A quick note to alert you about Voice Secure, our latest partnership integration, this one with Voice Verified.

Below is a blurb from our solution landing page:

Angel.com combines award winning IVR and call center technologies with voice authentication solutions to provide a way for callers to quickly, conveniently and securely access personal information over the phone. By simply repeating a few random digits in the IVR, caller identity is automatically verified through the composition of their voice.

Voice Secure Datasheet (PDF 97kb)

• Secure – No more revealing private information over the phone, risking having your personal information fall into the wrong hands.
• Convenient – No more forgotten passwords or PINs.
• Saves Time – No more time consuming process of routing calls to agents for verification of identity or password resets.

Bank account balances. Medical test results. Order status. Customers call your IVR for many reasons, but what they all have in common is they want their information quickly and they want it to be secure. Current security measures include passwords, PINs, challenge questions or personal information to confirm identity, creating a lengthy process for a caller to get the information they need over the phone. Not to mention the burden this places on your call center agents simply to identify the caller.

With simple and accurate voice verification through your Angel.com IVR or call center solution, your callers and agents are immediately able to focus on call resolution rather than identity confirmation.

We just came out with an exciting new integration with Parature, a leader in on-demand customer service software, that showcases just how unique of an offering we have at Angel.com.

The integration in a nutshell phone-enables the Parature on-demand customer service software. Using the newly release d Parature API, any application deployed on Angel.com’s Site Builder can interact with the Parature back-end to perform such actions as getting information about the caller, creating a new ticket and inserting it into Parature during the call, and getting the status of a ticket.

What this means, for instance, is that you are no longer forced to treat all callers the same. You can identify that a caller is a premium customer and then provide them with faster support than a regular customer. Also, you now give your callers the ability to open a ticket right over the phone if say no one is available over the phone to take the call (say all your agents are busy or customers are are calling after hours). Isn’t it much better to have the caller just speak to describe their problem and then have that description logged as a ticket right there and then, instead of asking them to hang up and then go log into the portal and log a ticket, etc.?

And how about the fact that as a manager, you have complete visibility into what is going on over the phone? You know who called, who got phone support, who logged tickets, etc.
Now on with how this solution showcases the unique strengths of Angel.com.

To begin with, once the Parature API was published late last year, enabling communication between Angel.com and Parature was a matter of building a voice site that had the right transaction pages and made the right calls to php scripts that interacted with the Parature API. From that point on, whenever a customer wants to deploy a Parature-enabled application, the process of deploying them consists in configuring variables and fields — no programming needed! (Unless the client wants to do something not covered in our out of the box functionalities.) In fact, we are putting together a library of transaction pages that customers can copy into their Angel.com account so that they can deploy their own Parature solutions without needing to talk to our professional services outfit! How cool is that!

Next, just a week before we announced our integration, we had come out with our VCC’08 offering — our next generation Virtual Call Center solution that comes fully integrated with our Site Builder. (If you have not taken the time to review the VCC’08 release, invest the time. It’s well worth it.)

What does this mean? Simply that if you have Parature, you can now, through Angel.com, provide phone automation and self service to your clients, treat your callers differently according to business rules that promote your bottom line, use our VCC offering right within your voice site, and have full visibility into what is going on in your phone support line. And do all of that right from the convenience of your browser, without having to write a single line of code! Where else can you do that?

And here’s the icing on the cake: the tickets that callers submit of the phone? The spoken description of those trouble tickets are sent out to SimulScribe to be transcribed in near-real time and then logged into Parature. (Click here to read more about our integration with SimulScribe.)

More to come as we continue building our Partner ecosystem….

We’ve just launched an exciting new partnership with SimulScribe, one of the leading providers of near-real-time voice-to-text transcription, to power Angel.com applications that require fast transcription and automatic delivery via email or via a web service into a back-end, such as a CRM or a simple database.

Our first integration is powering our newly released salesforce.com solution, SalesByFone. In a nutshell, the application lets field salespeople call into their salesforce.com account and leave a note to themselves, or send an email to a contact, by just speaking, and then have their spoken message transcribed and saved to salesforce or emailed to their contact.

Imagine not only the time the solution will save field sales (compare the number of steps it takes to log a note about a meeting if done via traditional browser versus making a call and saying the name of the contact and then speaking the note), but also the new level of consistency in logging and tracking it will introduce in the routine of its users.

