Accolades

2013 marks the 14th annual TMC Labs Innovation Awards for CUSTOMER magazine. Each year TMC Labs analyzes dozens of applicants to find the most unique and innovative products. In past years we’ve had several innovative workforce management solutions win, and this year is no exception. But we have some new unique and truly innovative categories this year, including a predictive behavioral routing algorithm from Mattersight Corp., which opened our eyes to the potential for personality matchmaking within the contact center. Mobile and social media categories also made a strong showing this year. We are proud to bestow this award to 14 innovative products that truly improve both the customer and the contact center agent experience.

ac2 Solutions Inc.
Advanced Workforce Optimization (AWO) Portal
www.ac2solutions.com

Workforce management solutions have existed for many years and while they aren’t the sexiest technology, they are at the core of every well-run, efficient contact center. ac2 Solutions is an innovative provider of next-gen contact center optimization technologies. Its solutions offer forecasting, simulation, optimal scheduling, performance optimization and strategic planning technologies. ac2 Solutions currently holds five U.S. patents with another two U.S. patents about to be issued on its advanced workforce optimization, contact center and supply chain integration technologies. The AWO Portal is a 100 percent web-based application. The customer pushes data out of its switch to the hosting site using either a secure ftp site, web service or API. 

AWO offers regular time-series and special event forecasting, what if forecasting and scenario analysis, as well as automated forecast accuracy tracking. Similarly, it features concurrent optimal scheduling, comprehensive strategic planning using advanced time series forecasting and staffing models, and forecasting and scheduling for multiple skills, sites, and channels. Its granular scheduling controls offer both agent and supervisor schedule management, including exceptions, shift swapping, overtime, vacation planning, and volunteer time off. Users can perform schedule assignment also by agent availability, preferences, and even bidding. It also has real-time adherence and contact traffic tracking, plus dashboards and scorecards. With the increase in home workers, it also offers home agent schedule management.

Innovative and sophisticated features (some of which have been patented) include time series forecasting models such as Box-Jenkins ARIMA and exponential smoothing (10 versions) for accurate forecasts, artificial intelligence-based best pick module to automate model fitting and selection, forecasting and scheduling. Also it has staffing models to capture customer abandonments in determining the required staffing levels, and forecasting service levels, abandonment rates, average speed of answer and agent occupancy accurately. In the last six months it has upgraded and improved the forecasting, reporting, and integration modules.

ac2 Solutions told TMC Labs, “AWO Portal’s Next Generation WFM 3.0 technologies deliver a quantum leap in contact center performance and efficiency. The artificial intelligence engine built into the AWO Portal has the forecasting and scheduling knowledge and skills an expert would use in planning and managing a workforce. It offers the utmost in ease-of-use allowing you to focus on the performance of your contact centers, while enjoying the advanced automated forecasting and optimization skills provided by the Portal.”

Aegis Ltd.
AegisLISAn 
www.aegisglobal.com

There are many touch points between an organization and its customers, including customer care/support, cross-selling, order processing, customer surveys, customer acquisition and prospecting, as well as the dirty work of billing, which includes reminder calls, pre-charge off, collections, post charge off and more. Then of course there is managing all the data for customers and reporting and analyzing that data. Aegis, a global outsourcing and technology company, enhances the customer experience across all touch points and channels to result in better customer acquisition and retention.

The company manages end user customer experience through its hosted customer lifecycle management solution called AegisLISAn, which tracks and monitors conversation threads from a large number of streams across various channels such as Twitter, Facebook, discussion boards, YouTube (News - Alert), news forums, blogs, review sites, e-commerce sites, and other sites related to your business. The built-in analytical capabilities, dashboard, and reports assist in competitive analysis, as well as Twitter, Facebook, volume and sentiment. In the last year it has added support for Google, LinkedIn groups and YouTube Channel comments.

