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An Introduction to Selective Forwarding Units

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An Introduction to Selective Forwarding Units

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For many consumers, personalized customer service is key to good customer experiences (CX). According to a 2020 survey by Gladly, close to two-thirds of respondents said that "lack of personalization makes [them] feel like a ticket number." Businesses wishing to meet and exceed customer expectations need to make personalized service a top priority. But personalization goes beyond making movie recommendations or using a customer's name in an email subject line. When it comes to personalized service, it's paramount that you deliver relevant, valuable, and speedy support to promote positive customer experiences. In this article, we'll break down what personalized service means, why it's so important to CX, and how you can deliver personalization service to your customers.

Voice bots are AI-powered software that can understand natural language (NLU) and synthesize speech in order to converse with people. Voice bots can run automated call campaigns for various purposes, put data into your CRM and route calls to the appropriate agents.

Any contact center manager considering a new cloud communications solution needs to do their "due diligence" before choosing a provider, including those in small to medium enterprises. The stakes are high for SMEs because your needs are unique and there are significant differences in the available providers. Your decision not only affects your organization's budget, but also its business processes, customer experiences, and agent work environment.

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An Introduction to Selective Forwarding Units | Voximplant.com

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Adding peer-to-peer communications to an application is relatively straight-forward. Developers can leverage WebRTC APIs or a CPaaS service to quickly add real time voice and video to their web or mobile app. But, what if you want to hold a meeting with more than two people?

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How to Evaluate VoIP Providers Based on Low Latency

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How to Evaluate VoIP Providers Based on Low Latency

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Striving to offer the best service possible, contact centers are usually very quick to adopt new technologies and try out innovative solutions. Successful implementation of speech technologies can create a great competitive advantage for a company.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are meant to make customer calls more efficient-but sometimes they get in the way.

Voicebots can lift the load off human operators for any business. In these six sectors, they are a must if you want to trump your competition.

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How to Evaluate VoIP Providers Based on Low Latency | Voximplant.com

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Striving to offer the best service possible, contact centers are usually very quick to adopt new technologies and try out innovative solutions. Successful implementation of speech technologies can create a great competitive advantage for a company. Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are meant to make customer calls more efficient-but sometimes they get in the way.

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What Are Voice Bots And How They Can Help You

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What Are Voice Bots And How They Can Help You

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It's time for you to meet your most effective employee...
Nowadays, the key to improving customer service is automating your communications. It allows for freeing up employees' time, creating great self-service options, increasing customer satisfaction and making your contact center more productive.

More and more companies are realizing the importance of automation and are investing in technologies such as AI, chatbots, voicebots and others. In order to keep up with competitors on any market, a modern business should not lag behind.

"About 75% of companies plan to invest in automation technologies such as AI and process automation in the next few years. AI, chatbots, voicebots and automated self-service technologies free up call center employees from routine tier-1 support requests and repetitive tasks, so they can focus on more complex issues." (Source: Deloitte)

Voice bots, being among the most popular automation solutions, are quickly becoming a must-have for any call center. And there are many reasons for that.

What is a Voice Bot

Voice bots are AI-powered software that can understand natural language (NLU) and synthesize speech in order to converse with people. Voice bots can run automated call campaigns for various purposes, put data into your CRM and route calls to the appropriate agents. To put it simply, they are machines that can converse like people, and they can perform their tasks in very quick and effective ways. They don't make mistakes and they don't need time to rest, like live agents.

For your business, such bots are a scalable way to interact with customers and speed up the service. When implemented correctly and appropriately, they can easily outperform a large group of skilled agents.

The AI technology helps voicebots to identify the key markers in human speech and conclude the best response to a dialogue. The text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT) engines quickly convert text into audio and vice-versa (all while your customer is speaking), so you can be sure there won't be any lags, and the dialogue will feel human-like.

Voicebots are also sometimes referred to as voice assistants. However, they are not the same, because voice assistants are usually integrated into customers' devices (for example, Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa can be called voice assistants, and Apple's iPhone can be called a voice-controlled device).

How Does a Voice Bot Work?

All voice interfaces use Natural Language Processing (or NLP) to interpret words. Sometimes it's also referred to as Speech-to-Text, NLU (Natural Language Understanding) or simply transcription systems. You are definitely familiar with such systems if you've ever used virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa. The technology is also implemented in automated subtitling, smart homes, and in-car systems.

