By David Toliver on January 13th, 2012 | No Comments »
Angel announced today that it will focus on how retailers can create a better customer experience at the National Retail Federation BIG Show 2012. As more retailers communicate with their customer bases on the phone, on the Web and over social networks, Angel will demonstrate at booth #3022 how retailers can securely leverage each channel to create more personalized customer interactions.
“Good enough customer service just no longer cuts it for retailers,” said Don Keane, Vice President of Marketing at Angel. “Retailers are struggling to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market, all while trying to keep costs low. Creating a customer experience strategy that focuses on multiple channels is imperative to helping retailers customize each customer interaction and build stronger brand loyalty.”
Angel anticipates the following trends will be top priorities for retailers at NRF 2012:
- Analytics – As retailers look to enhance the customer experience while reducing costs, having on-demand analytics and background insight on past customer purchases and interactions can enable retailers to create a personalized customer interaction strategy.
- Location services – Emerging location-based services are giving retailers the ability to efficiently direct inbound calls based on location to the appropriate resource within the business as well as quickly help customers locate a retail store, ensuring the customer receives targeted services.
- Security – With retailers communicating with their customers on different channels, data and transaction security continues to remain a major focus and a key component to building trust and loyalty with the customer base.
Angel works with 40 retail companies, including 10 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, and will demonstrate how retailers can build enterprise-wide strategies around these trends and leverage cloud-based customer experience management tools to efficiently manage the entire life cycle of any customer interaction on the phone, regardless of the channel.
By David Toliver on November 29th, 2011 | No Comments »
Proof that Angel continues to excel in product innovation and customer satisfaction is in the… Awards! Angel has recently won three different awards: the Best in Biz Awards, the INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Awards and the Speech Technology Excellence Award. They illustrate Angel’s corporate success, product innovation, and commitment to improving the customer service.
Best in Biz Awards
The Best in Biz Awards recognize businesses, teams, executives, and products for their business success. Angel was chosen as the silver winner in the Best Overall Company of the Year category. The award commended Angel’s cloud-based innovation, an impressive customer track record, and a strong relationship with Salesforce. With five solutions on the AppExchange, Angel’s most recent Salesforce integration is Voice for Chatter, which allows you to update your Chatter feed with your voice. With this integration, businesses gain the opportunity to deepen relationships with employees and customers and create a positive and memorable experience within Salesforce.com’s enterprise social media platform, Chatter.
INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Award
This award is given to companies that have shown successful deployment of IP communications technology. Angel won Internet Telephony Excellence Award recognition for its Virtual Call Center technology, which greatly reduces capital expenditures associated with on-premise solutions while providing callers with more quality interactions with agents. This year’s release of our Mobile Virtual Call Center app on both iOS and Android helped strengthen Angel’s innovation to win in this category.
Speech Technology Excellence Award
Customer Interaction Solutions magazine acknowledges firms that have made impressive advances in speech technology to better serve their clients with their yearly Speech Technology Excellence Awards. Angel’s Mobile Virtual Call Center, which grants businesses full management of their call center through a mobile device, was commended for its extensive functionality and convenience.
These awards represent a trend of success within Angel, as our products have won both of the Excellence Awards for multiple years running. For more details on each award, read the official press release, or see more Angel awards on our website.
By David Toliver on October 28th, 2011 | No Comments »
Common consumer perception when calling a large company and being met with an IVR’s automated menu is that the company puts that IVR in place to do nothing more than keep their costs down and keep callers from reaching their expensive live agents. Where’s the balance between giving callers what they want, and at the same time reducing costs and increasing the ROI for the business?
That’s exactly the question that global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca sought to answer when they began consolidating the customer experiences of all their brands. While AstraZeneca strategically made an early move to cloud-based IVR technologies years ago, they weren’t realizing the full benefit of having a holistic view of multiple programs across their brands—instead, they were using multiple, disparate systems.
