifts and VIP accessories (red carpets, etc.) for the in-store event itself.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM
Sugar UX offers a completely transformed, individualized CRM user experience that is immersive, engaging, and intuitive. Sugar UX fuses the straightforward simplicity, mobility, and social aspects of a consumer app with the business process optimization of conventional CRM. With Sugar PurePrice companies get a clear and simple price – with no hidden fees or forced upgrades.
TLC Associates
SecureRep
TLC Associates offers an array of services including BPO, chat, email, fulfillment, inbound, and outbound and can develop ROI-focused programs related to cross-selling and up-selling, customer service, lead generation, loyalty, renewal, sales, win-back, and more.
TouchPoint One
Acuity
The Acuity product is a hosted software solution that combines a central data store, intuitive business logic designer, and specialized analytics engine to deliver real-time performance intelligence through customized scorecards and role-based dashboards. Acuity provides a single platform for improved contact center decision-making, communication and process execution to achieve greater customer, employee and business success.
Verint Systems Inc.
Verint Engagement Analytics
Verint Engagement Analytics is a cloud-based software and services solution that provides an analytics platform for capturing, analyzing, and correlating customer, employee, transaction, and interaction data from different channels and systems, including case notes, chat, CRM systems, email, mobile app data, social media, surveys, voice channel and IVR activity, and web self-service data.
Votacall
Votacall VM 2 Text
This is a service that enables voice to be transcribed as a text message and email. Wav files come along for the ride as well. This allows for voice messaging access in any scenario for greater productivity and efficiency.
Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