When it comes to giving replies, voice bots can either use pre-recorded audio files or the Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology. It is a computer-generated simulation of human speech using deep learning methods. It's commonly used by developers that build voice applications such as IVRs (Interactive Voice Response). This technology is also referred to as speech synthesis.Instead of playing pre-recorded files, TTS automatically generates a human voice from raw text.

Voice Bot Benefits

Perfect for a large customer base

When you have a lot of customers, running massive call campaigns can become very time-consuming and increase your employees' workload significantly. Voice bots have become the perfect solution. Their capabilities and productivity levels are unmatched, when it comes to such tasks as:

Outbound call campaigns of any scale

Surveys for service control

Intelligent inbound call routing (with IVR)

Automated verification and confirmation operations

Informing customers about special offers

Reminding customers of visits and special events

If your contact center processes large numbers of incoming requests, voice bots are crucial for fast customer service. They significantly reduce waiting time in the queue by processing simple requests and routing the complex ones to relevant departments. If you often need to reach out to large numbers of customers, voice bots also create great opportunities for delivering information to large groups of people in short periods of time.

Accessible at any time

Unlike live agents, voicebots are active and ready to help 24/7, which means customers can get information and resolve their issues whenever they need it most. Voicebots allow them to avoid having to wait on the line to speak with an agent. Also, it means customers don't have to call in only during call center working hours. Bot-driven interactions are immediate and can improve the overall customer experience dramatically.

Voice communication is preferable for many customers

To many people, making a call is still the most convenient and quick way to interact with a brand or resolve an issue. Therefore, a voicebot becomes an important part of customer experience for such people.

A wide variety of integrations

Another great advantage voicebots have is that they can be easily and conveniently integrated with a wide range of customer service solutions, like a CRM or a knowledge base. It makes self-service options quite advanced and gives voicebots even more capabilities.

Voice bots save time and money

The bots require minimal coaching, thereby reducing the time lag between the setup and productivity boost (compared to humans agents). Besides, workforce cost gets significantly reduced. A voicebot can easily take over the repetitive tasks most agents have to deal with, drastically reducing the workload and eliminating the need for extra staff.

How to create a Voice Bot

Now that you've decided to improve customer service with a voicebot, you need to think about the requirements of your business. Each voicebot has its own level of complexity and takes a different amount of time to be created. Thankfully, nowadays there are many voicebot development platforms that make it much easier to create and launch a voicebot. However, before you create tasks for your developers, you should have a clear understanding of your business' needs and potential use cases. Based on them, it will be easy to determine what features, flows and personas your bot should have.

Features to consider:

1. The ability to pause and listen: Have you ever been annoyed by a long IVR monologue? If you have, then you understand how important it is that your bot is able to pause when a customer starts talking. For example, if your client says "no, I'm not interested" or "I'd like to talk to an agent right now", or "sorry, could you repeat that", your bot should be able to pause, listen and reply accordingly.

2. Quick speech recognition: Speed is essential to a smooth and pleasurable experience. You voice bot should be able to interpret at the same rate at which your customer speaks. It will ensure that conversations feel human-like.

3. Personalization (integrations with other software): Your caller should not have to repeat themselves. Integrations with your CRM and other support desk software should ensure that your bot greets caller by name, knows the history of interactions and can estimate the most likely reason for calling based on this history. It will allow the bot to personalize suggestions based on customer data.

4. Smart call routing: Once the customer has briefly explained the reason for calling, your bot should be able to route the request to the appropriate agent, based on their status/skills/language and other criteria. It will allow your support team to resolve issues faster. Besides, you should define user-oriented fallback rules, so that customers can start talking to a live agent at any stage of interaction. For example, if your bot can't understand the issue within two questions, you should revert to a live agent on priority.

5. Continuous learning: An AI-powered bot never stops learning. By analyzing previous customer interactions and their results, It continuously improves its accuracy. Chatbots that aren't powered by artificial intelligence essentially deliver a one-size-fits-all experience to all of the users they assist.

Conclusion

To sum it up, voicebots are a highly effective addition to a modern customer service team. Companies all over the world are quickly adopting voicebots and investing in more automation technologies powered by AI. A business that aims to provide excellent customer service, reduce costs and increase efficiency, should definitely consider developing a voicebot.
Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. We'll be glad to help you with creating your first voice bot and getting the most out of it!
Sign Up for a free Voximplant developer account or talk to our experts

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What Are Voice Bots And How They Can Help You | Voximplant.com

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Voice bots are AI-powered software that can understand natural language (NLU) and synthesize speech in order to converse with people. Voice bots can run automated call campaigns for various purposes, put data into your CRM and route calls to the appropriate agents.

