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Comm100 Launches Agent Assist to Boost Agent Performance and Customer Satisfaction

Comm100, a global provider of omnichannel customer experience solutions, announced the launch of Agent Assist, an AI-powered virtual assistant that helps agents respond to customer queries more quickly, accurately and confidently than ever before. Agent Assist significantly reduces the time agents spend hunting for answers, resulting in faster resolution, higher capacity and more time to focus on more complex or sensitive customer inquiries—all leading to higher customer satisfaction scores.

As AI matures, many companies are weighing the impact this new technology can have on their customers’ experience with their brand, and agent-facing AI is at the heart of that conversation. Agent Assist helps agents become smarter and more efficient, monitoring chat conversations and pulling relevant information from company data in real time so that agents can access the answers they need faster and more accurately.

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Key features include:

  • Enhanced agent capabilities: Agent Assist provides real-time answer suggestions to inbound live chat queries from Comm100 canned messages, chatbot intents and knowledge base articles, and gives agents the option to edit those responses before they’re sent. It also streamlines common service requests, like order tracking and password resets. Many of those requests require agents to gather more information, causing them to spend a long time on a routine action; using Agent Assist, agents can invoke a chatbot workflow to gather the details and take back control of the conversation once that’s complete. Additionally, if a chatbot is integrated with core business systems, agents can use it to access those systems and instantly deliver more personalized answers.
  • Straightforward system configuration: With a few clicks, an administrator can train Agent Assist to recognize industry-specific synonyms, select or deselect the resources Agent Assist should use and control how tightly Agent Assist interprets messages with tunable sensitivity scoring.
  • Intelligent learning and easy maintenance: Comm100’s machine learning algorithm observes agent behavior to improve answer suggestions. If Agent Assist cannot help in a certain situation, agents can mark those unrecognized questions to be placed in a learning portal for easy content management and coverage.

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“Many companies want to deploy AI in their contact centers, but might not know where to begin, or are concerned about how their customers will react,” said Jeff Epstein, VP of Product at Comm100. “Because its suggestions don’t get pushed to customers without approval, Agent Assist provides a low-risk way to leverage the promise of AI to make contact centers more effective. By putting AI to work for contact center staff, organizations can create ‘Super Agents’ with more knowledge and more capacity to handle any question a customer throws at them—making them the true heroes of customer experience. Agent Assist also helps new agents get up to speed more quickly, reducing their learning curve and making them more productive faster than previously possible.”

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Basis Technology Brings Deep Search to Salesforce

Acquisition of KonaSearch provides millions of Salesforce users access to AI-driven search

For the world’s number one CRM platform, deep search is the missing piece. Salesforce users lack the ability to search multiple organizations and external data sources as if they were a single cloud.

KonaSearch is the first deep search engine to provide a 360° view of this cloud from the Salesforce desktop. Enhanced by Basis Technology’s AI-powered text analytics, with its ability to connect people, places, and organizations, KonaSearch can now discover data connections to deliver the most relevant search results across the entire information landscape and in every major language.

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Andrew McKay, KonaSearch CEO and enterprise search veteran, joins Basis Technology as General Manager of the new KonaSearch Division. McKay is focusing on expanding the product’s footprint internationally, especially in EuropeJapan, and the Middle East.

“Before the next wave of artificial intelligence can truly benefit enterprise applications, data barriers must be removed,” Basis Technology CEO, Carl Hoffman notes. “As a combined company, we will enable more enterprises to realize the full value of their data.”

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“We are excited to join Basis Technology, the leading independent provider of commercial NLP,” McKay said. “The future of enterprise information systems isn’t about data. It’s not even about accessing this data because we already access everything. It’s about exploiting the hidden connections between the data sources to enable a truly complete view. With Basis Technology we can deliver this future by bringing deep search to the Salesforce market and beyond.”

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OpenMethods Announced New Feature Set that Creates a Step Function Improvement in Interaction Integration for Contact Centers

Customers Are Realizing 45+ Seconds in AHT Reduction, While Improving Customer and Agent Experiences and Satisfaction

OpenMethods, a leader in omnichannel and CTI integration solutions, announced new features to their next generation Interaction Integration Cloud to deepen cloud-based Oracle CRM integrations with leading communications infrastructure to provide real-time, relevant contextual information to contact center agents.

