2012 was the year of the cloud as it gave businesses increased flexibility to scale applications, create call centers to best meet their customers’ needs and provide greater insight into how customers are interacting with interactive voice response (IVR). Additionally, mobile and social media gained popularity and the IVR industry has reacted to this change by recognizing the importance of the 360-degree and multichannel customer experience.
Throughout the year, more and more businesses realized the importance of real-time, actionable reporting to analyze customer interactions and understand how customers are choosing to connect to their business. By seeing the results behind customer interactions, businesses are then able to measure those results and make improvements.
One company, Angel, a provider of cloud-based Customer Experience (CX) solutions for IVR and contact centers, continued to see this increase in businesses gravitating toward cloud-based IVR solutions in 2012, so it made sure its CX Builder was integrated with its cloud-based CX platform, to give customers control over how they design IVR applications.
Overall, Angel accomplished a great deal in 2012, and is well-positioned for an even better 2013.
“It’s been an extremely thrilling year for us – since kicking off the year with 35 percent year over year revenue growth, we’ve been able to continue expanding our customer base and introduce very exciting solutions that we hope further help businesses improve their customers’ experience,” said Dave Rennyson, president of Angel, in an exclusive interview with TMCnet.
Among several achievements this past year, Angel expanded its CX Analytics software capabilities and announced its Mobile CX Analytics app for the iPad, making the company’s solutions conducive to employees’ increasingly mobile lifestyle. The app enables businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of their voice applications and obtain a view of customer behaviors.
In 2012, Angel introduced a solution for the mobile market that would mirror the importance of the customer experience. So the company revealed Lexee, a mobile solution that enables businesses to add conversational voice capabilities into any iPhone (News - Alert) or Android application to personalize the mobile customer experience. Lexee is a result of the new division of Angel called Angel Labs, which helps develop forward-thinking solutions to empower organizations to provide a better customer experience.
“We’re looking forward to working with more enterprises to integrate Lexee within their mobile applications in 2013,” commented Rennyson. “We will also be working alongside businesses to help them enhance their mobile customer experience with Lexee to create a strategic multichannel customer service effort for our customers.”
Also in 2012, Angel’s enhanced Cloud CTI (News - Alert) Adaptor was developed to help businesses gain a real-time view into customer interactions, while Angel’s Outbound Campaign Manager was developed to enable businesses to quickly build, manage and measure proactive two-way conversations with customers.
Amidst all of Angel’s success in 2012, it also overcame obstacles to eventually become one of the first companies of its size to introduce a mobile voice solution for enterprises. “With Lexee being our first mobile application solution, we faced the challenge influencing businesses on just how valuable of voice capabilities are and how much additional value voice could bring to their enterprise mobile applications,” explained Rennyson.
In general, moving to the cloud has been a difficult question for businesses, according to Rennyson, but they have realized that by integrating cloud applications into their business operations, they could improve operations and offer a multichannel customer experience in a way that was not available before.
“The insight businesses were able to view to improve their customer experience efforts became a huge differentiator for those enterprises that adopted it over the course of the year,” he said.
Finding the most effective way to build a positive multichannel customer experience has caused a lot of debate within the IVR industry throughout 2012. “As mobile, Web and apps have driven social media growth, businesses have internally had to incorporate mobile and social media customer service efforts within their customer experience strategies as well as identify how they can ensure the experience across these channels remain as effective as other channels,” explained Rennyson.
In 2013, Angel plans to continue to focus on helping customers provide a 360-degree customer experience as well as giving its customers the tools to provide a multichannel customer experience. “As mobile continues to grow into a major form of communication between brands and their customers, we will continue to use analytics behind our products to measure the value of each communication,” he said.
Mobile apps will continue to increase productivity for both employees and customers in 2013. Angel is looking forward to helping businesses provide an intuitive on-the-go mobile experience that allows people to speak their commands instead of manually navigating through applications.
“We are very excited about contextual applications in 2013, as we think mobile applications will continue to get smarter and enhance the mobile experience by using analytics to learn the user’s preferences,” he said.
Looking into 2013, designing a multichannel customer experience should be a major concern for businesses to help businesses better communicate with their customers, as well as enable their employees to work more efficiently. This year IVR will be a core component of the multichannel strategy and enable companies to create strategies to understand customer preferences. As the number of mobile devices in the marketplace increases, users will continue to expect emerging devices to offer better technology.
Rennyson said, “We are excited to see what new IVR technology will emerge in 2013 and not only drive the direction of our industry, but also create the most seamless multichannel customer experience possible.”
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Edited by Rachel Ramsey