Workforce Engagement Management Archives - AiThority

Zendesk Signs Definitive Agreement To Acquire Klaus

AIT Staff Writer — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:38:58 +0000

Acquisition deepens company’s commitment to leading the future of AI-powered customer experience (CX) with new and transformative quality management capabilities

Zendesk announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Klaus, the industry leading AI-powered quality management platform. AI is driving a rapid increase in customer interactions and radically transforming the world of customer service. Customer service teams are being asked to increase their ROI by managing a rising volume of interactions while providing quality service, and increasing their organization’s efficiency in the process. With Klaus, Zendesk customers will be able to deliver consistent, high quality service across every channel and across both human and digital agents (bots) – all while unlocking the power of everyday customer interactions to increase loyalty.

“As AI drives up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered quality assurance (QA) can keep up as companies work to identify and fix gaps in their customer service operations,” said Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer, Zendesk. “The combination of Zendesk AI and Klaus’ capabilities will help businesses navigate greater complexity and volume and ensure both digital and human agents deliver highly personal and empathetic service.”

“Zendesk and Klaus share a vision of AI-led, personalized CX with businesses fully anticipating and acting on their customers’ needs,” said Martin Kõiva, CEO and founder, Klaus. “QA software plays a critical role in this, ensuring consistency, assessing both human and digital agent performance and providing actionable insights for strategic planning. As part of Zendesk, we will continue to build and deliver these crucial capabilities, but now at an even greater scale.”

With digital agents resolving more service inquiries without human interaction, having a QA solution that analyzes both human and digital agent performance is crucial to maintaining quality control and providing best-in-class customer service. While most QA software is capable of only scoring 1 to 2 percent of interactions and cannot recognize systemic trends, Klaus’ AI scores 100 percent of customer support interactions. It pinpoints conversations with positive or negative sentiment, identifies outliers, churn risk, escalations and follow-ups across all conversations – even those done by digital agents or outsourced teams. Klaus spots knowledge gaps and coaching opportunities that can be used to improve agent performance and productivity, all of which results in higher customer satisfaction.

WEM is a critical capability for customer service leaders. The acquisition of Klaus will be the latest addition to the company’s existing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions which includes Tymeshift, a modern workforce management tool built exclusively for Zendesk. The company acquired Tymeshift in June 2023. The acquisition of Klaus is anticipated to close in the first quarter of 2024 upon receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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Genesys Extends Beyond the Contact Center with New AI-Powered Employee Experience Solution

PR Newswire — Mon, 15 May 2023 16:01:34 +0000

Genesys, a global cloud leader in experience orchestration announced the Genesys Cloud EX solution, a new product to engage, motivate and empower employees within the contact center and beyond. This new standalone employee experience solution helps any business increase engagement, performance and trust with today’s digital workforce through capabilities including artificial intelligence (AI)-powered workforce forecasting and scheduling, gamification and performance management, coaching, and employee development.

Organizations increasingly recognize their employees are key to delivering great customer experiences. As businesses grapple with new remote and hybrid working models, talent shortages and the rise of the gig economy, many leaders say ensuring a positive employee experience is a No. 1 priority, according to “The State of Customer Experience” report from Genesys. Yet, legacy on-premises systems limit many businesses in managing and supporting their employees, with approximately only half (52%) of survey respondents reporting they use modern cloud-based workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions today.

With Genesys Cloud EX, organizations can drive engagement through a full breadth of employee experience features in a single user interface, including workforce management, quality management, performance management and more. The solution is built from the industry-leading AI foundation of workforce engagement management from Genesys, which currently holds 22 patents in areas like forecasting, model training, and contact center staffing, as well as over 100 pending patents in AI. Genesys has recently received the highest possible scores for the workforce optimization evaluation criteria in The Forrester Wave: Contact Center as a Service, Q1 2023 report. This includes earning a 5 out of 5 score for workforce management, quality management and performance management/gamification criteria.

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Genesys Cloud EX offers organizations added flexibility to modernize their employee experience with capabilities that they can use as a standalone solution, a first step to adopting the full Genesys Cloud CX suite or alongside their existing contact center infrastructure. To simplify the integration process between systems, Genesys and partners are offering pre-built connectors from the Genesys Engage solution, Avaya and Amazon Connect initially, with more to come. With capabilities to help organizations empower their workforce beyond the contact center, organizations can also use Genesys Cloud EX to support employees in the back office.