OpenMethods Announced New Feature Set that Creates a Step Function Improvement in Interaction Integration for Contact Centers

In this release, OpenMethods added over 100 features focused on automated interaction integration. The release makes it faster, easier, and cheaper to integrate Oracle CRM with leading communication platforms from Avaya, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, and others. Features enhance the ability for contact centers to quickly and deeply integrate enterprise and 3rd party data sets and workflows directly into Oracle CRM to streamline and personalize agent and customer workflows delivering what agents need to help customers when they need it. Also, OpenMethods released a set of features focused on advanced logic and usability to enable business users to automate thousands of lines of CTI, integration and design code, enabling the design, testing, and deployment of new agent workflows and screen pops in a matter of hours instead of months.

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“OpenMethods has been a big win, helping us automate workflows, understand the type and context of a call, which allows our agents to take care of the customer better and resolve their needs,” said Traci Scott, Senior Business Analyst at Pella Corporation.

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“Over the past ten years, we’ve been working closely with our customers, which represent some of the largest contact centers, to continuously prioritize our roadmap and drive innovations that create step function improvements and ROI with their integrations, design, and deployment in streamlining and personalizing their experiences. It has been great to see our customers drive incredible time and monetary savings while creating a better experience for their customers and agents with this new release,” said Gerrit Lydecker Jr., CEO of OpenMethods.

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Verint Only Vendor Recognized by Gartner in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center and the Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management

Verint Systems Inc., The Customer Engagement Company, announced its inclusion in Gartner, Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) report, published June 11, 2019, by the research and advisory firm. In addition to being recognized in this report, the firm also named Verint a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management** (WEM) research earlier this year.

“As the customer engagement company, we are pleased to be the only firm to have our solutions recognized in both reports”

In the June CEC report, Verint was evaluated on 15 criteria across two key areas—ability to execute and completeness of vision—for its Engagement Management solution, part of the company’s broader Customer Engagement portfolio.

Verint solutions simplify, modernize and automate customer engagement by enabling organizations to strike the right balance between elevating the customer experience and improving operational efficiency across both assisted and self-service channels.

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Gartner CEC report analysts, Brian Manusama, Nadine LeBlanc, and Simon Harrison state, “The best of today’s CEC applications have tools for both agents and customers. For this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to have clear views about how to escalate customer support from digital self-service to human agents (and to de-escalate it again), while retaining interactions’ context for the purposes of reporting and improving customer engagements. Additionally, their CEC applications for use by customer service agents must have been designed to operate seamlessly on a common platform by means of common development and integration tools, open APIs and a common graphical user interface.”

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Validation of company strategy

“As the customer engagement company, we are pleased to be the only firm to have our solutions recognized in both reports,” says Verint’s President Elan Moriah. “We believe that Verint is a customer engagement visionary with a proven track record of delivering significant business impact for our customers. Leading organizations across industries and around the world choose Verint to help them elevate customer engagement to a competitive differentiator for their entire company, and trust Verint to power their evolution toward modern customer engagement.”

*Source: Garnter, Inc. Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center by Brian Manusama, Nadine LeBlanc and Simon Harrison, June 11, 2019.
**Source: Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management by Simon Harrison and Jim Davies, February 12, 2019.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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TVSquared Releases Direct-To-Consumer TV Advertising Performance Report

TVSquared, the worldwide leader in TV attribution, released the findings of its 2019 Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) TV Advertising Performance report. DTC brands are one of the fastest growing groups of TV advertisers, devoting $3.8 billion in media spend to it last year alone. TVSquared’s report uncovers the TV buy elements that are driving response, spanning creative lengths, KPIs, programming genres, dayparts and days of week.

“Direct Outcomes: Analyzing the ‘Big Bets’ DTC Brands Are Making on TV”

TVSquared analyzed 15 months of performance data and $138 million in TV ad spend for 18 U.S.-based DTC brands across the retail, food delivery, subscription services and travel categories. Response, cost and audience data from the TVSquared ADvantage platform was evaluated by TV buy elements, including network, daypart and day of week, for campaigns that ran on broadcast, cable and satellite.

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Key findings featured in the report include:

  • On average, DTC brands track four performance-based KPIs
  • 15-second spots are the most frequently used format
  • Performance for 30-second spots was 4x higher than any other length
  • Morning dayparts outperformed primetime by 120%

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Alberto Corral, Senior Director of Marketing and Business Development at UNTUCKit, a long-time TVSquared client, said:

“TV is an invaluable marketing channel for us, and we treat it like digital in that we continuously measure and optimize it to maximize performance. We use real-time analytics to measure which creatives, channels, programs, genres, days and dayparts are working for us, and use those insights to make even more effective buys.”

