Business cloud communications provider Vonage today introduced skills-based communications routing and real-time sentiment analysis, intelligent communications technologies that enable businesses to create their own routing plans and analytical views of agent and customer interactions for the contact center via building blocks.
Developed as a part of the Nexmo Partner Program for Vonage's API Platform, these new technologies are the first in a line of planned building blocks.
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 third-party developers' contact center solutions.
"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," said Omar Javaid, chief product officer at Vonage, in a statement. "Vonage is redefining 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 be initiated from Vonage, its technology partners, or the developer community.
Vonage's sentiment analysis building block can be added to any existing contact center solution to provide real-time analytics to agents and supervisors. With these capabilities, contact center managers can monitor interactions between customers and agents.
In addition to the Nexmo technology, Vonage is working with a growing network of integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) providers, including Microsoft, MuleSoft,Built.io, and Tray.io, and bot platform partners, including Google, Converse.ai, Aspect.ai, Exceed.ai, and Inference.
Through the Nexmo Partner Program, Vonage is empowering these partners to use its suite of APIs to build messaging and voice experiences for their customers within their own applications, integration projects, or complementary platforms. The Partner Program works directly with application, integration and technology partners that use Nexmo APIs or a combination of APIs and consultative services.
The Nexmo platform includes communications capabilities, such as voice, SMS, two-factor authentication, and text-to-speech.
"With the global reach and scale of the Vonage API Platform, coupled with strong partnerships, Vonage is reinventing how enterprises use communications to collaborate and engage with customers," said Tony Jamous, president of Nexmo, in a statement. "Vonage's offering is unique among competitors, as we are creating a completely open structure where we put our innovation and tools in the hands of our partner ecosystem to accelerate market adoption and drive business success."
Vonage has partnered with several iPaaS providers to bring its Nexmo APIs to their platform offerings. They include the following:
- MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform will leverage Nexmo's SMS API to build custom workflows to integrate real-time communication into business automation workflows, such as the ability to send order status notifications to customers via SMS from e-commerce platforms like Magento.
- Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, and Logic Apps: Via Nexmo, Microsoft's suite of workflow tools allows users to embed real-time communication and turn repetitive tasks into multi-step workflows. Examples include notifying sales representatives when new opportunities are created on Microsoft Dynamics or to issue alerts for negative social posts.
- Built.io enables businesses to connect to cloud-enabled and on-premises business applications for marketing, sales, customer service, customer engagement, and back-office automation, such as sending an automated SMS reply to a customer when a Zendesk ticket is created, or calling a customer using a TTS call when a ticket is closed.
- Tray.io is employing the Nexmo SMS API to integrate cloud-based collaboration tools directly into accounts, enabling expanded functionality such as SMS notifications and the ability to record SMS interactions. Tray.io is also embedding the SMS API into other CRM tools or business applications and the Nexmo Verify API to validate contacts within these databases.
Bot platform partners that have already employed the Nexmo API Platform to enable direct and real-time interaction with customers include the following:
- Dialogflow: Focused on building conversational workflows leveraging Dialogflow and connections to the full Google product portfolio, Nexmo has added a direct connection between its SMS API and Dialogflow.
- Chatbot provider Converse.ai integrates its graphical interface with Nexmo SMS and Voice channels, enabling developers to build features such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Facebook Workplace and Google G Suite administrators can leverage real-time communications to enhance business workflows for company-wide alerts and notifications, employee shift scheduling, and surveys, to name a few.
- Aspect Bot Framework embeds Nexmo SMS APIs to create a single, centralized chatbot application, integrated into contact center infrastructure, Exceed.ai enables sales teams to sell more by automating lead capturing and qualification. Exceed.ai uses Nexmo SMS API to send notifications to sales reps when potential leads are qualified and ready to speak to reps. The Nexmo API is also used to verify leads’ phone numbers, and the integration allows reps immediate response and action.
- Inference Solutions’ conversational customer engagement platform uses Nexmo SMS API to empower its virtual agents.
"We are thrilled to partner with these leading iPaaS providers and bot platforms to enable countless unique and vertical-specific use cases for enterprises to help them drive better customer engagement for deeper relationships and a better overall customer journey," Jamous said.