Personalized Inbound Communication, Self-Service IVR, Next-Gen Open Source CRM

Call Center Technology Roundup February 23, 2012

Guided Speech Personalizes Inbound Customer Interactions

The Varolii Corporation has introduced the Varolii 360 integrated call center solution, uniting key proactive outbound features of the Varolii Interact platform with guided inbound capabilities for a personalized customer experience. The Varolii 360’s Guided Speech capability combines automation with silent human "guides" that direct the automation in real-time, correcting misheard responses or redirecting the ASR. This hybrid approach offers an alternative to full time agents, provides more efficient self-service options, and reduces customer frustration and opt-outs. Other features of solution include:

• hosted IVR and Application Scripting
• queue management options
• fully integrated CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) functionality with pre-agent transfer, agent connect, and pre-connection data delivery to agent
• web self-service options
• authenticates customer identification and tracks interactions and safeguards sensitive data with Varolii’s five-layer security protocol

Self-Service Apps Provide Tailored IVR

SpeechStorm has announced that its advanced IVR applications are now being deployed by the British Sky Broadcasting Group plc (BSkyB). SpeechStorm offers a range of intuitive phone self-service applications, including the Business User interface, that combine speech and touch-tone interactions to provide a personalized customer experience. The Business User interface enables rapid deployment of new services and instant changes to prompts and menus; features that have assisted the BSkyB in its self-service and KPI goals.

Next-Gen Open Source CRM Application

X2Engine has announced the general availability of X2CRM, a next generation open source Social Sales Management application. The X2CRM was designed to streamline contact and sales actions into a compact, social user interface. Key features of the CRM include web and Facebook lead capture forms, lead nurturing, scoring and intelligent routing, contact activity management, sales process work-flow engine, email correspondence, product and sales quotes, user profile pages and activity streams, field security, roles and sales teams, visual form editor for admins and a reporting dashboard for iPad and Mobile Device Apps. X2CRM uses the latest open source software including Apache, PHP, MySQL and Linux (LAMP) and the X2Studio administrative tool allows developers to create and share new application modules without any programming knowledge. Additionally, X2CRM supports HTML5, iPad, iPhone and Android mobile phones. X2CRM is fully internationalized and has been localized into six languages with more on the way. X2CRM can be downloaded from GitHub, Code.Google.com and SourceForge.net, and is released under the BSD license. X2Engine plans to introduce commercial support and private virtual server hosting packages in March 2012.