«
»

Voxeo’s IMified Launches Twitter Support to Help Companies Expand Customer Service

Companies Can Now Add Twitter as Another Channel in Their Customer Interaction Strategy

Boston, Mass (PRWEB) June 24, 2009 — At the Enterprise 2.0 conference today in Boston, Voxeo Corporation, a leading provider of premise and hosted Unified Communications and Unified Self-Service platforms, announced that its recently acquired IMified platform now supports direct inbound and outbound communication via Twitter. As companies expand their use of Twitter to interact with customers, applications can be created to help a company grow and scale their ability to respond on Twitter.

“Twitter has brought a direct, human element back into customer service and support,” said Dan York, Director of Conversations at Voxeo. “We use Twitter extensively to interact with our customers and developers and want to help companies grow their use of Twitter for customer interaction.”    

Twitter has brought a direct, human element back into customer service and support
We use Twitter extensively to interact with our customers and developers and want to help companies grow their use of Twitter for customer interaction.
Think of all the typical information you gather at the beginning of a customer service interaction like the user’s name, account details, or a description of the problem they are having
Twitter is simple and flexible
we’ve seen companies use it to gather research information, to spread marketing messages, to sell, to provide support, or even to collaborate with customers on product features.

As the volume of a company’s Twitter messages grows, an application on the IMified platform can scan incoming tweets and reply back as appropriate based on information in the message, speeding up the response time and allowing company staff to focus on more detailed inquiries. As another example, companies using Twitter as a customer service channel can create an application that will respond to Twitter inquiries late at night when customer service staff are not available. Similarly an application could scan messages and alert staff via IM or other channels when certain Twitter users contact the company or certain keywords appear in tweets.

“Think of all the typical information you gather at the beginning of a customer service interaction like the user’s name, account details, or a description of the problem they are having,” York continued. “Unlike phone-based IVR where a user has to work through menus, Twitter and other short-message communication services enable automated agents to supplement human support without putting a menu barrier in front of people. Automated agents can watch both public and private/direct Twitter messages and either respond with the appropriate information or make sure the appropriate person responds to the message.”

“Twitter is simple and flexible,” writes Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. in a recent report, “we’ve seen companies use it to gather research information, to spread marketing messages, to sell, to provide support, or even to collaborate with customers on product features.”1

The IMified platform also supports outbound notification via Twitter and can be linked to other business processes and systems. A library, for example, can receive a query from a user about a certain book. When the book becomes available, the application can send the user a Twitter direct message with this information. In a similar fashion, a company can create a loyalty program that alerts users when specific sales or events occur. In both cases, the application can send automated messages from the same Twitter account used by company staff so that replies can be seen and handled by staff.

Whether used for inbound or outbound communication, or a combination of both, developers on the IMified platform can create their application once and interact with customers across the leading IM platforms as well as Twitter. As the interactions occur, the IMified platform provides developers with real-time monitoring of the activity through a web interface.

Developers can sign up for free at http://www.imified.com/ and start creating applications that interact with Twitter right away. Code examples are available to get started. Developers can add Twitter connectivity to existing IMified IM bots by simply adding a Twitter username to the configuration of their IM bot. The IMified API supports both Twitter public replies and direct messages. The API also uses Twitter’s new more secure OAuth support so that developers do not need to share their Twitter username and password.

IMified, the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform, enables the delivery of automated Instant Messaging (IM) services–also known as IM agents or IM bots–that work with leading instant messaging platforms from AOL, Cisco/Jabber, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Voxeo acquired IMified as part of a strategy to enable Unified Self-Service and live Unified Communications applications that work across voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM, the mobile web and social messaging.

Voxeo can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/voxeo

1 Owyang, Jeremiah, et al. Using Twitter for Groundswell Objectives. Forrester Research, Inc., March 3, 2009.

About Voxeo
Voxeo makes Unified Communications and Self-Service applications easy to build and deploy. The company’s common sense approach isn’t rocket science: Create exceptionally great products. Make them exceedingly easy to try, buy and use. Deliver them with extreme support. This approach has made Voxeo the leading choice for enterprises and developers that prefer powerful simplicity where expensive complexity once reigned. More than 45,000 customers – including half of the Fortune 100 – use Voxeo’s SIP-powered products and services to deliver innovative IVR, VoIP, outbound notification, and unified communications solutions. All of Voxeo’s products and services are available for free development and trial use at www.voxeo.com/free.

Voxeo is an employee-owned company with headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne and London. Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Platform includes the worlds only 100% certified compliant VoiceXML browser. Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Hosting service is the largest in the world and the only one backed by a 100% uptime guarantee. For more information visit www.voxeo.com.

See Also:

[Via Computer]


This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.