Aegis Limited explained, “The social media chatter between two friends or between a consumer and a brand has opened up a high impact customer services, interaction and engagement channel. This chatter throws up sales, service and reputation management opportunities, therefore an opportunity for the organizations to engage with their consumers on social spaces to gain a significant mindshare of customer experience management through these opportunities.” They added, “With the current state of competition, having a well-defined target market is imperative. AegisLISAn is a social media engagement solution, providing the ability of listening, interacting, socializing and adapting with the online community of a brand via a single solution platform.”

Calabrio 
Calabrio ONE
www.calabrio.com

Calabrio ONE is a comprehensive suite of contact center workforce optimization software that features call recording, quality assurance, workforce management, as well as speech analytics and performance-based dashboards and reporting. Calabrio ONE’s hosted offering utilizes a dynamic, widget-based user interface that is customized to suit agents or supervisors required information.

Calabrio explained, “Contact centers are sitting on endless amounts of useful data. However, many are not extracting the valuable insight this data can hold because the information is highly unstructured. Furthermore, traditional analytic technology has been very complex, which makes adoption difficult and unattractive.” The company continued, “When left to traditional approaches to analyzing voice data – where contact centers are forced to manually listen to calls in order to pinpoint essential transactions, trends and take action – enormous business opportunities can be lost because users can’t literally listen to every call, so they don’t have a complete view of what customers and agents are saying. Calabrio ONE’s Speech Analytics component is more intuitive, making the process of turning unstructured phone transactions into big data that can be sorted, evaluated and acted upon more easily and cost effectively.”

Some innovative features include a 3x increase in throughput efficiency for concurrent recordings, signaling enhancements that support reliability in the event of a server failover, and meta-data enhancements to provide rich call and customer-related context for calls captured at the gateway. Calabrio ONE supports recording of the full customer experience on every call to the enterprise regardless of capture method, including the ability to associate contact-rich metadata with every call, record and associate multiple legs of a call, and the ability to associate IVR interactions with each call.

Calabrio claims that ONE’s installation and implementation time is significantly lower than those of well-known competitors NICE and Verint. The company adds that Calabrio ONE is fully scalable, giving small contact centers the same features and results that larger centers can afford to experience.

Confirmit
Confirmit Mobile
www.confirmit.com

Confirmit Mobile includes a range of survey solutions to ensure companies can engage their customers and gather feedback with a strong focus on mobile surveys, since people today are loathe to pick up a pen and paper and fill out a paper survey. Further, digital surveys are faster to fill out, have higher response rates, can offer immediate incentives (such as immediate lottery spin upon submission to win something), and more demographics on the user, such as location data. Confirmit can be used as an on-premises or on-demand offering. For on-premises customers, all information is stored on their own servers. The SaaS platform provides access to a shared, secure environment via the web.

Several surveying methods are supported, such as mobile computer assisted personal interviewing solutions, enabling businesses to conduct face-to-face and field research using a wide range of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. They also support mobile diary research, where businesses provide respondents with mobile devices and a customized survey app to understand the individual experience over a period of time. Prompt responses with alarms and reminders; capture photo, video and voice evidence; and gather location information through GPS are also included. It integrates with photo, video, audio and GPS capture capabilities to provide rich feedback. Other options include inviting users to download the Confirmit Mobile survey app, which can then be filled out at any time regardless of any wireless data availability. Further, it supports consumer engagement and field audits with the ability to create a two-way dialogue with customers on their own mobile devices and a company-specific social network for wider engagement. Surveys can be submitted via SMS, mobile browser, as well as mobile research apps previously mentioned.

In June 2013, Confirmit debuted the industry’s first automated back-checking capabilities, creating an efficient and automated process for data quality checks. With Confirmit Mobile back-checking, researchers can now verify data collected in the field via mobile devices using a desktop or mobile device, an app or a browser, making verification easier and faster. In addition to Confirmit’s back-checking capabilities, Confirmit claims to be the first to introduce signature capture, photo capture and GPS capture in the industry.

Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Ameyo Communications Suite
www.drishti-soft.com

Drishti-Soft’s Ameyo Communications Suite is simply what TMC Labs would like to call an all-in-one contact center in-a-box due to its plethora of features and components all seamlessly integrated to offer advanced capabilities for inbound, outbound and blended processes. The platform is like a one-stop shop to build a contact center. It includes pre-integrated core components like ACD, IVR, dialer, voice logger, predictive dialer, reporting, CTI (News - Alert), quality monitoring, campaign management and multimedia (e-mail, SMS, chat, fax, web and social media) communications and IP PBX functionality.

TMC Labs would like to highlight Ameyo Stats Manager, an innovative automation tool primarily used to provide accurate real-time information to effectively manage a contact center. Dhrishti-Soft Solutions explained, “In a normal scenario a manager of a contact center would rely on rows of data often derived from historical reports. This can be eased through the use of a wallboard, which can provide condensed information to the manager.” The company continued, “However, this approach to consolidating information quickly and easily has its drawbacks. The most notable drawback is the lag in the information that is presented. This is due to the delay in parsing the information and representing it in a form that is easily understood. The delay in the presentation of the information would mean that the contact center manager would be viewing information that is outdated at that point in time and therefore rectification would be ineffective.”

Ameyo Stats Manager is not only real time, but it also acts intelligently by pushing the right information at the right time and shows the manager of the contact center the relevant information for him or her to make an informed decision. This is beneficial in the modern-day business scenario where quick action is required to rectify a dip in performance or a massive spike in call volume.

One other tool that truly makes this an all-in-one contact center in-a-box is Ameyo Social Interaction Manager, a powerful tool that enables businesses to reach out and be easily accessible by their customers and prospects on popular social media platforms. Businesses can track mentions about their business on social media and respond to queries as they occur.

Empolis Information Management GmbH
Empolis Service Resolution Management
www.empolis.com

The Empolis Service Resolution Management knowledge management solution helps deliver the right information with its ability to determine the correct answers from internal and external sources and supports in communicating these in a competent and consistent manner. Users receive the answer or solution by being guided through a number of questions and suggestions so that even non-specialists find the right answers and identify solutions quickly. Empolis SRM is available both on premises as well as a hosted cloud solution. Empolis Information Management explained, “The solution supports service center staff, for example, or customers with web self-service. In practical day-to-day use, the solution has improved the first call fix rate from 56 percent to 77 percent, has increased resolved trouble tickets within 24 hours from 39 percent to 54 percent, and has achieved an ROI within seven months.”

Empolis SRM offers Adaptive Decision Trees, a powerful extension of standard decision tree technology that allows deep integration with other systems to fetch information automatically. The Adaptive Decision Trees can take different roles and knowledge levels of users into account, such that the same decision tree configurations can be applied in different environments but will adapt to the specific user, such as a web self-service solution and an in-house call center.

Empolis SRM features highly scalable semantic search based on the Empolis Information Access System. This allows users to incorporate large document collections, including from external sources, and interpret and analyze these based on a semantic model such that these documents can be truly understood in the context of a particular problem. That results in shorter problem resolutions and call handling times.

It provides tight integration of content and knowledge management, allowing more explicit knowledge such as documents or databases and the more implicit knowledge by subject matter experts enabling users to pull the desired information. Uniquely, the scalable semantic search is based on a sophisticated linguistic technology covering more than 30 languages.

Jibe Mobile
Joyn by Jibe
www.jibemobile.com

Joyn is the carriers’ answer to Skype, a voice, video, and IM communications platform, except with tighter integration into carriers’ services like SMS/MMS. The joyn initiative is the first time attempt from carriers to introduce a new, interoperable global service since the introduction of SMS. Unfortunately, not all carriers have rolled out joyn, and that’s where Jibe Mobile comes into play.

Jibe’s cloud is the secret sauce that allows any carrier in any market to launch new joyn services and provide a complete cross-carrier solution that works both in-network and across networks. Joyn by Jibe provides in-network and cloud-based joyn capabilities to mobile users on any network, giving them the ability to share, video call and group chat. It can also perform one-on-one private sharing, allowing mobile users to share videos and photos, request friends’ locations, and share their own location. Other innovative features include group file share, in-call video sharing, contact discovery, chat store and forward, and file share store and forward.

