BEDFORD, Mass., July 25, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the Forrester Research, Inc., January 2012 report entitled 2012 Customer Experience Predictions, the current state of multi-channel communications is a disjointed collection of consumer touchpoints, systems and silos. Committed to arming businesses with more than a "duct tape and bubblegum" approach to unified cross-channel customer interactions, SoundBite Communications Inc. (Nasdaq:SDBT) announced significant enhancements to its SoundBite EngageTM and SoundBite InsightTM platforms that allow companies to optimize the customer experience, harnessing the power of the mobile device and consumer preferences.
SoundBite Engage, a cross-channel platform designed for ease of use, intelligently facilitates conversations and offers a seamless experience for the customer. While stand-alone multi-channel customer communications have been utilized for some time now, SoundBite Engage expands those capabilities, allowing organizations to elegantly preserve customer conversations across multiple touchpoints, easily moving between voice, email, web and text silos in real-time without losing the thread of the interaction. SoundBite Insight, an intelligent preference management platform, allows personalization for every interaction while keeping organizations in compliance through careful management of opt-in and carrier-supplied deactivation data.
"Finally, businesses are in a place where they can tailor interactions to each specific customer, and the customers in turn can state their exact preferences on how they interact with businesses. Based on our domain experience and working with some of the leading Fortune 500 organizations, we anticipated what was needed for the next generation of business to consumer conversations and seized the opportunity to optimize our platforms to meet that next wave," commented Jim Milton, president and CEO of SoundBite Communications. "SoundBite Engage and SoundBite Insight offer a complete end-to-end solution, allowing organizations to improve customer experience by personalizing interactions at every stage of the conversation, all via the ultimate convergent device- the mobile phone."
SoundBite Engage and SoundBite Insight improve engagement strategies in key areas of the consumer lifecycle.
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Collections: One of the world's largest Financial Services institutions sought to utilize the text channel as a way for customers to make self-service payments. It utilized SoundBite's unique cross-channel solution to gain opt-in via text and seamlessly transfer to a secure Automated Voice Message (AVM) to capture confidential payment information. Once customers are enrolled, payments can be made by simply texting "pay" and passing a verification event. Adding an additional self-service payment channel offers customers the further ability to customize their experience with an organization.
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Customer Care: Utilizing SoundBite's Agent Text Portal (ATP) and Interactive Mobile Messaging (IMM) in a customer care strategy would allow customers to interact with an automated script via their mobile phones, specifying their product model and issues through preset keywords via SMS. The script offers customers options to: link seamlessly to a video with instructions on how to fix their problem, have an agent call them, or interact with a live agent via text chat. When connecting to a live agent for text chat, a customer who has a previous interaction with an agent is automatically routed to that same agent. SoundBite Insight manages previous behavior and opt-in information, while SoundBite Engage's robust dialogue engine identifies the contact associated with the mobile originated message and manages the interactions.
- Marketing: A retailer choosing to promote a marketing program could capitalize on these new capabilities by advertising a short code and top-level keyword in their stores or via direct mail such as: send the keyword "reward" to 12345. When the consumer does this, the SoundBite Engage dialog engine and the client's script could then look up that customer in SoundBite Insight and respond with personalized information by leveraging attributes, preferences and previous behavior.
About SoundBite Communications
SoundBite Communications, a leading provider of cloud-based customer communications, enables organizations to build lifelong, profitable customer relationships across the full consumer lifecycle. It serves two global markets, the Hosted Contact Center and Mobile Marketing. Its solutions leverage the power of two robust platforms: SoundBite Engage, an interactive multi-channel communications platform providing integrated SMS, dialer, voice messaging, email and web communications; and SoundBite Insight, a preference management platform enabling intelligent, personalized communications. SoundBite powers nearly two billion customer interactions annually. Visit SoundBite.com for more information.
SoundBite is a registered service mark of SoundBite Communications, Inc.
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