Mark Hudson, Head of Business Intelligence at TVSquared, who spearheaded the report, added:

“As digital natives, DTC brands eat and breathe data for every aspect of business, and they recognize that TV can deliver both scale and performance. Understanding optimal days, dayparts, programs and creative strategies gives them the analytics they need to drive the best outcomes.”

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InsideSales.com Names Chris Harrington Chief Executive Officer

Former COO and SaaS Leader to Drive Next Phase of Growth for Sales Technology Innovator

InsideSales.com, the only AI Sales Platform powered by Collective Intelligence, announced Chris Harrington has been appointed chief executive officer, effective immediately. Previously COO of InsideSales.com, Chris brings a depth of experience leading high-growth software companies and has driven nearly 30 percent enterprise customer growth since joining seven months ago. Harrington will succeed former CEO and founder Dave Elkington, who will remain with the company as Chairman of the Board.

“This market has heated up in the last two years, with enterprise companies trying to solve for an increasingly challenging sales environment”

“As InsideSales.com continued to grow and my vision of creating a software company that enables the largest enterprise companies in the world to service their customers from lead to renewal became a reality, I had always planned to find a leader with the unique skills and abilities to take the company to the next level into that market,” said Dave Elkington, founder and chairman of InsideSales.com. “This past year I was fortunate enough to work alongside Chris. He has proven himself a software and sales visionary and an unmatched growth leader in the SaaS industry time and time again. Chris takes over at a key inflection point and shift in trajectory for InsideSales.com. He’s the ideal leader to enable us to fully capitalize on the massive market potential we’ve unlocked with our enterprise solutions.”

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InsideSales.com closed its 2019 fiscal year having reached new milestones across the business, including growth of its platform data to over 75 million companies with more than 204 million individual profiles, captured from 110 billion sales interactions. Core to the company’s growth is the success of Playbooks — an industry exclusive AI-based sales prospect and prioritization solution powered by Collective Intelligence. It has become the company’s fastest growing product since its marketing introduction and now accounts for over one third of total product revenue. Additional growth highlights from Playbooks include:

  • A 571 percent YoY increase in power users
  • A 273 percent YoY growth of activities on the platform
  • A 299 percent YoY increase in installations

Seventy-six percent of executives at large companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue are targeting higher sales growth with machine learning and artificial intelligence. As companies turn to advanced technology to improve sales effectiveness, Harrington will lead InsideSales.com to build on the momentum it has already attained with enterprise customers.

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“This market has heated up in the last two years, with enterprise companies trying to solve for an increasingly challenging sales environment,” said Chris Harrington, CEO of InsideSales.com. “I joined InsideSales.com because we have the opportunity to build an unrivaled platform and lead in this space. The revenue uplift we drive for enterprise customers is unparalleled. As CEO, I’m focused on telling this story, executing on our platform strategy, and putting the right operational groundwork in place to support continued scale, growth and innovation. I want to thank Dave Elkington and the InsideSales.com board of directors for this incredible vote of confidence.”

Before joining InsideSales.com, Harrington steered widespread SaaS adoption for digital sales and marketing powerhouses Omniture, Adobe, and Domo. At Omniture, Harrington drove seven years of annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth from $4 million to over $500 million. Omniture grew to serve more than 5,000 global customers before it was acquired for $1.8 billion by Adobe Systems, where he led all enterprise sales for the Americas and was responsible for $890 million in revenue. Most recently, Harrington served as president of the $2 billion business intelligence leader Domo, where he worked with InsideSales.com board members Josh James and Mark Gorenberg to create one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies.

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Talkdesk Launches Talkdesk Boost to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Talkdesk Boost eases transition to the cloud by augmenting existing on-premises systems with intelligent, cloud-based contact center applications

Talkdesk, the cloud contact center for innovative enterprises, at Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas unveiled Talkdesk Boost, a new way to accelerate corporate digital transformation by augmenting existing voice systems with AI-infused, cloud-based contact center applications to boost agent productivity, operational agility, and customer experience.

