In September 2013 WebRTC specialist Thrupoint successfully spun out a software company called CaféX to bring a suite of real-time, multi-channel customer care resources to market. Today, the stand-alone company has made impressive strides in that direction. Its OEM relationship with Cisco has insured that the CaféX Fusion Live Assist has been incorporated in trials or live customer care offerings by 6 of the top 10 global financial institutions (branded as Cisco’s Mobile Advisor offering). CaféX Live Assist is also going to have high visibility at the Enterprise Connect Conference in Orlando where it is one of 6 finalists for the “Best of Enterprise Connect” Award.

Yet, from Opus Research’s point of view, the most noteworthy aspect of the company is that its products make it simple for a company to add real-time video to its customer care offering (delivering on WebRTC’s promise of initiating a live stream of audio or video from a Web browser without requiring a customer to download and install a client or plug in). The other is to make it possible to initiate such a stream while a customer is in the middle of using a mobile app.

The first capability is made possible by the aforementioned Live Assist platform. It enables two-way video communications between an agent and customer as well as co-browsing, screensharing and “annotation” (which means that the agent can write instructions or draw pointers on a customer’s screen. This video demo illustrates how the platform is designed to work for a financial services company targeting high net-worth investors.

Supporting a secure link from inside a mobile app to a company’s customer care resources is the role of CaféX In-App Communications. CaféX supplies enterprise or 3rd party developers with an SDK that includes a tool-kit that helps extend the Live Assist capabilities to an iOS- or Android-based tablet using just two lines of HTML, Javescript or Objective-C code. It is believed that CaféX In-App and Live Assist is the basis for the “Direct Connect to personalized servicing for Platinum and Centurion Consumer Card Members” mentioned in the app description in the iTunes store.

The third “pillar” of the CaféX offering is called Fusion Palettes. This is a set of middleware that serves as the connective tissue between many elements of existing customer care resources – such as existing IVR scripts – and figures out how to represent them as buttons in a mobile app. It also acts as an analytical engine that performs what CaféX calls “dynamic translation of contextual data” – which means it takes user generated data and metadata and uses it to support intelligent routing or generation of screen pops on agent desktops.

CaféX is plowing ahead to add a number of practical capabilities on top of clientless and plugin-less two-way streams. It has incorporated electronic signatures, as depicted in the video demo mentioned above. This is a capability that is relevant for other verticals such as healthcare, insurance and government applications. The company has been aggressively marketing to these verticals and has a relatively low cost (approximately $50,000) 90 day trial that enables companies to get acquainted with the platform and its capabilities.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Mobile + Location, Articles

Tags: mobile customer experience, WebRTC, omnichannel, Contact Centers