“Jibe Mobile has incorporated SMS/MMS as a mode of communication into the user experience, allowing SMS/MMS to be utilized as a fallback mode in case joyn capabilities are not available – so no friend is left behind. With this approach, users are able to upgrade their mobile experience while remaining connected to all of the contacts in their address book. By providing a fully interoperable joyn service in-network, and the use of Jibe’s cloud, Jibe Mobile enables every market to have 100 percent joyn reach from day one,” explained a Jibe Mobile representative.

In the last six months, Jibe’s 1.0 joyn by Jibe was released to carriers. The video and audio quality has been improved over the last several months with the inclusion of dynamic bit-rate adaptation, voice activity detection, half duplex operation and automatic gain control. Supported video codecs include H.264 and VP8. Supported audio codecs are AMR-WB, AMR-NB, OPUS, G.729, G.726, G.722, G.722.1, ILBC, G.711 (PCM a-Law/u-Law). The encryption employed is Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP/SRTCP).  

LiveOps
LiveOps Engage
www.liveops.com

LiveOps Engage is a cloud-based contact center application that brings together the social, mobile and traditional contact center channels within a single, integrated agent desktop. LiveOps Engage simplifies the user experience to increase agent productivity and improve customer experience across all channels on a single screen, including voice, e-mail, chat, SMS, Twitter, and Facebook. As a cloud-based application based on HTML5 technologies, LiveOps Engage requires no additional hardware or software and works with any HTML browser.

LiveOps Engage supports all the various communications channels that a customer may want to use to interact. That includes voice, e-mail, chat, SMS, and social. This array of choices not only improves customer loyalty, but also increases agent productivity and results in improved first call resolution. It supports inbound/outbound PSTN and VoIP phone capabilities, including on-demand outbound functionality to rapidly configure and deploy outbound telemarketing, surveys, telesales or fundraising campaigns. It also has a feature-rich IVR, enabling self-service, with support for speech-enabled applications, touch-tone call routing, and call surveys.

Mattersight Corp.
Mattersight Predictive Behavioral Routing
www.mattersight.com

Having a real connection or a mismatch with a particular agent happens because we all have our own personalities, speaking styles, skill sets, and behavioral characteristics. What if as a business you could connect the best matching employee with the customer based on the employee’s personality? That’s what Mattersight aims to do with Mattersight Predictive Behavioral Routing, an innovative approach to matching up the right agent with the right customer.

As a SaaS solution, Mattersight Predictive Behavioral Routing is used by large enterprises and other organizations with sizeable contact centers, typically over 200 seats. Mattersight told TMC Labs, “Our customers improve customer-employee interactions to increase sales conversion rates, reduce cost of service, increase first contact resolution, and improve customer experience and satisfaction or other contact center business metrics that drive value.”

The company explained that while one particular competitor utilizes publicly-available demographic data to match callers with contact center agents, it conducts no analysis on the actual agent performance or customer behavior and personality. Mattersight’s solution is unique in that it matches callers with agents based upon personality, communication style, and behavioral characteristics decoded from actual customer-employee interactions.

The solution captures, analyzes, and stores every second of every interaction in a robust data mart where advanced algorithms respond in milliseconds with a ranked agent availability list. Pairing/matching data is provided to the client’s existing routing architecture in under 200 milliseconds for each call via a secure network connection.

The company claims its Process Communication Model is the only communications-based psychological behavioral model, and was developed by Dr. Taibi Kahler in the 1970s with NASA for astronaut selection. The way people communicate (tone, tempo, words, emotional syntax, etc.) are advertisements of their personality style, psychological needs and communication preferences. NASA used the model to pair astronauts in space to ensure strong communication and a successful mission. Mattersight has an exclusive license from Kahler to use this model in CRM applications in contact centers.

To TMC Labs, it almost seems voodoo science to measure or quantify human behavioral characteristics in an accurate fashion, but the company has some impressive customers and references, not to mention Dr. Kahler’s esteemed credentials and research into speech patterns. Automating the application of psychological behavioral models for contact center call routing is truly a unique and innovative approach to solving the problem of routing calls to the best possible agent.