Etraveli Group, a worldwide online travel agency and leading global provider of flight technology, recently selected Genesys Cloud EX to manage and engage 300 employees in the back office in its claims, payouts and ticketing departments. The company previously consolidated its customer service agents on the Genesys Workforce Engagement Management solution, enabling it to identify issues and manage its teams more effectively.

Gurpreet Sawhney of Etraveli Group said, “As a long-time Genesys customer that’s driven improvements across both customer and employee experience, we saw an opportunity to utilize Genesys Cloud EX for our employees outside of the contact center. Genesys Cloud EX has provided a solution focused on employee experience to help us accomplish our objectives.”

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With Genesys Cloud EX, businesses can create happier, more engaged employees through:

Comprehensive quality management tools – powered by AI and automation – and personalized, performance-driven learning, help managers identify clear CX improvement goals and empower employees in real-time.
Speech and text analytics make it possible to more accurately understand customer requests to predict and suggest responses that better address inquiries, both via self-service and agent-assisted interactions.
AI-powered continuous forecasting and scheduling enables organizations to intelligently manage resources so the right employees are available to help customers at the right time; suggest what resources might be needed at any time; and avoid overstaffing or understaffing.
Performance management and gamification allow organizations to make work more purposeful and fun. Transparent and intuitive dashboards deliver employees with personalized, real-time feedback against business goals, empowering them to own their success. Leaderboards and competitions help cultivate team spirit.

“Improving the employee experience has become a business priority that spans people, process, technology and physical workplace considerations. Different business functions must work together to develop a unified strategy that transforms them into a more employee-centric and experience-focused organization. Solutions such as Genesys Cloud EX that help better integrate organizations at the people and workflow level will be a vital support for businesses looking to improve employee experience,” said Adam Holtby, principal analyst at Omdia.

“Employee experience is a business imperative because it often dictates customer experience. Many organizations are hamstrung by legacy investments that limit their ability to support the needs of today’s digital workforce,” said Olivier Jouve, chief product officer, Genesys. “Genesys Cloud EX offers companies a simplified path to the cloud and tools that help them manage and empower their employees wherever they are.”

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com

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Playvox Announces AutoQA to Transform Quality Assurance with the Power of AI

AIT News Desk — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 19:50:21 +0000

Playvox, the leading provider of workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions for the digital-first and CRM-centric contact center,announced AutoQA. The new AI-based SaaS product, which improves the efficiency of Quality Assurance (QA) efforts, is the result of Playvox’s acquisition of Prodsight and its integration into the award-winning Playvox Quality Management platform.

Playvox has an ambitious plan to roll out a comprehensive approach to quality automation that includes automatic topic identification, compliance score generation, and ultimately, direct automated scoring into a customer’s existing form.

Currently, many customer service and support organizations can only manually analyze a small percentage of customer interactions. While reviewing 2-5% of interactions may help organizations understand critical issues, it leaves many companies to question what they are missing and how they can drive more insight and efficiency from their quality management process. It also may cause agents unneeded stress about whether their managers have a limited view of their performance and miss the amazing work they’re doing for customers most of the time. AutoQA improves the efficiency and effectiveness of Quality Assurance efforts by extending visibility across 100% of support interactions.

Playvox will release AutoQA in phases, beginning with sentiment scoring across 100% of customer support interactions, conveniently accessible from within the Playvox Quality Management solution. AutoQA enables customer service agents to gain insight into all digital interactions, including email, chat, and social, with a customer sentiment score. AutoQA’s Sentiment Reports indicate a positive, neutral, or negative customer sentiment based on automated interaction analyses. With sentiment analysis as a proven predictive indicator of customer satisfaction, it provides additional information that many customer service teams do not have today. Companies may also use AutoQA to benchmark sentiment trends from interactions scored the traditional way.

“Almost two decades into the application of analytics to illuminate and automate the world of QA, confusion persists, and AI insights remain the exclusive possession of the largest few,” said Kristyn Emenecker, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Playvox. “Our commitment is to bring the powerful lens of AI to the hard-working QA analysts supporting customer service teams of all sizes. AutoQA is our latest example of an agent-empowering solution for delivering exceptional customer experiences. The out-of-the-box, AI-powered SaaS solution lets operations executives and quality managers spend less time figuring out where there might be quality problems and focus more resources on fixing issues.”

