Skills-Based Routing & Real-Time Sentiment Analysis
Vonage Debuts New “Building Block” APIs to Enable Advanced Contact Center Capabilities
During the recent Enterprise Connect 2018 industry conference, Vonage CEO Alan Masarek noted that the future of business cloud communications lies in the development of ‘microservices’ - solutions that can be custom-built to provide unique capabilities for a business or enterprise. With an eye on that future, we recently introduced skills-based communications routing and real-time sentiment analysis - two intelligent communications technologies that enable businesses to create their own routing plans and analytical view of agent and customer interactions for the contact center via building blocks.
These new technologies were developed as a part of the Nexmo Partner Program for Vonage's API Platform, and represent the first in a line of planned building blocks that will enable greater flexibility and efficiency for businesses to create more meaningful customer relationships and better business outcomes. Skills-based routing and real-time sentiment analysis capabilities, paired with the Nexmo Voice API, can be used on their own, or to augment Vonage's or a third-party's contact center solution, allowing customer service representatives and agents to better engage with their customers in real-time.
Omar Javaid, Chief Product Officer for Vonage, said in the recent announcement, "Our new skills-based routing and real-time sentiment analysis offerings represent a brand new way for the industry to think about building an intelligent contact center — one that reflects the unique requirements of individual businesses." Our goal is to redefine the contact center industry by providing businesses with building blocks to implement intelligent routing technology and the flexibility to determine where and how that routing is set up to deliver better business outcomes to their own customers.
Skills-based communications routing, as a fully open source building block, can bring enhancements to contact center capabilities which are flexible and limitless, and can be initiated from Vonage, its technology partners or the developer community. They easily extend to support new capabilities to differentiate a contact center's ability to engage with customers in meaningful, customized ways. In addition, because there are no license fees associated with the building block, significant cost savings can accrue compared to traditional options.
Vonage's sentiment analysis building block can be added to any existing contact center solution in order to provide real-time analytics to agents and supervisors. With these capabilities, contact center managers can better monitor the interactions between customers and agents to ensure a smoother customer journey.
Through skills-based routing, the developer decides which agent(s) has the best skillset to field a call from a Spanish-speaking customer, or which agent(s) would be best suited to field a sensitive call to a customer to collect fees. With the Nexmo voice API, skills-based routing technology can also enlist real-time sentiment analysis capabilities via APIs to gauge the temperature of a customer interaction, pulling in a supervisor or escalating a customer issue if needed, in real-time, creating a smoother customer journey for deeper relationships and increased loyalty.
Offering skills-based routing and real-time sentiment analysis, two innovative, leading-edge technologies, as simple ‘building blocks’ allows our customers to build customized, intelligent contact center capabilities according to their analytics preferences and specifications, paving the way for the future of customer communications, today.