.@Talkdesk launches Talkdesk Boost to accelerate #DigitalTransformation and ease the transition to the cloud. https://bit.ly/2XtTC9V

“The number one driver of digital transformation is to enhance the customer experience,” says Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst, ZK Research. “While customer experience typically resides in the contact center, it’s critical to modernize in that area. With Talkdesk Boost, Talkdesk has enabled the agent to do more with minimal disruption, while also being able to yield business results.”

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Companies today need to compete and win on customer experience, but many are held back by legacy on-premises Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) that lack critical capabilities such as a unified agent experience, mobile agent support, digital channels, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software integration and artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the limitations and frustrations of these older, inefficient on-premises systems, many large enterprises and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO) are reluctant to adopt modern cloud-based alternatives. These organizations often have years of investment in these deployments, which still perform core call center functions, and cloud migration may be perceived as too complex, risky or costly.

Talkdesk Boost addresses this growing marketplace dilemma with a win-win approach. Companies can now leverage and strengthen their existing investment in on-premises telephony with modern and intelligent cloud applications to boost agent performance, supervisor productivity, IT agility and customer self-service. Leveraging Talkdesk xConnect to interact with IP-based systems, Talkdesk integrates with legacy ACDs using secure SIP trunk connections to offer companies new features and a comprehensive, customer-centric solution portfolio.

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“Talkdesk Boost is a game changer. Our partners can now offer their Avaya and Cisco customers a risk-free way to boost efficiency and customer experience with a set of intelligent cloud-based applications,” said Shane McNamara, executive vice president, Avant Communications.

“Talkdesk Boost offers cloud adopters a coexistence model and progressive transition rather than a ‘rip and replace’ option offered by other cloud contact center providers,” said Tiago Paiva, chief executive officer, Talkdesk. “This newest advancement from Talkdesk enables companies to remain focused on their customers by offering a smooth and simple digital transition, with consistent customer experiences across voice and digital channels.”

Talkdesk Boost provides companies the best of both worlds; the wealth of benefits that come with digital transformation – efficiency, agility, cost savings, ongoing innovation and better customer experience – in a risk-free cloud deployment that protects their legacy ACD investments.

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Acorn International Establishes Acorn Digital Services

Social Media and Digital Services Agency under Acorn International to Target Broader Range of Brands Seeking to Maximize Their Business in China

Acorn International, Inc., a leading marketing and branding company in China, announced that it has consolidated under Acorn Digital Services the following business units: Acorn Entertainment and Acorn Streaming, which are Acorn’s social media management business and digital content business, respectively, as well as A-KOL (standing for “Acorn Key Opinion Leader), which facilitates the development of local China influencers with the objective to optimize their ability to convert Acorn’s content into product sales.

Acorn International’s business model combines social media management, content creation and sales of its own as well as third-party brands through e-commerce. The establishment of Acorn Digital Services over Acorn Entertainment, Acorn Streaming, and A-KOL consolidates Acorn’s digital agency business under one unit.

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Mr. Jacob A. Fisch, Acorn’s President and CEO noted: “Acorn’s business is and has always been about incubating promising new brands in a low risk manner. Acorn Digital Services is structured to allow us to incubate these brands while getting paid as we go as a third-party service provider.”

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In regard to the overall business model, Mr. Fisch noted further: “Social commerce is at the intersection of social media, content creation and e-commerce, allowing brands of all sizes to increase conversion rates by leveraging their social media reach. Brands that are embracing this rapidly evolving trend in China are getting a head start on the competition and positioning themselves for success. We believe Acorn Digital Services’ expanded focus will result in greater visibility and higher conversion rates for Acorn and our clients in China.”

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NetLine Launches a No-Cost Tool to Access B2B Content Consumption Data

Audience Explorer is the new, exclusive search tool aimed at helping marketers analyze B2B content consumption and buyer engagement in real time

NetLine possesses the largest repository of content consumption insights on the B2B web. Through over 15,000 web properties and hundreds of thousands of leads processed monthly, NetLine is uniquely positioned to provide marketers with immediate, actionable insights on the content consumption behavior of professionals across the network. Harnessing the value and scale of this data, NetLine has released a new tool to help marketers search and analyze buyer engagement in real time. Audience Explorer is a free tool for B2B marketers to discover their buyers’ content consumption and engagement behavior beyond the boundaries of their own site.

