Every smartphone user has become accustomed to a completely seamless and unified omni-channel experience when we use our apps and devices to connect socially. As Candace Sheitelman, Chief Marketing Officer at Edify Labs, remarked:
“If I was on the phone with you like this, but then I wanted to show you the shirt that I bought I’d just flip over to FaceTime and be on video with you. And then if you asked where I got it I’d text you the link… We have multichannel in our pockets, for everything — except the brands we do business with.”
And that gap was the reason for the launch of Edify Huddle: purpose-built to innately unify all internal and external business communications, the only platform that combines UC, CC and API functionality (to integrate with your CRM and other tools) in a single software solution. With machine learning built-in, the platform is designed to replicate that fluid consumer experience, down to the passing of context and history across each channel – just as your friend remembers on the call what you were texting about the other day, but we’re less accustomed to businesses being able to respond to us individually in this way.
Humans and machines augmenting one another
As Sheitelman continued, “the IVR can front-end the mundane and repetitive actions, taking account numbers and dealing with billing, then they can send the customer and all that information to a human — and they can do it when the customer asks for it. Or, because of natural language processing and intelligent sentiment, it can act when they hear the person is annoyed or angry.”
So the future at Edify is one where human agents work alongside automation, to bring the best response to the customer, when and where they want to receive it.
It’s definitely not one where the bots replace one-to-one interaction with real people any time soon.
“We believe that the best knowledge-base in any organisation is your entire employee pool”
“Once you have your contact centre technology and your UC in one place, your agents have access to all the knowledge across the organisation. They can bring in someone from ops or finance immediately, to resolve things quickly for the customer.”
Good CX is good news for everyone
It makes sense then that many of the companies adopting Edify are those with complex B2C transactions, such as pharmaceuticals and travel. But the diverse growth is supported by a freemium model which lets any forward-looking customer-facing business test the platform for free, then scale in a flexible and accessible way.
Committing to a blended future for customer service makes sense to Sheitelman, because, as she pointed out, we all experience the good and the bad: “We’re all customers, even if our jobs are marketers or developers… Everybody understands how annoying it is to sit on the phone and struggle to get a problem resolved. We know your customers have better things to do…”
“So we want to help you make your customers love you more”