NICE Systems
NICE Customer Engagement Analytics
www.nice.com

Customer Engagement Analytics is a new hosted platform, launched earlier this year, designed to serve large enterprises and service providers that engage their customers across multiple channels and touch points. The product analyzes customer transactions (e.g. bill payment), interactions (e.g. customer calls, e-mails, chat), and feedback (e.g. surveys) for a complete view of the customer journey. It analyzes cross-channel trends at the mass level, as well as drills down to show an individual customer journey across channels and touch points.

One innovative feature is customer journey visualization, which allows users to see all the channels (social media, phone, web, retail store, IVR self-service, e-mail) that the customer uses to interactwith the organization, including percentages for each. Further, it features interaction analytics, including speech and text analytics to get to the root cause of customer issues, such as “no service” mentioned a lot or “keeps freezing”. Importantly, reports and dashboards with KPIs come out of the box to assist managers in reaching certain metric goals. Finally, it allows users to close the loop to make business impact with performance management, coaching, real time guidance, and direct customer engagement.

NICE told TMC Labs, “Interaction analytics vendors on the market track and analyze contacts such as calls, e-mail, and chat but have little visibility into events outside of interactions, such as bill payments, account change, etc. Transaction analytics vendors on the market analyze transactions and customer events, but offer no visibility into what was said or written during the interaction, without relying on third-party solutions. NICE Customer Engagement Analytics offers both in an integrated solution that covers the entire cross-channel customer journey.”

Not only can users visualize the customer journey on two levels, the mass and the individual customer, but they can drill down to individual customer interactions such as playing back a customer call, which was NICE’s core competency until it expanded far beyond simple call recording. To support large volumes of interactions and transactions, NICE leverages the IBM (News - Alert) big data (Hadoop) technology stack to bring big data capabilities together with NICE’s customer service domain expertise. The product leverages a big data platform to combine data from a very large number of data sources such as customer calls, web logs, chat logs, IVR logs, CRM data, billing data, branch/retail transactions, social media and more to sequence customer events and provide a holistic view of the customer experience.

NICE explained, “Taking a cross-channel view of customer journeys is challenging. Customer identities are often different across channels; for example, the user login to a web account is not the same as the customer identification over the phone or the customer account number, even though it’s the same customer. Therefore, most organizations have no way to identify such repeat contacts across channels. Our product uses a unique customer identifier to resolve customer identity across all channels and touch points, thus enabling a true holistic view of the customer experience.”

Pegasystems
Pega CRM
www.pega.com

Pega CRM software is a flexible CRM solution combining CRM with industry-leading BPM technology enabling organizations to improve customer satisfaction. Traditional data-centric CRM relied heavily on employees to take the right steps to resolve customer issues, meaning that a customer’s experience can vary greatly depending on the manual processes and efficiency of the staff at any given organization.

With Pega CRM organizations can, in real time, understand and adapt to their customers' needs, automate work execution, and continuously deliver a multichannel experience directly aligned with business goals and objectives. Process-centric CRM provides service that is personal, quick, and also cost-efficient to deliver the best customer experience. Further, BPM solutions are fundamentally different because they aren’t isolated or siloed – they manage work from end-to-end and can incorporate human tasks as well as data and functions from other systems into efficient, streamlined customer-centric processes.

Customer requests are intelligently managed through a guided process across channels to ensure successful and cost-effective resolution. Recently the company added real-time collaboration among customers, customer service representatives, and supporting back-office teams across the enterprise. It leverages next-best-action analytics, to help improve customer service, retention, and profit. Newly enhanced social capabilities allow real-time collaboration and improved productivity across customer support functions.

PowerNet Global 
NetDialer 
www.powernetglobal.com

NetDialer is PowerNet Global’s outbound dialer long-distance service. It is specifically designed for businesses that need dialer and outbound call centers that require a cost-effective, stable, and long-term outbound calling solution. PowerNet Global offers Tier 1 call quality on high velocity, short duration calls without incurring costly short duration fees.