The obvious next integration using SimulScribe will revolve around support: mainly, transcribing support tickets and saving them into a support CRM back-end.

Stay tuned for the next integration and the next partnership announcement!

As you may know, the premier expo for the CRM industry, DestinationCRM, and the speech industry’s annual event, SpeechTek, are both holding their respective gatherings this year in New York City at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. DetinationCRM 2007 will take place between August 21 and 22, while SpeechTek 2007 will take place between August 20 and 23.

I’m glad to see the two conferences brought together under one roof. I’ve always been a big believer in the still mainly untapped possibilities of phone-enabling CRM — or, if you prefer, CRM-enabling the phone. Think about it: if you are a sales person, what do you do all day long? You type stuff into your CRM and you talk over the phone. What do you do if you are in support? You type stuff into your CRM and you talk over the phone. In other words, you type stuff into your CRM and talk over the phone before you close your deals, and you do the same after you close your deals!

And yet, the CRM and the telephone continue to be used as if they lived in completely different worlds. Simple stuff like logging your phone activity into your CRM, accessing your CRM data by telephone, capturing data about the interactions between your prospects and your sales people, or your clients and your support agents, etc. — pretty basic stuff — continues to elude most CRM systems.

Here at Angel.com, we have already converted the vision of phone-enabling the CRM into concrete solutions for our clients. So far, we have phone-enabled Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and Netsuite.

So, if you use any of those three solutions for your CRM, contact us and we will take care of you.

If you are using some other CRM and would be interested in deploying an inbound or outbound IVR, or Call Center solution, contact us and we will work with you to integrate with your CRM.

If you are an integrator and are interested in working with us to integrate Angel.com with some other CRM, fill out our partner application and we can talk.

Check out this blog post from one of our partners, Clicktools, a provider of on-demand web based tools to build, deploy and analyze surveys. They have built an integration with Angel.com that hooks up Voice Sites with their sophisticated reporting system. In a nutshell, with Clicktools, you now can deploy surveys that capture responses both over the web and over the phone and present the results from the same Clicktools reporting and analysis interface.

Here is how you can test drive the integration.

1. Click www.clicktools.com/dashboard and login to the demo Clicktools account with the email angelivr@clicktools.com and the password ‘angelivr’
2. Call 866-248-8135 and answer the short four question survey by saying the numbers or pressing digits on your phone. Leave a comment too.
3. In Clicktools, Click the ‘+’ then ‘Results’ link in Clicktools to see your result appear before your eyes. This includes storing a link to the comment which you can cut and paste in to another browser window to hear.

As Andrew put it in the post: “You gotta LOVE on demand software!”

Indeed!

Those among you, like myself, who have been in the speech and IVR industry for more years than we care to say, who have all along believed (and still believe) that the speech wave is “just around the corner,” but who continue to be frustrated by the wide gap between the promise of speech automation and its actual state in practice, can only be heartened by this story.

For us at angel.com, the story is especially gratifying for two reasons: first, because its protagonists are new additions to the angel.com family, but also because their initiative represents precisely the type of creative use of speech automation technology we want to see entrepreneurs out there make in solving very concrete business problems.

Read about how Vishal Chordia, Amit Agarwal, and Lawrence Lee (seen above in that order, from left to right), recent graduates from Carnegie Mellon University, worked on and deployed a fully-automated bus schedule operator that tells callers, in real time and to the minute, expected bus arrivals for given stops.

Try out the solution at: 1-866-MY-CMU-BUS.

Here are links to the two articles published (so far) on their exploits: “Tracking through talking: Carnegie Mellon alums create way to track buses by phone” and “Alumni Create Phone System for Campus Bus Routes”.

How was the application received? Well, take a listen to what a satisfied customer had to say!

Kudos guys!

I am late-comer to the Geoffrey Moore bandwagon and only recently got to finally read his seminal book, “Crossing the Chasm,” but this past Wednesday, I became a full convert after listening to him talk at a panel of VCs at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference. The man is an impressive intellect, very friendly and affable, and quick on his feet. He is a firm believer in the Appexchange project, fully buys into the mash-up movement and composite solutions sold on an on-demand marketplace, thinks ERP on-demand is almost an oxymoron and a waste of time to pursue (salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff had mentioned in the keynote that ERP on demand was something that salesforce.com was pursuing!), and firmly believes that boot-strapping, as opposed to seeking investors, is the best way to go for new start-ups, especially with the advent of the open-source movement and web 2.0 tools.

