Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

by Gary Audin

57% of online consumers report that they will probably abandon an online purchase if they cannot find what they want quickly. The virtual assistant can accelerate the process. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is a layer of technology that sits between you, your team, and your customers to answer complex questions, execute solutions, and deliver the right outcomes. It’s about more than streamlining processes. It’s about building relationships and growing them through self-help processes. It’s human emulation technology.

Rick Collins, President, Enterprise at next IT and Gary Audin discuss virtual agent technology in this podcast recorded at the SpeechTek conference. Virtual agent technology has capabilities including natural language processing and the ability to integrate with enterprise systems. Virtual agents offer business benefits, including enhancing customer experiences, reducing live agent costs, and producing cross-sells.

Next IT www.nextit.com is the intelligent interface company. The Alme® platform from next IT spans across an enterprise to answer complex questions, execute solutions and call on different data sources to deliver the right outcomes. Alme is able to guarantee accuracy and consistency with digital dialogue that’s powered by a proprietary engine smart enough to ask questions, clarify intent, and engage in two-way conversations that flow naturally and delight users. Watch the video http://www.nextit.com/.

by Gary Audin

You need an outbound dialer, an inbound contact center, call center scripting, web agent, call recording, and mail interactions. This can mean multiple packages and working with an integrator. The cost can be high and so can the risk. The delivery of a complete package mitigates these problems.

Paul Dickinson, VP North America at Presence Technology www.presenceco.com  and Gary Audin discuss the evolution of the contact center at the SpeechTek conference. This podcast covers how to deliver seamless services across multiple channels. He also covers the differences in supporting North American customers vs. international customers. Presence offers its software for on-premises solutions that are hardware agnostic. The services are also available on both public and private clouds.

Presence Technology is a provider of Multi-Channel Contact Center Solutions. Their contact Center Suite of Solutions was created and developed in one of Europe’s largest and most respected Call Centers. They understand the day to day operation of Contact Centers. Today their solutions support more than 200 clients in 20 countries with over 75,000 contact center seats. The clients utilize Presence to optimize resources and increase productivity in the communications process with their customers.

Built to be versatile, easy to integrate, and user friendly, Presence is designed to meet the changing demands of today’s Contact Center industry. 17% of their annual budget is devoted to research and development.

by Gary Audin

DIY or DI cloud? The cloud is an expanding option. But most cloud services do not include the network access. With the combination of a provider and cloud service, then the management of the contact center can view and monitor the caller, the call, and the agent in a single real time report so the center managers know what is working and what to fix.

Felipe Rodriguez, COO for Advantone www.advantone.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at the SpeechTek conference. Felipe discusses the growing requirement for flexibility and scalability that cloud services provide. With the combination of IntelePeer and Advantone, the contact center can gain the operational insight of the contact center call end-to-end. This improves the operation and can allow the management to tweak their business model and rapidly see the results.

Advantone www.advantone.com is a Communications as a Service (CaaS) provider with over 25 years of hands-on experience working with multi-national organizations in North America. They partner with clients throughout different industries such as Retail, Consumer Goods, Direct Response, Pharmaceutical/Healthcare, and Finance. Advantone has years of experience in helping these organizations improve the customer experience of their Contact Centers by offering IVR, Call Routing, Virtual ACD’ and Predictive Dialing solutions.

Their mission is to provide the best service delivering a continuous cycle of assessment and development. Advantone’s infrastructure and operations are designed to support the customer’s demands and today’s compliance requirements. Built on enterprise infrastructure, Advantone’s technical footprint expands across multiple data centers for scalability and business continuity in order to ensure 24/7 availability.

IR (Integrated Research Limited) provides companies with proactive performance management software for communications networks and IT infrastructure. IR's flagship Prognosis works for UC users of Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft Skype for Business, Alcatel Lucent, Oracle, Sonus, and AudioCodes, and also helps service providers, contact centers and payments.  As companies migrate to the cloud or other communications methods, obtaining actionable information on network performance has become more critical than ever.

In this podcast Chief Solutions Officer John Dunne and Sales Director Kevin Donovan walk us through how UC managers need critical information about their networks, especially as the architecture and functionality of those networks evolve. Commenting on how the IR booth was busy all week at Avaya Engage, Kevin Donovan remarks "As they go through these transformations...they need solutions like ours."

At the end of June, Prognosis 11 launches. " No matter where the gremlin in the network or the UC environment, you'll be able to triage that with Prognosis," says John Dunne. Visit ir.com

To Uwe Kreuter, Managing Director, of CCT Solutions, Avaya Breeze and newly announced Avaya Oceana are welcome developments. Kreuter sees these offerings as a, "way to find a very intelligent way to migrate from the old world to the new world without having to do an ugly forklift upgrade."

Based on Avaya technology, CCT helps companies communicate with a new generation of customers, through social media, chat, and video, ensuring enterprises adapt to the changing customer landscape, decreasing contact center costs and providing deeper relationships with their customers.