PowerNet Global recently added inbound SIP DIDs, which allows national call centers to give out local phone numbers to their clients, as well as a partnet with Gryphon, a well-known Do Not Call compliance solution. The company also has worked with two other large carriers to provide direct inward dialing numbers. To ensure the quality of the service, the company collaborated with software IP tool providers that outfitted it with tools to track and view call flows, find any/all issues, and improve the quality of service being provided to customers.

PowerNet Global told TMC Labs, “What makes PowerNet Global’s call center solution, NetDialer, so unique is its ability to get businesses up and running within just a few days with their outbound SIP long-distance service, compared to traditional dedicated circuits that can take up to a month or more to be installed. Another unique feature is flexibility on capacity to allow room for growth. We ensure that you aren’t stuck with a certain amount of capacity, as opposed to dedicated circuits that are fixed capacity.”

RightAnswers Inc.
Unified Knowledge Platform Version 7.1
www.rightanswers.com

The Unified Knowledge Platform is a cloud-based knowledge management and web self-service solution designed to improve customer service by enabling organizations to create, manage and share knowledge. The Unified Knowledge Platform features powerful search, customer-friendly interfaces, and was designed and built to integrate into clients’ CRM/customer service systems such as NetSuite, Salesforce, SAP and more.

RightAnswers told TMC Labs, “the platform has been enhanced with a new interface, integration with social media outlets, social forums, interactive forms, a guided search to help narrow results, and more. The platform elevates the web self-service experience from simple search to self-sufficiency, improving customer satisfaction rates and easing the strain on the service organization.”

The RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Platform is offered both via the cloud and on premises, while the clients typically access RightAnswers through via a browser or via the embedding of RightAnswers components within their own corporate portal or Internet site. RightAnswers claims to be the first vendor to offer a cloud-based knowledge management platform, introduced back in 2001. It has developed a new interface, which joins together a client’s knowledge base, CRM platform, social media and learning management system.

Another RightAnswers innovative concept is the Client Success Program, which is offered to clients at no additional cost. RightAnswers stated, “While other vendors stop supporting clients after the initial installation, RightAnswers starts by providing a unique success program that goes well beyond the initial deployment to ensure clients have a successful knowledge strategy. Our Client Success Program enables clients to develop, deliver and maintain an effective adoption strategy and on-going knowledge initiative.”

SoCoCare
Social CIM (Customer Interaction Management)
www.sococare.com

SoCoCare’s solution, Social CIM, is a social engagement solution for customer service and sales organizations that helps organizations manage what is happening in social media. Social CIM provides social agents and supervisors with rich social feeds including blogs, articles, and social network posts with the ability to reply and direct-message authors all on one unified platform. SoCoCare leverages advanced natural language processing and business rules engines to eliminate social spam that can waste an agent’s time. Agents also have the ability to filter on a specific topic grouping, type of consumer sentiment, or level of social and enterprise influence, and more.

It leverages heads-up displays, dashboards and strong analytics to gain insights into what is happening in the social media world. It also provides best practice tools including pre-approved responses, rules-based next best actions, author search and conversation threading, callback offerings, and more. Social CIM can also be customized based on enterprise rules and best practices. Rules-based auto-dispositioning can prioritize, close or categorize posts based on the systems natural language understanding intelligence. As with any contact center solution, analytics and reporting metrics are key. SoCoCare’s advanced analytics provide agents and supervisors with KPI and workgroup analytics, agent and group SLAs, outreach, spam, workload, and cluster summaries, top voices, top sources, relevancy, and sentiment dashboards, trending clusters, volume trends, and more.

SoCoCare told TMC Labs, “While a handful of social engagement products preceded the SoCoCare solution, none were purpose built for the social contact center. Many of the competing products on the market are simply first generation social marketing tools repurposed for customer care. These repurposed products fail to deliver the tools and analytics that are necessary for contact center success. SoCoCare was purpose built from the ground up for the social contact center by social pioneers and contact center experts.”