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Any contact center manager considering a new cloud communications solution needs to do their "due diligence" before choosing a provider, including those in small to medium enterprises. The stakes are high for SMEs because your needs are unique and there are significant differences in the available providers. Your decision not only affects your organization's budget, but also its business processes, customer experiences, and agent work environment.

For many consumers, personalized customer service is key to good customer experiences (CX). According to a 2020 survey by Gladly, close to two-thirds of respondents said that "lack of personalization makes [them] feel like a ticket number." Businesses wishing to meet and exceed customer expectations need to make personalized service a top priority. But personalization goes beyond making movie recommendations or using a customer's name in an email subject line. When it comes to personalized service, it's paramount that you deliver relevant, valuable, and speedy support to promote positive customer experiences. In this article, we'll break down what personalized service means, why it's so important to CX, and how you can deliver personalization service to your customers.

VoIP providers minimize latency by supporting point-to-point SIP calls, operating a global POP network and maintaining modern codecs. Dip into our guide and choose your VoIP provider wisely.

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What is a No-code Contact Center? | Voximplant.com

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If you're involved in evaluating cloud contact center services, you've likely recognized two distinct categories and a big difference in the amount of technical expertise required to implement them. You're attracted to the ease of use offered by contact center as service (CCaaS) offerings, but their fixed functionality doesn't fit your business needs.

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Speech Technologies For Your Business – The Future of CX

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Speech Technologies For Your Business – The Future of CX

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If you're involved in evaluating cloud contact center services, you've likely recognized two distinct categories and a big difference in the amount of technical expertise required to implement them. You're attracted to the ease of use offered by contact center as service (CCaaS) offerings, but their fixed functionality doesn't fit your business needs. In contrast, a cloud contact center built on a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) offering provides unlimited flexibility, but requires expensive software development resources to build a complete solution.

Growing a business involves lots of moving parts, but no matter how large your customer base gets, customer experience (CX) should hold a top spot among your business responsibilities as your company grows.

A couple weeks ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage in its US-EAST-1 region. As so many services rely on AWS, this outage had a broader impact, causing outages and various issues with Amazon's own Ring services, online retailers, and even the New York City MTA. In addition, a couple major Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers also reported issues (Voximplant was not impacted), potentially impacting the communications of many of their customers. With this in mind, now is a good time to look at how CPaaS offers leverage public cloud infrastructure and review the factors involved in providing reliable, high quality communications services. In this post we will review the public cloud infrastructure used by several major CPaaS vendors and discuss the implications of their choices.

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Speech Technologies For Your Business - The Future of CX | Voximplant.com

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If you're involved in evaluating cloud contact center services, you've likely recognized two distinct categories and a big difference in the amount of technical expertise required to implement them. You're attracted to the ease of use offered by contact center as service (CCaaS) offerings, but their fixed functionality doesn't fit your business needs.

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5 Tactics to Strengthen Your Contact Center Operations with Technology

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5 Tactics to Strengthen Your Contact Center Operations with Technology

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In our fast-paced, digitally focused world, customers want personalized service at lightning speed. A Hubspot survey of 1,000 customers found that 90% of people expect a response from a live customer service agent in ten minutes or less.

Because expectations are so high, the pressure is on for customer service agents to consistently provide quick, high-quality customer experiences. Offering an elevated level of service with such a fast turnaround is next to impossible with manual support alone. And even if you have some digital tools in your tech stack, traditional contact center technology can fall short when it comes to efficiency. That's why choosing no-fuss technology that automates your contact center's routine operations is essential for making tasks more manageable for your agents.

Running a smooth operation at your contact center is crucial for both your agents' work experience and the customer experience (CX) they deliver.

Let's dig into five tactics for improved contact center operations!

1. Make the move to the cloud

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many business leaders weren't convinced that remote work was a great option for their teams. Some business executives felt as though their companies didn't have the necessary tools to adequately support a remote workforce. And fears of reductions in remote workers' productivity prevented many companies from adopting work from home models. 2020 put those fears to the test.

Due to the pandemic, physical contact centers abruptly halted on-premise operations for the safety of their agents. CX business leaders had no choice but to go remote and learn how to deal with workforce management virtually. And with little time to figure out remote training, some customer support teams may have had a tough time adjusting to the new work-from-home setup, leaving agents unprepared to do their jobs effectively.

