Today Voxeo is acquiring IMified, a company which operates a hosted platform that provides its clients simplified ways to automated Instant Messaging services regardless of protocol or proprietary service provider. It’s all part of Voxeo’s efforts to support what it refers to as “Unified Self-Service” as part of a broad suite of Unified Communications services.

Automated Instant Messaging is proving to be a popular way to reach both mobile and deskbound clients. So called ‘IM-bots’ present both mobile and deskbound clients with access to real-time information from a variety of sources, including news headlines, emergency notification, package tracking and delivery status, as well as the evergreen applications of news headlines, sports scores and stock quotes.

In enterprise settings, the IM-bots are serving as virtual agents to support CRM, information entry and even auto attendant functions. During this time when the economic climate dictates increased cost control, companies of all sizes are finding that such automated services are able to perform such functions at a fraction of the cost of both live agents and IVR systems. More importantly, modern customer care applications already have a decidedly multi-channel flavor – including Video, contact center agents, radio, Web sites, IVRs (interactive voice response systems) and text messaging, as well as Instant Messaging.

The acquisition and integration of IMified into the Voxeo platform makes it even more cost effective to add Instant Messaging to the mix of channels for customer contact. As CEO Jonathan Taylor points out, companies that used to have development and support teams for each channel, can now consolidate their efforts into a single team which, in many cases, can develop a single, multichannel application.

Voxeo was impressed that IMified was able to build a roster of some 7,500 developers in just one-and-a-half years of operation. Its special sauce is its ability to offer ubiquitous reach for IM services regardless of protocol (be it SIP/SIMPLE or XMPP/Jabber) or service provider (including AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype or network operators). As Voxeo’s CEO Jonathan Taylor explained, IMified has done a considerable amount of heavy lifting by identifying and negotiating with the individuals within each service provider to secure the terms and conditions that will enable the service to operate reliably as it scales up. When it comes to unified and universal delivery of IM-based services, they’ve done what no single enterprise customer would easily be able to do.

IMified’s Instant Messaging services will be baked into all flavors of Voxeo’s service development and delivery platform including the tools-based, code based (voiceXML) and API-based (Tropo.com) clients, in both hosted and premises-based configurations. However, in all cases, the ubiquitous IM delivery will be offered on a hosted basis. This is in deference to the advantageous deals that IMified was able to negotiate from a multiplicity of service providers on behalf of their clients.

Opus Research expects the service to catch on relatively quickly, primarily for financial reasons. The system is able to perform basic customer triage – collecting customer identifiers, purpose of call and other basic information – before transferring to a live agent (at a lower cost than the same conversation through an IVR). What’s more, the IM-based approach is expected to have more appeal among the increasingly active 17-34 user demographic.

Challenges remain as developers tackle implementation issues. There is no doubt that enterprise customers will benefit from multichannel support. However, solutions providers will initially have to define the most efficient mechanisms for transferring information about each customer across channel. It’s a new, more robust version of CTI (computer-telephony integration). The good news is that it’s all doable and, in the case of Voxeo’s latest acquisition IMified, all the complication surrounding multiple standards and protocols for IM have been resolved (or at least they are not the enterprise customer’s problem).

Categories: Articles

Tags: Voxeo, Recombinant Telephony, Unified Communications, Instant Messaging