Recently TMC’s (News - Alert) Erin Harrison had the opportunity to sit down and interview Angel’s Jason Hochman, Director of Enterprise and Channel Sales, at the IT Expo West 2010 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Hochman said Angel was founded about ten years ago with the goal of bringing voice products to SMBs. In the past couple years, he said, “we’ve begun to expand into the enterprise space, developing applications for pharma, finance and online retail. We decided it was time for a rebranding,” he said, so the company could go after the enterprise space, and meet their needs “in a different way than you meet the needs of SMBs.”
The company was founded in the ‘90s and originally named Angel.com (News - Alert), but that felt “very 90s,” Hochman said, explaining why it’s now known as simply Angel: “In today’s world, ‘dot com’ has the opposite connotation it had ten years ago.”
Still, rebranding or no, the trick for an IVR company is to differentiate themselves in what is a crowded market. Hochman said Angel knows there are lot of companies that sell IVR, and a lot of the platforms do the same things, quite frankly. He said Angel seeks to present a “caller first” philosophy, the idea being that if you offer the caller a pleasing experience, they will actually opt in to the system, actually use it, which will result in a better customer experience for them and a lower-cost transaction for the company.
And believe it or not, yes, shocking, we know, but according to Hochman, there are actually IVRs out there that don’t make the caller feel comfortable, ones which answer the questions poorly and in a way that makes them feel like their trapped. No, we don’t know what he’s talking about either, but we’ll take his word for it.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Chris DiMarco