Social Component Taking on Larger Call Center Visibility

InContact was at Call Center Week recently, talking about its new partnership with artificial intelligence-based IVR company SmartAction, and how the social channel is starting to make more inroads into the contact center space.

TMCnet spoke at the Las Vegas event with Jennifer Waite, product marketing manager at inContact, which sells a complete cloud-based workforce optimization suite for contact centers of all sizes. Waite said that eight out of the 10 requests for information she saw from enterprises last month required a social component – and that involved not just listening capabilities, but also the request for the ability to do social response. She added the companies have for some time grappled with the question of whether the social channel belongs to the contact center organization or to the marketing department. But, she added, companies now are beginning to understand that they don’t have to hand social over to one or another; rather, both departments can be involved. Indeed, some companies are already effectively addressing social customer care, she said, holding up the airline Delta as one example.

HelpSocial is inContact’s partner for social. HelpSocial is a good choice for this, she said, given that it started out servicing the contact center industry, so it understands the space. HelpSocial’s solution is API-driven, so it’s easy for companies like inContact to do integrations with it.

For those not familiar with inContact, the company sells a WFO solution powered by Verint (News - Alert) that targets enterprise-level operations while its Uptivity WFO solution is designed for small to midsize contact centers. Individual WFO products within these suites include Audio and Screen Recording, Quality Management, Performance Management Scorecards, Desktop Analytics, and Workforce Management, in addition to inView Customer Dashboards, Customer Survey functions and integrated eLearning and training tools. The company, which owns the competitive telephone company formerly known as UCN (News - Alert), can also bring connectivity along for the ride for its customers.

As for inContact’s new partner SmartAction, that company is a recent winner of Speech Technology Excellence awards, a program of CUSTOMER magazine and TMC (News - Alert), the parent company of TMCnet.

SmartAction offers a solution called Intelligent Voice Automation, which leverages an AI brain that can reason and learn from experience. It features a large vocabulary and array of built-in skills and knowledge, can be easily trained with customer-specific information, dynamically adapts to conversation flow in real time, evaluates multiple hypotheses from the speech recognition engine and selects the most likely interpretation based on context, has short-term memory of prior conversation flow, has long-term memory that recognizes callers and remembers facts from previous calls, and more.