By Don Keane on May 1st, 2012 | No Comments »
Here at Angel, we take pride in the quality of our voice solutions and applications. But as excited as we may get about voice technology, nothing beats the recognition of our company and products by not only one, but three organizations within our industry.
We are thrilled to say our own Customer Experience Platform won bronze in the Innovation in Customer Service category in the sixth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. It’s no secret that enabling our enterprise customers to provide their end-users with a memorable customer experience is a big passion of ours. The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are one of the world’s top sales awards, contact center awards, and customer service awards and this recognition reemphasizes our commitment to provide quality solutions that improve customer satisfaction.
Outside of our customer engagement platform, our social media solutions have also received some notable industry nods. Our own Voice for Chatter also received the Product of the Year award from INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine. Angel’s Voice for Chatter is a cloud-based, free application which brings IVR technology to Salesforce.com’s social media tool that looks to “empower employees and make business processes social.” With voice functionality on Chatter, employees can be more productive and easily share information by leaving a voice update on their Chatter feeds via a link to the audio recording as well as a transcribed text version of the voice update.
Additionally, Angel’s VoiceforTwitter was selected as a finalist in the 2012 Appy Awards’ social networking category. Our VoiceforTwitter has had an exciting year since starting off in President Obama’s Twitter 2011 Town Hall Meeting and enables Twitter users to deepen their social media experience and connect with other members using both text and voice.
As we approach the midway mark to 2012, we remain committed to creating new and innovative services and solutions across Web and mobile platforms to ensure our enterprise customers can not only remain as efficient and productive as possible, but also have the best tools on hand in order to create a personalized experience for their customers. Needless to say, we’re excited to share what’s in store from us in the second half of 2012!
By Shankar Sripadham on April 2nd, 2012 | No Comments »
Radio stations all over the US are rapidly adapting to the changing technology landscape. Internet radio stations, and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter simultaneously pose an opportunity and a threat.
New Internet-only radio stations, operating on a shoestring budget, pose a credible threat as they steadily erode market share from the bigger, more established radio stations by creating new micro-content niches. Established AM/FM broadcast stations are, in-turn, leveraging the Internet as a complementary channel to reach a much wider, Internet-savvy audience.
Facebook, Twitter and other social networks compete with more traditional media such as newspapers, TV and radio stations, for audience attention and advertising dollars. On the other hand, they provide a conduit for traditional media to reach a global audience that was hitherto inaccessible.
This disruptive techno-climate calls for radio stations and other traditional media to innovate, change, and adopt a more radical strategy – one that embraces technology.
A recent innovation in this space is a service from Angel called Voice For Facebook. Radio stations in the U.S. are leveraging Voice for Facebook, to better engage with their listeners using the communication medium of choice, namely, voice.
In this blog post, I will provide answers to some of the common questions I get about this service:
What is Voice for Facebook?
Voice for Facebook is a service that lets radio stations engage their listeners on their Facebook page using voice. The service is as simple to use, as it is to set up.
How can my listener community and I use Voice for Facebook?
You and your listener community can post voice comments to your Facebook page. To do so, simply pick up a telephone and place a call to a Voice for Facebook provided phone number. Once connected, you can speak a voice message into the phone that will get posted on your Facebook page. Yes, it’s really that simple!
How does it work?
When you (a radio station employee) sign up for Voice for Facebook, our service will provide you with a unique phone number. You can advertise this number any way you choose – on your Facebook page, announce it during your programs or publish it on your website. Your listeners can then call into this number and start using it to post voice comments!
Click here to read more »
By Laura Kissam on February 17th, 2012 | No Comments »
The demand for websites that are a key component of customer-business interaction started about 10 years ago and has continue to rise until, now, it is the norm for businesses to have a well-run and functional website for customers to use to gather information, place orders, and execute other various tasks related to any given company or cause. Yet once again the way customer service is delivered is drastically changing: the past two years have seen the quick rise of social media and some, if not most, companies have begun to leverage this new channel as another touch point with their consumers. Those businesses who haven’t will need to do so if they are to stay competitive.
But what if we step back a few years and consider the phone? With the rise of smartphones globally, it’s safe to say that the phone as a means of interaction is not going anywhere. So why have the consumer’s interactions with most businesses largely not changed over the past 30 years? Why is it that when I’m traveling, my Internet browser can recognize my current zip code but when I call certain companies they still have to ask me for my phone number? Maybe it’s time for IVRs and call centers to step up and make similar improvements by leveraging the information they have on me, a customer,—like an account ID that is tied to a certain phone number or a recent order that was placed—to provide all of their customers better and faster service.
The future of customer service includes incorporating trends that leverage consumer data, social media, and increased use of mobile technologies such as smartphones. Organizations have a huge task in front of them of combining these initiatives to create 360 degrees of customer service and erasing the past 30 years of the bad technology associated with their old IVR and call center technologies.
It is important to remember that to complete the 360 degrees of various touch points to your customers, you must incorporate your customers’ connections with partnering organizations. This additional customer touch point should be considered, but seems too frequently forgotten, and focuses on how your partners are treating and delivering services to your customers. For example, it is fairly common for companies to develop partnerships and to utilize others’ services to fulfill certain client needs or business goals. Making efforts to work with partnering companies to provide a seamless customer experience across all levels is a vital piece often left untouched.
As an example, Company A is a retail clothing and shoe store and has a partnership with Company B for shoe sales only. A member of Company A’s loyalty program calls to place an order for shoes; in an automated system, she selects the shoe department, then women’s boots, and identifies herself as a loyalty program member. However, when the customer finally reaches the final step of placing the specific order with Company B, the agent has no information on the caller and her selections, forcing her to repeat herself. Company A is responsible for creating a more seamless transition for the customer so she does not have to provide the same information more than once in a single interaction.
Let us know what you think. How well do you feel you are being serviced by the companies you interact with?
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