CafeX Communications, last year's Best in Enterprise Connect winner for its Live Assist real-time customer engagement solution, has returned to Orlando this week with a new partner in tow -- Humanify, a provider of cloud-based customer experience technology.
Talk to the companies about the relationship, and you'll hear a lot of the same buzzwords others will be dropping all over the Enterprise Connect conference and exhibit hall this week and, no doubt, throughout the year -- customer engagement, customer experience, personalization, collaboration, analytics, real-time, WebRTC. In the case of CafeX and Humanify, the former focuses on customer engagement and WebRTC-based real-time communications, while the latter serves up an analytics-fueled personalized customer experience.
Through the partnership, CafeX and Humanify aim to give enterprises the ability to deliver a personalized customer experience across a range of channels, in real time. Using Humanify's analytics capabilities, enterprise customers will be able to match experts or resources to customers upon contact.
Brent Kelly, principal analyst at KelCor and co-moderator of today's WebRTC Conference-in-a-Conference (in Osceola 4, if you're on site and registered for the one-day event), spoke to the importance of the capability.
"Forward-looking companies are exploring the intersection between big data, real-time communications, and the contact center to provide better customer engagement, particularly from within mobile and Web applications," he said in a prepared statement. "Solutions like CafeX and Humanify that use cloud-based predictive analytics to match the right experts with the right customers and provide easy-to-use collaboration tools within apps will significantly intensify brand loyalty and an organization's long-term financial performance."
In a pre-show phone interview, Mike Betzer, CEO of Humanify, said, "At the highest level, we as consumers sit back and say, 'When I need to talk to big brands, it's terrible. I can't talk on my terms, they don't know me, they don't understand me." If you've been a bank customer for years, that's hard. If you've bought a ton of stuff from Best Buy over the years, that's hard, too. Humanify is about empowering people within those sorts of interactions, he added.
The partnership's central theme revolves around CafeX's and Humanify's belief that mobile and Web will be the face of customer engagement going forward, said Sajeel Hussain, CMO at CafeX.
Weight Watchers, a Humanify customer, exemplifies the trends bubbling up around digital engagement.
Weight Watchers has rejuvenated its Web presence around the idea that customers need to think not just about their bodies but about their brains, too. They need to live right and exercise right, Betzer described. Humanify helped develop a new experience to meet that mindset, a new real-time personalized coaching service delivered via SMS text chats, online and via a mobile app. Now Weight Watchers wants to embed additional channel support for greater interactivity between customers and coaches, he said. That's where CafeX fits in, with its ability to support real-time video chats and co-browsing, for example.
Partnership highlights include:
Personally, I love the idea of this one example Hussain provided: The ability to reach out to customer technical support when, say, installing or repairing a home appliance. You're down on the floor peering into your washing machine trying to figure out what's gone wrong. Of course your smartphone is in your pocket, so you fire up the manufacturer's mobile app, click to video, and show a technician exactly what you're seeing. Just imagine the grief that would eliminate in many a household.
"Companies can connect their customers to the right expert through a data-driven, personalized approach, and have the ability to have those customers escalate to live voice or video conversations within their apps," Hussain said. "That's giving them an integrated in-app experience across mobile and the Web and assisting them in their end-to-end journey. It's that omnichannel experience we talk about."
Oh, yes -- customer journey and omnichannel. Let's add those to the buzzwords we'll be listening for this week at Enterprise Connect!
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