A couple of years ago, they decided to make a transformative move in the pharmaceutical industry and created a team devoted to customer experience that worked across brands to create a consistent and effective experience for all of their consumers. But they weren’t just looking for better technology and a positive ROI; AstraZeneca is deeply involved with their consumers and wanted to make sure the changes they were going to make did not negatively affect their brand perception in the marketplace. They were looking for a true “partner,” not just a vendor, to help them along this path.
Here are just some of the steps they took—ones you can also take—to bring all systems under one umbrella with the goal of increasing both ROI and customer satisfaction:
- Form the right team: Bring together all of the stakeholders and decision makers across departments and across brands. Then choose a select few who will represent the voice of the company when it comes to the customer experience. Involving too many people (which is easy to do in pharma) can instigate things getting out of hand and can lead you right back to a messy customer experience, as everyone wants to “just throw one more thing in.”
- Scrap your old stuff: And your old mindset. The concoction of systems you have in place is myriad of brand colors, which has likely been tie-dyed over the years as brand managers and regulatory bodies have simply “added” and “changed” stuff without taking an overarching look at how each change affects the phone experience. Not to mention, your company and your customers have changed over the years. Now is a great time to start from scratch and rethink your approach. Click here to read more »
By David Toliver on October 5th, 2011 | No Comments »
We’re proud to announce that our cloud-based Customer Experience Platform, including our interactive voice response (IVR) technology, has been approved and certified as Level 1 Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant.
We have been Level 2 for a couple of years, and in an effort to enhance the security of the customer experience, we have upgraded to the highest level of compliance. Dave Rennyson, President of Angel, stated that the security of sensitive information is imperative for large enterprises such as financial institutions and retailers.“With this level of assurance, our expanding customer base will not only benefit from a safe and reliable transmission environment, but will also be able to reduce applicable security assessment costs.”
What is the PCI Data Security Standard?
The PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) is an information security standard required for organizations that transmit credit card data or process credit card payments. It’s designed to prevent credit card fraud through increased controls around sensitive data. In order to be PCI DSS certified, organizations must build and maintain a secure network and maintain a vulnerability management program. This certification also requires that the organization regularly test and monitor networks and uphold an information security policy, in addition to protecting cardholder data.
We upgraded to Level 1 so that our customers could be even more confident that they are working in a secure environment while transmitting credit card information through the Angel platform.
Learn more about our achievement here and share your thoughts about it in the comments.
By David Toliver on August 9th, 2011 | No Comments »
Businesses today have social, mobile and analytic needs attached to their voice requirements—needs that hardware simply cannot meet due to long deployment cycles, an inability to make changes in real time and an inherent lack of flexibility. Enterprises need to put the caller first, every time, and hardware cannot effectively support that mission.
“Hardware simply doesn’t move at the speed of business,” said Don Keane, vice president of marketing and business development for Angel, in a keynote presentation at SpeechTEK yesterday. “Enterprises need to be able to execute proactive and reactive changes in real-time to accommodate ever-changing customer demands, maximize revenue and achieve brand loyalty—and hardware doesn’t offer that level of control or agility. Businesses must turn to the cloud to make the most of the voice channel, or risk lost opportunity every time the phone rings.”
While hardware has long been the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) industry standard, the advent of the cloud has signaled a death knell for hardware products. A smart cloud strategy can help alleviate hardware CAPEX and maintenance costs, while providing on-demand service and improving the customer experience. Conversely, hardware expenses stack up, its limitations costing enterprises both monetary and brand value. Ultimately, the cloud is an asset to the bottom line in a way that hardware never will be again.
“Advertising, marketing and customer care are often seen as the voice of the company,” said Keane. “In fact, the concept of a company voice is literal—it’s the experience that enterprises provide when a customer picks up the phone. If you trust that customer interaction to outdated technology, you risk providing an outdated experience.”
For more information on Angel’s viewpoint on hardware vs. cloud, check out our webinar, “Join the Crowd Moving to the Cloud,” or come see us at booth #132 at the SpeechTEK conference in New York this week.
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