[24]7, a provider of customer engagement solutions, is partnering with Amdocs, a provider of customer experience software for the telecommunications industry, to deliver intelligent, personalized customer support across all service channels, including chat, email, voice, web, and mobile.
The combined offering integrates Amdocs Customer Care, Omni-Channel Experience, and Digital Care and Commerce solutions with [24]7's Virtual Agent technology and [24]7 Speech, which allows consumers to handle some issues, like account balance and payment inquiries, through phone self-service.
"In the highly competitive telecom industry, the ability to deliver an effortless customer service experience is a key differentiator. Our partnership with Amdocs enables telecommunications companies to offer powerful self-service options to their customers, and if someone needs to transfer to a live agent, they can do so without losing context. This eliminates the need to repeat information, one of the biggest pain points in customer service," says Scott Horn, chief marketing officer at [24]7.
"To compete in this fast-moving world of intensifying digital lifestyle expectations, service providers need to keep consumers engaged with contextualized and personalized experiences across channels. This joint offering helps providers improve Net Promoter Scores (NPS), reduce costs, reduce average handle time (AHT), and increase revenue through upsell opportunities," said Chris Williams, head of global marketing at Amdocs, in a statement.
Through [24]7 Virtual Agents and [24]7 Speech, telecommunications companies' customers will be able to get information around the clock. Both applications use natural language technology that is enhanced by advanced deep neural networks that draw from more than 10 billion utterances to make speech recognition more accurate. The technology predicts customer intent and intelligently routes conversations to live agents as needed, while preserving context.
Horn calls this "intent-driven engagement," which he says uses machine learning and artificial intelligence "to predict what the customer is trying to do and make it easier for him to do it."
Beyond that, the systems "enable our business clients to leverage the data in their CRM systems to better engage with their customers," he adds.
Amdocs Customer Care solution delivers end-to-end, communications industry-specific customer management processes from initial customer contact, managing account and service profile, promotions and product offerings to onsite resolution. Amdocs Omni-Channel Experience enables service providers to deliver a personalized and consistent user experience across all applications and devices using modular widgets that can be created once and deployed across any channels. And Amdocs Digital Care and Commerce solution provides a multichannel commerce and a self-service platform via a single catalog-driven commerce engine supporting all business services from traditional to multiplay services, entertainment, and digital content.
The integration of [24]7's customer engagement technology with Amdocs' Digital Care and Commerce and Omni-Channel Experience solutions uses secure web services integration. All major web and voice browsers are supported within the integration.
For Horn, partnering with Amdocs for this solution "made a lot of sense."
"We have a lot of mutual customers," he explains. "When we talk to telcos, invariably Amdocs is already there."
Though the integration with Amdocs primarily covers the telecom industry, Horn sees similar opportunities in a lot of other industries. "There are lots of industry verticals where there are significant technology players with complementary systems that can easily integrate with ours," he says.