(excerpt from CRM Magazine)
Customers can touch their way through mobile interactions
Uniphore is not a newcomer to the customer service arena. The 23-year-old company has a long history as a provider of Web, mobile, and self-service solutions, agent desktops, and contact center process optimization technology. However, Uniphore has made a name for itself in the past year as a pioneer in the development and advancement of visual IVR technology.
First introduced at the close of 2012, Uniphore Mobile Agent is a self-service product for smartphones and other mobile devices that visually maps out the steps of the customer service interaction. The company’s visual IVR also supports data entry and can proactively mine knowledge bases for information and retrieve or update customer information in real time. For calls that require agent assistance, Uniphore Mobile Agent provides a seamless transition to the voice channel. Once the call is connected to the agent, all of the steps already taken by the customer, as well as any data entered, are visible to the agent.
In April, Uniphore followed this release with Visual IVR Plus. Designed to use a company’s existing IVR scripts, Visual IVR Plus presents users with a graphical, menu-driven interface that enables them to simply touch their way through the IVR. “Navigating a traditional IVR is tedious and cumbersome, waiting to hear all of the options to make sure that you select the right one. Just as pushing buttons replaced the rotary dial, touching selections on a screen is replacing the push button,” said Guy Yair, co-CEO of Uniphore, in a statement at the time. “Your IVR should keep up with how your customers are using their communication devices, and Visual IVR Plus enables that to happen by allowing them to communicate with customer service in a modern, less frustrating fashion.”
Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, agrees. “Uniphore has done something smart here,” he says, calling the Visual IVR solution “a brilliant way of dealing with one of the most frustrating service problems that a company has–‘kludgy’ audio menus.”