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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Alvaria Completes Acquisition of Cicero Inc. Intelligent Analytics Platform

AIT News Desk — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 10:43:48 +0000

Extending its Market Leadership with Activity Intelligence, Process Intelligence and Robotic Automation

Alvaria, the world leader in enterprise-scale customer experience and workforce engagement management, announced the completion of the acquisition of the Intelligent Analytics Platform from Cicero Inc. The talented Cicero team, focused on further advancing their solutions for the contact center industry, will join Alvaria in connection with the acquisition. The addition of this capability will accelerate how customers understand consumer and employee behavior to build better workflows with a simpler approach to complex problems with attended robotic process automation (RPA) and desktop analytics.

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“It is exciting to complete our first acquisition as Alvaria, adding a skilled team and technology to our already world-class suite of solutions”

“It is exciting to complete our first acquisition as Alvaria, adding a skilled team and technology to our already world-class suite of solutions,” Said Jeff Cotten, Alvaria Chief Executive Officer. “The Cicero platform will allow some of our largest customers to shave seconds off agent interactions resulting in millions of dollars of savings every year.”

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As a powerful extension of the Alvaria Automation and Analytics solutions, Alvaria will incorporate the Intelligent Analytics Platform to further enable organizations to reshape customer and employee experiences. Users will have the ability to analyze agent productivity, tools and application usage, performance and rankings. This information will allow for the automated delivery of relevant, just-in-time, information and action requests, all while maintaining compliance and updating customer records.

“We now have a robust RPA offering with both attended and unattended RPA in Alvaria Automate,” said David Funck, Alvaria Chief Technology Officer. “The solution utilizes data from the agent desktop for insights and optimizations. The events can also trigger attended RPA workflows, supporting automated responses and actions across a wide variety technologies and applications,” David continued. “This is an adaptable framework that is responsive to change – and to top it off, there is no coding required.”

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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Playvox Unveils Dynamic Capacity Planner At SWPP Annual Conference

AIT News Desk — Mon, 02 May 2022 16:07:17 +0000

Playvox, the leading CRM-connected omnichannel contact center provider of Workforce Engagement Management solutions, is launching its new Capacity Planner solution at the Society for Workforce Planning Professionals Annual Conference April 4-6 in Nashville, Tenn.

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The reimagined Capacity Planner moves long-term forecasting from a one-and-done annual burden, to a dynamic, integrated component of workforce management. This latest functionality seamlessly integrates with ongoing scheduling and supports visibility, long-term workforce budgeting and forecasting, and dynamic staff planning.

Hiring shortages and the current business environment present contact center leaders with unique challenges. With the Capacity Planner, which is part of the Playvox Workforce Management solution, contact center leaders can:

Create staffing scenarios to ensure they can meet demand and their budgets;
Access projections based on historical data, actual and projected demand, and forecasted market shifts;
Pinpoint contact center resource needs based on how shrinkage, leave and attrition projections will impact staffing and hiring; and
Determine how and when to scale workforce levels in order to mitigate risks, while also addressing recruitment bottlenecks, shrinkage and leave.

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At 8:45 a.m. CT on Wednesday, April 6, Kristyn Emenecker, Playvox’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, will lead the SWPP Annual Conference workshop, “And Now We R.O.C. – Radically Operationalized Capacity Planning.” The session will focus on how to define and implement dynamic capacity planning in modern real-time contact centers. Emenecker will also cover the top five ways capacity planning must change to effectively address daily scheduling needs.

“The Capacity Planner enables Playvox’s customers to successfully and nimbly navigate these times of economic disruption and technology transformation,” said Emenecker. “We’re proud to launch this reimagined product during the SWPP Annual Conference, and to give attendees the first look at this exciting new take on long-term planning for service operations.

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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Playvox Steps up Customer Service Efficiency for SoFi

AIT News Desk — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 15:21:23 +0000

Playvox, the leading provider of workforce engagement management solutions for the digital-first and CRM-centric contact center, announced that SoFi, a leading next-generation financial services platform, has partnered with Playvox to implement the Playvox Agent Optimization Suite.

