After issuing “Mobile Customer Care: New Paradigms and Practices”, we’ve engaged in very interesting conversations with solutions providers in the mobile care space. Last week, we were briefed by VHT (the new brand Virtual Hold Technologies), which will be rolling out a new flagship platform, the Conversation Bridge. It is a platform whose components have been integrated into solutions that generate over 90 million call backs in recent years and helped caller avoid an estimated 2,000 years of time spent on hold since the company’s inception in 1995.

Over the years, VHT has offered four major solutions: Concierge – which informs callers of their expected wait time and lets them decide to hold or hang up and wait for a callback; Rendezvous – which enables the caller and company to coordinate and schedule a callback at a time that is convenient for the caller and feasible for the right agent; Rapport – which is an outbound, intelligent alert service that can support informative calls, reminders and updates.

The VHT platform has been integrated with large-scale implementations of call processing systems from Genesys, Avaya and Cisco and has been been a mainstay for financial services companies, healthcare providers, retailers, utilities and government agencies. However, last week’s briefing addressed a major repositioning as well as a rebranding. Noting that the company has supported multi-channel conversations for over eight years, with its WebConnect product, it is formally moving beyond virtual queuing of voice calls by packaging its platform as the VHT Conversation Bridge.

Acknowledging that “people just want to get things done,” VHT says it is concentrating on “completing the conversation” using the most appropriate channel at the time. Thus it can support a “callback on the Web” function for the screen-based generation.

In the mobile+”cloud” realm, there is a “mobile lane to the Conversation Bridge,” meaning that there are connectors (Web services interfaces) and SDKs to support iOS-based and Android devices. The company also offers tutorials for mobile developers to add the Conversation Bridge (displaying expected hold times and providing callback options to callers) with just “six lines of code” and minimal development time.

In addition to the premises-based solutions providers mentioned above, VHT has forged partnerships with a number of cloud-based, on-demand telecommunications services providers, including Verizon Business on its Next Generation Services Node (NGSN). We’ll be noting developments on the hosted front in future reports.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, CRM, self-service, Cloud-based services, Mobile Experience, Mobile care, Virtual Hold, VHT