As marketers become more risk-averse in their content strategies, this tool provides buyer insights and data on the content with which in-market buyers are actively engaging. Audience Explorer begins by asking marketers to select the job area of target buyers. From there, capabilities allow users to drill down on their target audience further, with additional filters of job function, job level, company size, industry and region. Results update instantly, rendering interactive charts and content insights.

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Trending Topics and Buyer Research Stream provide information on the content that buyers are consuming in real time. For example, marketers seeking to target HR professionals would find that buyers in this audience are actively engaging with content about talent management, staff training, payroll and health insurance. The Buyer Research Stream then provides additional, invaluable data on specific employees conducting this research. Marketers can leverage the individuals’ job title, company, content type and title to sharpen targeting, enhance content resonance or curate custom outreach. Inside the NetLine ecosystem, this data helps marketers pivot and strategize based on the behavior of their custom, in-market audience.

NetLine’s SVP of Audience and Product, David Fortino, shares his perspective on the origins and value of Audience Explorer, “Audience Explorer was developed in direct response to our customers asking for deeper insights into what’s really happening across the B2B web in a transparent fashion. Much of what is available to today’s B2B marketer tends to be black box and subscription oriented. Being that we’re at the epicenter of content-first B2B research patterns and buyer engagement, we felt it was our responsibility to democratize access to these insights on a real-time basis.”

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Audience Explorer is the next wave of innovation at NetLine, marking a historic launch of completely transparent access to their content consumption data. On the heels of their latest annual report (2019 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report), this tool provides a customized application of buyer engagement data; advancing the insights within the report, the tool helps marketers apply NetLine’s data to their own target buyers. Marketers can confidently assemble personas based on the actual consumption patterns of real individuals as they are actively consuming content.

Launching in 1994, NetLine has since amassed a bevy of first-party data and adapted to the changing needs of the competitive marketer. Providing access to their repository of buyer engagement data does a service to the industry by allowing marketers to drive their strategies on a factual basis. This shift towards data-centric content marketing products is part of a larger rebranding initiative that positions NetLine as a provider of buyer engagement solutions beyond that of verticalized content syndication vendors or sources of company-level data and signals.

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Native Mobile Apps Market Expanding Massively by 2020

A Native application is a software program that is implemented for use on a specific platform and device. Because the native application is developed for a specific device and its OS, it has the capability to use both hardware and software. Native applications can give the best performance and have the benefits of the new technology, such as GPS, compared to mobile cloud apps or web apps designed to across many systems.

Platform

Two main mobile OS platforms are Android and iOS. Native applications are written in particular programming languages, such as Java for Android and objective c for iOS operating systems. Native apps offer fast performance and high reliability.

Native application pros and cons

Advantages of native applications:

  • Wide functionalities due to using the capabilities of the underlying device.
  • Quick and responsive software performance.
  • Push notifications.
  • UI that improved matches with user involvements of the OS.
  • Quality assurance though ratings in application stores.

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Disadvantages of native applications include:

  • Multiple code bases.
  • The rate for developers to create and build a code base for every platform.
  • Time consumption

Native functionality

Mobile apps created using React Native function as well as any native app, hence the name React Native. When it comes to scrolling accelerations, usability, keyboard behavior, and graphics can play a defining role in the popularity of the app and, thus, developers cannot avoid it. The user interface established with Native contains native widgets that execute flawlessly. React Native along with JavaScript runs the most complex of apps smoothly, outperforming even the real native apps, without Web View. Therefore, developing apps with native is a good solution for developing robust apps.

Live Updates

Another feature of using React Native is Live Updates. With the extensive use of JavaScript, developers have the feasibility of pushing the updates straight to the customers’ phones instead of the app store update cycle. Consequently, this ensures that users can enjoy the updated versions of the app immediately and you do not have to deal with the problems associated with older versions. Moreover, with React Native, the entire procedure is extremely streamlined and simple.

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Simple to Learn

React Native is highly understandable and easy to study since it trusts on language basics. It is the perfect tool for novice developers, who are new to JavaScript, as it provides a range of components, including maps and filters.

Developer Experience

React Native provides a great development environment, where the developers have a better experience. For starters, it allows the modifications and implementations to take place while the app is running, eliminating the need to restart. Hot reloading refreshes the user interface when changes are made to the file. Consequently, it simplifies the iteration cycle by removing the tedious re-building and deploying step.

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