SoFi is a member-centric, full suite of financial products enabling nearly three million members to manage their financial lives in one application. As one of the fastest growing fintech companies, quality assurance is key to its success and the satisfaction of its members, which SoFi Member Service Teams support through their contact center operations.

To continue meeting evolving member expectations, SoFi needed greater visibility into reporting and in-depth, robust analytics. The Playvox all-in-one agent optimization suite, including Quality, Learning, Performance, Voice of the Customer, Coaching, and Motivation, delivers meaningful analytics designed to help agents improve their work results and satisfaction.

According to Ian Motiee, Quality Assurance Analyst at SoFi, “One of our primary business goals is to make informed data-driven decisions that are clear and not only align with our customers’ financial goals but also match our leadership team needs.”

“Playvox Agent Optimization Suite’s fast time-to-value allows wonderful insight into performance that is actionable at different levels of the organization as we continue to grow and has allowed us to expand the reach and impact of measurable improvement.”

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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NICE Ranks Top of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in 2021 for Workforce Engagement Management

AIT News Desk — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 09:11:20 +0000

NICE was recognized as a leader in the report “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management” for the thirteenth consecutive year. The company is positioned higher on the axis of “Completeness of vision” and further ahead on the axis of “Ability to execute”, respectively.

The unified package with the best WEM solutions in the NICE cloud allows agents, even in remote activities, to serve customers in the best way. The company accesses the equipment to function digitally and flexibly. With the use of analytics, Artificial Intelligence and automation incorporated throughout the package, it allows better management of the relationship between customers, employees and technologies.

“2020 has redefined the fundamentals of customer service, and at the same time, organizations have experienced unprecedented volume growth and a dramatic shift in digital interactions. Succeed in this time of transformation, while managing a workforce remote, it can only be approached with the most extreme agility driven by Artificial Intelligence and automation, and with an infrastructure that enables rapid innovation, “explains Barry Cooper, President of NICE Workforce & Customer Experience Group. “Agile CXone WEM from NICE enables companies around the world to be present for their end customers and employees,

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Thoma Bravo Completes Acquisition of Calabrio

AIT News Desk — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 15:43:24 +0000

Thoma Bravo, a leading private equity investment firm focused on the software and technology-enabled services sectors, announced the completion of its acquisition of Calabrio, the customer experience intelligence company.

Founded in 2007, Calabrio provides products and services to help companies streamline and enhance customer service operations and workforce management through cloud-first software solutions. The company has experienced accelerated growth during the pandemic, and its Calabrio ONE software suite has enabled organizations to seamlessly shift to a work-from-home environment, protect their brand through customer-agent interactions, and continue on a path to further enhance their digital capabilities.

“It has never been as important for companies to understand the customer and employee experience through data. Calabrio is committed to delivering our analytics-driven Calabrio ONE suite in order to empower agents, elevate the role of the contact center and connect the enterprise,” said Tom Goodmanson, President and CEO of Calabrio. “I look forward to the software expertise and like-minded partnership of the Thoma Bravo team to help us take these ambitions to even greater heights.”

“Calabrio has successfully established itself at the forefront of the workforce engagement management industry by transitioning to the cloud, capitalizing on the wave of digital transformation and expanding its customer relationships,” said Seth Boro, a Managing Partner at Thoma Bravo. “We are excited to partner with Tom and his team in this new chapter for the company. Calabrio has an impressive growth story and we look forward to leveraging our operational capabilities and industry knowledge to supercharge Calabrio’s growth and market opportunity.”

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“We are thrilled to complete this transaction and begin working closely with the Calabrio team,” said Mike Hoffman, a Principal at Thoma Bravo. “Calabrio is well positioned to capture momentum in its space as more companies transition to cloud-first systems and adopt a hybrid approach to remote work.”

Thoma Bravo acquired Calabrio from KKR. Perella Weinberg Partners LP acted as financial advisor to Calabrio. Kirkland & Ellis, LLP served as legal counsel to Thoma Bravo. Golub Capital provided committed financing for the transaction.

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NICE Announces Agile WEM, Empowering Organizations to Sustain High Employee Engagement in the Work-from-Anywhere Reality

AIT News Desk — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 19:13:27 +0000

With remote work here to stay, NICE enables organizations to virtually keep employees under one roof and empower excellence anywhere

NICE announced Agile Workforce Engagement Management (WEM), a new offering that allows organizations to empower excellence anywhere among the workforce. Enabling employees to work from anywhere under one roof and driving up engagement, Agile WEM also empowers organizations to rapidly adapt and respond to business upheaval.

