There is an old Beatle’s song Help whose lyrics are emblematic of the times in which we live—“Help! I need somebody. Help! Not just anybody. Help! You know I need someone, HELP!”
With customer experience becoming a major competitive differentiator, getting help from the right person in a fast manner ease of contact in an omni-channel world of emerging importance. If you do not think so, just look at how the addition of the ‘Mayday’ help button on new Amazon Kindles has ignited sales.
At TMC’s recent ITEXPO East event in Miami, I had the chance to kick the tires of New York City-based real-time in-app communications provider CaféX and their Fusion Live Assist™ solution. Maybe the best way to sum up what they do and what I had an opportunity to experience is to say that help is on the way.
A finalist for this year’s Best of Enterprise Connect competition, Fusion Live Assist enables customers to interact with enterprise personnel using high-definition video, screen sharing, co-browsing and more, directly from company websites and mobile applications. In short, it gives end users the access they want to people who can solve their problems and contact center agents a valuable tool that augments existing capabilities and adds a lot more by leveraging the capabilities of WebRTC and B2B collaboration capabilities.
A screen shot illustrates the multiple-media value being provided.
Source: CaféX
Fusion Live Assist is driven by powerful developer toolkits and server components that embed existing enterprise communications within branded applications on smartphones, tablets, and desktops. As the screen shot shows, this allows contact center agents to engage customers with omni-channel experiences that are characterized by consistent, integrated, and personalized customer engagement across multiple interaction channels.
Kris Hopkins, senior vice president of product management and strategy, CaféX Communications, explains how the solution works. “With two lines of code, Fusion Live Assist transforms nearly any web or mobile app into a real-time communication portal. There is no need for users to leave the application, download a plugin or launch a separate communications client.”
The good news here for developers is that the solution is device agnostic and popular OS friendly. In other words, help no longer has to be propriety to a device type or OS.
CaféX Fusion Live Assist capabilities
As noted, thanks to the use of WebRTC technology Fusion Live Assist is a great example of why many consider WebRTC to be a game-changer. Solution highlights include:
- Users can contact enterprise agents via one-way or two-way high-definition video and voice with a single click from web and mobile applications
- Users can share application screens from their tablet, smartphone or browser and allow remote control by an expert
- Advisors can draw on users’ screens and push documents, files, videos, and other content
- Agents can generate a unique URL and send it to users to launch live assist sessions
- Users can request a callback, bypass IVR menus with context-based routing, view IVR menus visually and access other existing contact center features from mobile and web apps
- Two lines of code to implement Live Assist within iOS and Android mobile platforms
- Support for major browser vendors with no plugin required for Google Chrome and Mozilla FireFox
- Support for both VP8 and H.264 video codecs to minimize transcoding and ensure scalability
Dr. E. Brent Kelly, principal analyst and consultant, KelCor, amplified the value being provided and why such capabilities are the direction in which contact center interactions are going thanks to the ability to combined the power of WebRTC and mobility technologies. “CaféX has created a simple software development toolkit that allows programmers to add WebRTC-based voice and video to mobile or web apps —without plugins. Amazon opened the door to live mobile customer service with its ‘Mayday’ button last year, and CaféX is expanding this trend by providing a platform that can enable live assist capabilities for a wide array of applications and use cases in apps developed for Android, iOS, and soon Windows mobile devices as well as for the four popular browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. This kind of omni-channel customer engagement is changing the customer interaction landscape.”
For those planning on attending the Enterprise Connect show in Orlando, March 17 – 20, you can check out Fusion Live Assist in person. The company also has an interesting whitepaper that is instructive for anyone looking for more detail on the importance and value of WebRTC and how it is poised, as Dr. Kelly says, to change the customer interactions landscape. In fact, he could have added that WebRTC is a game changer not just for customer interactions but how all of us communicate in real-time in general.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
