Edify's Automation Nation

If your customer service and sales personnel are inundated with massive amounts of Web, email, or phone queries on a daily basis, then automation may help. Edify Enterprise 8, unveiled this week and shipping in June, harps on three areas that Edify executives prefer to call the "Triple A Solution:" automate, assist, and analyze. Edify's Triple A Solution consists of "automated" cost cutting interactions, "assisted" interactions for a single customer view, and "analysis" tools match the appropriate service levels based on customer value and expectations. While automation technology is heavily ingrained in Edify's past solutions, assistance technology is something new for the company. "We have 2,100 customers using our automation software. That's been our heritage and our strength. We haven't provided assistance. To be successful, we needed to provide call center solutions," says Joseph Brown, president and chief executive of Edify. Recognizing the need for assisted service, Edify is currently offering chat and co-browsing solutions in its call center assistance software solution. Moving beyond merely storing transactional information about customers, the information obtained in the assisted interaction can also be logged. Enterprise 8 provides the ability to track interaction information as well through its customer context object (CCO). So organizations can log information obtained during the assistance process and make it available to service agents and sales people instantaneously. Like many other CRM vendors, Edify is not only looking to collect data, but analyze it as well. Executives at Edify claim automated analysis is more accurate than one-to-one interaction with a live person. "What we've learned over time is people are far more ready to tell you how they feel when they encounter the experience. Customers are far more likely to tell this to a computer than to a live person," Brown says. While competing CRM automation vendors offer Web, wireless, and email automation tools, Edify also offers voice automation tools. "If you expect the telephone to always be in the customers hands, then you have to design a CRM system utilizing the telephone. That's what we do," Brown says. To that end, Edify can automate phone calls within a company's sales and service organization with voice recognition software that Brown says is 99 percent accurate. Edify's Enterprise 8 solution includes voice security methods to recognize a person's unique voice intonations and use that as a security code for secure access to private information, such as banking information.