June 23, 2015
InContact recently attended Call Center Week to discuss its new partnership with SmartAction, an AI-based IVR company, and how social media is beginning to make greater inroads into the contact center industry.
At the Las Vegas event, TMCnet spoke with Jennifer Waite, product marketing manager at inContact, which sells a comprehensive cloud-based workforce optimization suite for contact centers of all sizes. Waite said that eight out of the 10 requests for information she received from enterprises last month required a social component—and that involved not only listening capabilities but also the ability to respond on social media. She added that companies have long grappled with the question of whether the social channel belongs to the contact center organization or the marketing department. But, she noted, companies are now beginning to realize that they don’t have to assign social media to one department or the other; rather, both departments can be involved. In fact, some companies are already effectively handling social customer care, she said, citing the airline Delta as one example.
HelpSocial is inContact’s partner for social media. HelpSocial is a good choice for this, she said, given that it started out serving the contact center industry, so it understands the field. HelpSocial’s solution is API-driven, so it’s easy for companies like inContact to integrate with it.
For those unfamiliar with inContact, the company sells a WFO solution powered by Verint (News 
– Alert) that targets enterprise-level operations, while its Uptivity WFO solution is designed for small- to midsize contact centers. Individual WFO products within these suites include Audio and Screen Recording, Quality Management, Performance Management Scorecards, Desktop Analytics, and Workforce Management, in addition to inView Customer Dashboards, Customer Survey functions, and integrated e-learning and training tools. The company, which owns the competitive telephone company formerly known as UCN (News – Alert), can also provide connectivity for its customers.
As for inContact’s new partner, SmartAction, that company is a recent winner of the Speech Technology Excellence Awards, a program of CUSTOMER magazine and TMC (News – Alert), the parent company of TMCnet.
SmartAction offers a solution called Intelligent Voice Automation, which utilizes an AI engine capable of reasoning and learning from experience. It features a large vocabulary and a wide range of built-in skills and knowledge, can be easily trained with customer-specific information, dynamically adapts to the flow of conversation in real time, evaluates multiple hypotheses from the speech recognition engine and selects the most likely interpretation based on context, has short-term memory of the previous conversation flow, has long-term memory that recognizes callers and remembers facts from previous calls, and more.