No Jitter Roll: BlueJeans Basic Debuts while Sprinklr adds a host of new features

Welcome to this week's No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. In our pre-Enterprise Connect 2023 edition, Verizon launched BlueJeans Basic, a free version of its meeting and collaboration platform. Meanwhile, Sprinklr announced the inclusion of more than a hundred new features and AI-powered tools. Next week we’ll feature the major announcements coming out of Enterprise Connect 2023.

Verizon Targets Small Businesses, Home Users With Free Version of BlueJeans 

Verizon launched BlueJeans Basic, the free version of its subscription-based BlueJeans meeting and collaboration platform. BlueJeans Basic allows users to meet for as long as they want, one-on-one or in groups of up to 25 people.

BlueJeans Basic comes with integrated computer vision techniques, AI-provided virtual background experiences, on-the-fly lighting adjustments, and auto-camera framing to ensure each attendee can bring their best self to the meeting. BlueJeans will soon be rolling out the next-generation AV1 Codec to deliver 1080p video and beyond.  

According to Chris Lewter, VP and GM, BlueJeans by Verizon, said that BlueJeans Basic was launched, in part, to “better fit the needs of individuals and small businesses that may not require enterprise-level services.” 

The BlueJeans Basic desktop and mobile app versions include one-touch join via browser, as well as calendar integrations, breakout sessions, file sharing, group polling, and annotation for users.  It also comes with Dolby Voice audio, AES 256-bit encryption, a user waiting room, screen sharing controls, and the option to hard mute participants individually or upon entering the meeting.

Sprinklr Announces 120 New Customer Service and 25 New AI Innovations to Elevate Omnichannel Customer Service

Sprinklr Announces 120 New Customer Service and 25 New AI Innovations to Elevate Omnichannel Customer Service | Sprinklr

Sprinklr Service is an AI-powered Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform. In Release 18.2, Sprinklr includes new features and functionality which, according to Sprinklr CTO Pavitar Singh, empowers “customer service teams to seamlessly work across digital, social, and voice channels. Support from AI-self-service tools helps brands deliver faster resolution of customer queries at reduced cost.”

Some of the new features include:

• Predictive intelligence analyzes customer data and identifies patterns that can predict future behavior.
• AI-powered quality management provides real-time insights on agent performance and compliance for all customer conversations on all channels.
• Commerce solutions for WhatsApp which enable product purchases, interactions, and personalized recommendations and guidance when using the WhatsApp chatbot.
• Top contact driver, which automatically analyzes content from all customer voice interactions. This tool reveals insights around common issues and can provide indirect feedback, such as when customers mention related topics or issues that may not have been explicitly requested or addressed during the calls.
• Outbound voice which allows contact centers to use AI-powered predictive dialers and conversational IVR to increase customer connection rates and reduce inbound calls, resulting in increased conversions and efficiency.

Prodoscore Announces Workplace Productivity Feature Launch

Prodoscore Launches Remote Office Productivity Feature| PR 

The productivity monitoring solution provider debuted Workplace Productivity, which leverages machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing to log employee activity across cloud-based business applications, and then uses that data to measure an employee's productivity based on the service's productivity scores.

Prodoscore CEO, Sam Naficy, said “some roles and people are better suited to remote while others are more effective in an office. With our Workplace Productivity feature we no longer have to make assumptions – the data makes it really easy to pinpoint those trends.”

Infobip: Customers Want “Conversational Everything”

New research reveals the growing prevalence of “conversational everything” for customer communications | Business Wire

New research from the omnichannel communications company reveals the growing prevalence of “conversational everything” for customer communications. The data shows a 73% and 51% increase in WhatsApp Business Platform and Email interactions in 2022 compared to 2021, highlighting the ongoing critical nature of these channels. The term “conversational everything” refers to the use of conversational AI in various rich communication channels – SMS/MMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger, etc. 

Ivan Ostojić, Chief Business Officer at Infobip, said: “We expect to see conversational experiences continue to expand across sectors from ride sharing to healthcare and even the public sector as organizations adapt to conversational everything.”

This Week on No Jitter – TO DO

In case you missed it, here are our top stories for the week: 

Use Advanced Analytics to Get the Full Picture of Your CX Performance: CX leaders must invest in a customer insights and analytics program which they can leverage by correlating it with key internal metrics (employee performance, revenue, costs, etc.). Robin’s session on this topic at Enterprise Connect dives into much more detail.

Collaboration Security Challenges Are Growing: Security plans must cover threats across the present, and anticipated future, collaboration technology landscape. To learn more about UC and collaboration security, Join Irwin for his session at Enterprise Connect.

IT Leaders Are Struggling to Create Consistent User Experiences in Communications: For enterprises, success with converged communications requires a cloud that interoperates across different wired and wireless carriers. One of Zeus’s panels at Enterprise Connect dives into a related topic – how CPaaS is enabling applications and integrations.