Despite the recent roll-out of vaccines in some parts of the world, it’s clear that a return to business as usual as we knew it will be slow if even a possibility. Remote work is therefore no longer an intermediate state but a long term one. Contact center teams have faced an upsurge in interaction volume over the past nine months coupled with the lack of immediate manager support and the absence of swivel chair assistance in this new reality. This has resulted in a decline in workforce engagement. Organizations must find new ways to motivate the workforce and drive up performance to ensure top quality service that’s conducive to customer loyalty. Organizations must also ensure they are equipped to face sudden business upheaval and mitigate surprises that could adversely impact continuity.

Agile WEM allows organizations to virtually connect the workforce under one roof irrespective of location, motivate and recognize as well as empower employees with the tools and data needed to deliver exceptional customer experiences. With Agile WEM, organizations are ready to rapidly adapt and respond to an ever-changing business environment. The solution enables organizations to:

Gain visibility – understand employee activities and behaviors based on desktop analytics and workforce management (WFM) data from schedules and activities. By leveraging business based KPIs, such as AHT, productivity and adherence, organizations can now drive team and employee focus. A holistic view of the blended office and workforce also enables better management of performance and skill gaps.
Ensure performance – personalize employee coaching to meet and exceed business goals by focusing on direct data that emphasizes knowledge and gaps. This enables supervisors and managers to guide the workforce in the right direction. Share dedicated employee dashboards that empower them with the insights to adjust their performance course.
Drive engagement – boost workforce commitment and engagement by creating activities that challenge, motivate and reward employees to achieve superior results and nurture teamwork. Reward success by applying points and badges and enable their use for additional time off or related prizes.

“While the world is beginning to step out of the crisis, a new state of business as usual is still undefined and continues to evolve,” said Barry Cooper, President, NICE Enterprise Group. “In the past nine months, organizations recognized the need for agility and that customer service has proven itself to be a lifeline for consumers. With our Agile WEM, organizations are prepared to motivate, guide and inspire employees as they deliver exceptional customer experiences while staying ready to face whatever comes next.”

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Calabrio ONE Now Available via Twilio Flex Ecosystem

AIT News Desk — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 09:44:55 +0000

Calabrio extends its Twilio partnership, making it effortless to deploy the leading workforce engagement management suite on Twilio Flex

Calabrio, the customer experience intelligence company, announced that contact centers using Twilio Flex and looking to add powerful workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities to their business, now have simplified access to Calabrio ONE through the Twilio Flex Ecosystem.

The cloud-to-cloud integration of Calabrio ONE and Twilio Flex, which was announced earlier this year, fills a gap for modern contact centers looking for a customizable, data-driven environment that puts the customer and agent experience at the forefront, whether they’re working from home or in the office.

As a part of the Twilio Flex Ecosystem, Calabrio is focused on helping businesses accelerate contact center transformation through a modern cloud WEM suite that enriches customer interactions—whether they happen via voice or other digital channels. The Twilio Flex Ecosystem allows businesses to quickly and easily extend the functionality of their contact center using pre-integrated add-ons from leading customer experience cloud-technology partners. Calabrio has partnered with Twilio to reduce costly integrations and enable fast deployment. Customers can feel secure in their purchase knowing that the solution has been rigorously pre-validated for seamless integration, and that the partnership of Calabrio and Twilio ensures superior end-to-end support.

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“Businesses need flexible technology solutions and streamlined purchasing experiences as we navigate through the new reality brought about by COVID-19,” said Ross Daniels, vice president of global partners for Calabrio. “Twilio Flex has rapidly become one of Calabrio’s top platforms, and we believe that every Twilio Flex opportunity is a Calabrio opportunity. Calabrio ONE’s availability via the Twilio Flex Ecosystem makes it easier for companies to add WEM functionality quickly, helping them operate efficiently and at scale.”

“Our customers rely on Twilio Flex to handle complex contact center workloads while still using the best-in-class Workforce Engagement Management and CRM solutions that they know and love,” said Elliot Goldwater, senior director of global business development at Twilio. “Calabrio ONE and Twilio Flex combined deliver that option and enable our customers to continue empowering a modern workforce in today’s constantly changing environment.”

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