All of that is good, but the reason why I was captivated by Moore was this piece of advice he gave: if you want to capture market share, he said, seek out the most disenfranchised department in a company and empower them. The on-demand service provider, he said, is almost uniquely equipped to fulfill such needs. This is something that rang very true with what I have seen here at Angel.com….

Another zinger he came up with was the advice that many service providers fail because their solutions were “too expensive to buy and too cheap to sell”. In other words, make sure that you target the right market with the right price, and implement the processes that can sustain your margins.

As for Moore’s verdict on where salesforce.com and the Appexchange stood as far as the chasm was concerned: well, salesforce.com has crossed it, looks like, but the Appexchange is still working on it. Let’s see where things stand next year….

Technorati Tags: angel.com, appexchange, geoffreymoore, dreamforce, salesforce.com, salesforcewatch

Two of my favorite people in the speech industry are Melissa Dougherty and Wally Brill (meet them). A brilliant usability expert and a raucously creative designer, they have put together a world-class team of people at Voice Partners.

Not so long ago they published an excellent two-part podcast titled “Design before you buy“. (If you use iTunes, you can watch their slides while they talk). If you are responsible for a project that may benefit from voice automation, this is a must-listen.

The main takeaway is that if you want to maximize the chances of success of your voice project, you want to start with the design, not the technology investment.

To me, even better than “Design before you buy” is “Don’t buy, just design”. Spend your money on guaranteeing an awesome user experience and where to go for technology will follow. Needless to say, on demand IVR helps make this a reality.

Technorati Tags: angel.com, ivr, melissadougherty, usability, voice interface, speech recognition, speechrec, voicepartners, vui, wallybrill

Over the past few weeks, I’ve given dozens of demos of our newly published Appexchange applications, SupportFone and SurveyByFone, and almost every time, the one thing that has impressed my audience the most is how painless it is to have an Angel.com IVR application interact with a Salesforce.com account.

In this and future posts, I will show you how you can make your Salesforce.com applications talk to Angel.com.   Or, if you are coming the other way, how you can make your Angel.com applications talk to Salesforce.com. 

And I will show you how you can do that without writing a single line of code!

 To illustrate, I will start by showing you how you can open cases over the phone and have them logged in real time to your Salesforce.com (more…)

If you’re tracking closely the Skype phenomenon, I think you’ll be interested to read this press release:

For example, business owners who rely on Skype for Internet calling can now add speech-enabled automation services to manage tasks such as customer service inquiries and frequently asked questions or add communications capabilities to their existing commerce websites. Angel.com’s Site Builder toolkit also allows Skype users to create new, revenue-generating services, such as help lines for professionals with expertise in a specific topic or industry.

So, in a nutshell,

• If you’re a business with a strong online presence, and you’d like your customers to contact you via Skype, without losing all the capabilities of phone automation, we have a solution for you
• If you’re an entrepreneur exploring new ways to make money by creating interactive voice content, we have a platform for you.

Now, at Angel.com we believe that the online business community has been clamoring for new ways to connect with their customers, for the unshackling of the chains around their necks that traditional telco have forced them to wear (NetCentrex, anyone?), and are ready for innovation through Voice Intelligence.

This partnership allows us to launch products that we could only dream of, and in the process, revolutionize business communication once again.

What can you expect? Watch closely as we unveil Skype-connected versions of Site Builder, Virtual Call Center and Virtual Receptionist over the next few months. Here are some Site Builder screenshots to whet your appetite:

Easy to Subscribe to Angel with Skype-centric plans

Easy to get new Phones from Skype and Easy to Manage your Skype Phones

Easy to call Voice Sites accessible from anywhere in the world!

The other stuff…. I cannot describe … but we’ll keep you posted!

Here is an eye-opening piece published in the January 20th, 2006, issue of CRN that bodes well for all you IT  solution providers out there thinking of using Angel.com for your clients’ IVR and automation needs. 

“The number of SMB accounts that have decided to outsource their entire IT operations to solution providers is climbing at a mind-boggling pace.”  — From Hoodwinked CEOs by Steven Burke

The article also reinforces the validity of the strategic emphasis Angel.com puts on developing tight partnerships with service providers and IT consulting firms. (more…)