In this podcast, Kreuter reacets to Avaya's announcements at Avaya Engage and discusses how his closely aligned CCT offerings will help customers be able to move on with out costly disruptions or new worker training. He also touches on integration with solutions such as Moxtra and the importance of providing many migration capabilities to Avaya users.

Visit www.cct-solutions.com, and listen to the podcast

Earlier this week, Unify announced the introduction of the OpenScape Desk Phone CP Family, a group of new end points integrated with collaboration software designed to meet the needs of a modern work space. In this podcast an Jan Hickisch, VP of Global Solutions Marketing at Unify walks us through the release and discusses the importance of enterprises being able to offer a great desk top experience to their employees. Read the press release.

Listen to the podcast.

by Gary Audin

Can you enhance your applications with speech technologies that transform rigid DTMF menus into effortless customer experiences? You want a standards-based integration with automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) software for natural, conversational customer interactions. Speech-enabling touch tone apps can drive significant ROI.

Tom Fetters, Strategic Accounts Director for Blueworx www.blueworx.com and Gary Audin discuss the growing demand for “intelligent assistance” in this podcast recorded at the SpeechTek conference. Prospects want to contact companies through the device of their choice, using their own words ant time of the day. The interaction needs to quick, error free and satisfying.

In a space where technologies often look the same, Blueworx believes that  their focus on customer service, communication and relationships creates the ultimate differentiator and that this will translate into tangible advantages for your business.

The Blueworx www.blueworx.com  platform drives critical customer interactions and business processes. They understand this and are committed to providing ongoing innovation, investment, and focus. Blueworx wants this to be the last IVR platform you’ll ever own. To do that, they push the envelope on what’s possible, partner with you to maximize your investment, and help you deliver customer experiences that are awesome.

Learn more by reading “News Analysis: Blueworx, the New Name for WebSphere Voice Response” http://www.blueworx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/BlueWorx_Report_OpusResearch.pdf

by Gary Audin

You have encountered that IVR with a rigid menu. You make a mistake you then hit “O” to get an agent. This is frustrating and adds to the agent workload. The solution, introducing visual IVR to improve the interaction. A screen display that is the first customer contact can foster effective self-service, with a good ROI. A second ROI is that visual IVR self-service produces 75% shorter calls with happy customers and less agent intervention.

Chris du Toit, CMO for Jacada www.jacada.com and Gary Audin discuss the frustrations and solutions surrounding classic IVR technology in this podcast recorded at the SpeechTek conference. Visual IVR enhances self-service, reduces errors, shortening interactions, and delivers happier customers.

Jacada www.jacada.com enables organizations worldwide to deliver effortless customer self-service and agent assisted interactions by implementing cutting‐edge mobile, smart device, and web based visual IVR solutions www.visual-ivr.com, as well as optimized agent desktops, and business process optimization tools. Customers can benefit from an improved customer experience at every touch point with the organization, whether at the contact center, on the mobile, the website, or at the retail store. Jacada solutions have helped organizations improve customer experiences and reduce operational costs. Jacada projects often deploy in less than six months, and customers often realize a complete return on investment (ROI) in far less than 12 months of deployment.

By Gary Audin

It is very common to encounter either an IVR or a call center agent. The IVR or agent is scripted but you cannot see the script. What if you not only could see what the script contains but it could be in the language you are most comfortable speaking and reading. How about an IVR that has a screen display where you can select your response more accurately and quickly from a visual menu of options? Add the ability to work with any voice device and an Internet connection and you have this result of  ChoiceView®.

Dr. Richard Davis, CTO and Dr. Theresa Szczurek, CEO of Radish Systems www.radishsystems.com (also known as Radish 2.0) and Gary Audin discuss their approach to enhancing the user experience with visuals in addition to voice. Theresa points out that the voice/visual combination can improve understanding by 600%, according to Brain Rules. Applications like tech support, customer care, and e-commerce benefit. It is in healthcare coaching where dramatic improvements have been delivered with ChoiceView®.

An earlier company Radish 1.0 developed and pioneered a modem protocol, VoiceView®, allowing data to be transmitted during an ordinary land-line phone call. The protocol was licensed in 1994 by Microsoft, Intel, Rockwell International, and dozens of other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). It became the defacto industry standard and was shipping as a part of the Windows operating system and more than 90 percent of off-the-shelf PCs, modems, and chip sets. Radish products for contact centers and IVR systems were used by 1-800-Flowers, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and a host of other companies to improve the efficiency and value of transactions.

TelStrat has served UC and contact center communities for over twenty-three years, featuring technology partnerships with major platforms such as Avaya. Now, with their flagship product, Engage, about to undergo a major new release (Engage 6), Mike Berlin, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development discusses with Doug Green how TelStrat is venturing into new verticals while riding the wave of migration to cloud. In this podcast we discuss major trends such as cloud, how IT managers are reacting to Skype for Business, and how TelStrat offers new value as partners such as Avaya realign their own portfolios. Even as change occurs in the products connecting enterprises and their contact centers, the need and demand for the recording, quality, analytics, and workforce management solutions TelStrat offers continues to grow.