One of the much-touted benefits of the cloud model is a leveling of the playing field. The latest example comes from CafeX Communications, which is bringing enterprise-like customer engagement options to small and medium-sized companies via a new cloud-based platform it calls Quisbee.
Quisbee is for that neighborhood cake shop or small law firm that has a website but not the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that comes part and parcel with a large enterprise's contact center operation. Customers or clients will have questions no matter the size of the company with which they're dealing, so why shouldn't any SMB be able to leverage a high-end engagement opportunity?
That's the rationale CafeX applied in creating Quisbee, which essentially provides the communications capabilities of the company's enterprise-scale, award-winning Live Assist real-time customer engagement application to smaller businesses via the cloud, says Sajeel Husain, CMO for CafeX. Quisbee enables one-click voice and video chat with a sales clerk, paralegal or whoever might be on hand to provide guidance. While in that session, as shown below, the business contact can facilitate co-browsing or take temporary control of the browsing, draw on a shared screen using a free-form annotation tool, push out catalogs or share other files with users on the Web or mobile endpoints, Hussain says.
Capabilities available from the Quisbee agent console
"The session is bidirectional -- there's no passing of the ball," he adds.
Getting started is easy, too -- so easy, Hussain says, that the 14-year-old son of a CafeX developer hooked up a club website with Quisbee in a half hour. "All you have to do is drop two lines of code into your website and you get all this stuff. Literally, kids can do this -- anybody can do this," he says. "It's low-touch, no-touch."
Companies interested in adding the live-assistance capability to their websites need to register at Quisbee.com to get an API key. They then add those two lines of code to their sites and the call the Quisbee library - both done via easy-to-follow directions found in this online quick start guide.
Behind the scenes, the Quisbee code reaches out to CafeX servers running in the Amazon cloud. CafeX leverages the WebRTC protocol in order to support the multiple channels of communication offered up through Quisbee, Hussain says.
Quisbee is available in a pay-as-you-go pricing model typical of cloud-based offerings. CafeX offers three monthly pricing options: $25 for 2,500 minutes (recommended for one to three users), $70 for 7,500 minutes (for four to eight users), and $130 for 15,000 minutes (nine to 12 users). CafeX will alert customers when they've hit the 80% mark, at which point they can add more minutes for the month or upgrade to a new plan, Hussain said.
"It's two lines of code, then they're off to the races."
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