LiveVox Announces VoIP Agent@Ready

LiveVox, a provider of hosted-dialing solutions to the credit-and-collections industry, has released VoIP Agent@Ready, delivering sub-second call transfers not only between consumers and contact center agents, but from agent to agents as well. VoIP Agent@Ready is a cloud-based inbound/outbound contact solution and supports telephony infrastructure with "hunt" groups of greater precision.

John McNamara, chief marketing officer at LiveVox, says that traditional hunt groups are "sloppy," often functioning as a "broad swipe" at connecting a customer with the right agent. "When a call comes in," McNamara says, "the call will traditionally go to who has been idle the longest. That's a terrible way to figure out who is your best available agent."

VoIP Agent@Ready, McNamara says, delivers 100 percent skill-based routing. "You could create a Spanish hunt group," he says, by way of example, "but you could rank the very best Spanish speaker. When the call comes in, [VoIP Agent@Ready] looks for whoever is the best. It's going to look at all idle agents and then it will select the one with the highest proficiency rating." The particular skill can be completely customized, he adds: "It could be solving escrow problems, explaining why flights are delayed, anger mitigation pools, etc."

VoIP Agent@Ready also has an automatic call distributor, a considerably better method, according to McNamara, than the technology that many contact centers use to direct "whispers" to their agents from an automated voice that reads account numbers. Agents must then search CRM or open applications for the account, "improving the sales of Post-It Notes," McNamara jokes.

VoIP Agent@Ready's computer-telephony integration capabilities deliver customer information to agents via a "screen pop" before the customer's actual call is connected. McNamara describes the process as one that has more to do with "merging" calls and caller info than it does with "connecting" them, since the audio connection between agents and LiveVox is already in place. From the customer's perspective, an agent is on the line the instant the call begins.

LiveVox cites the most common problems with hosted broadcast providers as longer transfer time, increasing call abandon rates by 40 percent. Longer transfer times can also increase billable minutes by 20 percent or more. With VoIP Agent@Ready's multi-country, multisite platform, calls can be paced based on the agent's status — which is available at all times. 

"[Whisper-based technology] was the best technology that was out there four years ago. You know that you launched a call and you know that the call was connected and then it's dumped into the hunt group," McNamara says. "[However], you lose two critical elements: you lose the ability to steer that call to the best possible agent and you lose visibility to how that call was positioned."

[Editors' Note: Due to reporting and editing errors, LiveVox executive John McNamara's name was misspelled in early versions of this article. The current text reflects the correct spelling of McNamara's name. The editors regret the error.]

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