If you're worried about how a fully distributed workforce will affect your contact center performance-don't. Offering a great customer experience is possible with work-from-home agents.

Cloud contact center technology like Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) lets you move your team members from a physical location and give them everything they need to remotely support your customers.

You can hire contact center agents in multiple time zones, allowing you to provide 24/7 customer support coverage to customers worldwide.

You'll likely see significant cost savings as you're no longer paying for expenses associated with a physical location, like rent, utilities, and on-premise hardware.

You'll have happier agents. A survey of 1,200 U.S. workers found that employees are 22% happier working from home full-time than their in-office counterparts.

There are quite a few CPaaS options available for CX leaders today, but all cloud-based contact center technology isn't the same. As you look for the CPaaS that's best for your company, it's essential to consider your contact center's particular needs. Are your agents working with international customers who speak different languages? Maybe your agents need a way to streamline multichannel customer communications. Explore the features of each CPaaS, and select a solution that gives you the flexibility to simplify and automate your agents' workflows.

2. Embrace no-code solutions

Because today's customers expect a fast resolution of their issues, your agents must be ready to provide an excellent CX without delay. To minimize setbacks, opt for a no-code contact center solution. Using no-code development tools, you can set up and launch a cloud contact center in minutes without programming a single line of code.

Some cloud center technology software requires programming expertise to implement specific automated features, like chatbots, digital self-service menus, automatic call distributors (ACD), and so on. In most cases, a contact center leader must hire a developer to build these custom features. This custom software development can cost anywhere from $75 to $175 per hour, depending on your company's size and project.

Choosing a no-code CPaaS saves you time and money because you can go the DIY route with easy-to-use building blocks. Our no-code platform Voximplant Kit offers an intuitive drag-and-drop visual editor that anyone can use to customize their cloud contact center. You'll have your agents set up and ready to go in no time.

Voximplant Kit's visual flow builder lets you set up outbound call campaigns and categorize your call scripts by department or author.

You can also save time by tapping into our template directory when you want to process incoming calls or launch a call campaign. In the Template gallery, you can select from various outbound call scenarios, like "discount offer", "debt notice", or "invitation to an event". Editing, duplicating, and maintaining our fully functional templates are a breeze in Voximplant Kit.

A view of Voximplant Kit's outbound call scenario templates.

The flexibility of a no-code cloud contact center allows you to launch efficient and customized workflows. Seamless communication flows allow your agents to deliver a first-class CX during every customer interaction.

3. Organize all communications with an omnichannel interface

Customers connect with companies through many different communication channels these days. But without a way to organize customer data across these digital channels, agents' communication workflows can get messy. When that happens, agent frustration goes up, while agent satisfaction crashes down.

That's why choosing a CPaaS that offers an omnichannel customer experience is vital. An omnichannel cloud contact center puts all of a customer's communication history in one place on the agent dashboard. This interface gives agents a fuller, more detailed view of the customer journey and keeps agents from wasting time piecing together customer conversations across channels.

Voximplant Kit offers the comprehensive omnichannel customer view your agents need. On the platform's dashboard, agents have access to customer communications from phone calls, text messages, messaging apps, on-site chat, social media, and email, all in one window.

While handling a query, agents can simultaneously communicate on different channels and offer personalized assistance by accessing customer information from every platform. Agents resolve issues faster, customers don't endure long wait times on calls or chats, and both parties leave the interaction satisfied.

4. Track contact center operations in real-time

The wide-ranging capabilities of omnichannel contact centers mean there's a lot of data on deck. Every business collects data differently. And there's no standard for tracking this contact center information. But with the right CPaaS, you can have a comprehensive view of the data and gain insight into how well your agents handle their workload.

With a CPaaS that lets you monitor your contact center's activities in real-time, you have access to accurate contact center performance analytics. You can peer into agent performance and make informed decisions to improve operations.

CPaaS performance statistics allow you to keep track of contact center key performance indicators, like call abandonment rate or cost per contact. And if you're interested in tracking agent performance but aren't interested in getting bogged down in the numbers, Voximplant Kit lets you see how your agents are working in real-time with live call logs.

The information from live call logs can show you:

What an agent's average call length is

The amount of answered vs. unanswered calls

How many calls sit in an agent's queue

The length of time calls in the queue stay unanswered

Track this information to measure workflow efficiency, get better equipped to discover your agents' productivity blockers, and extend support to them when necessary.

5. Create seamless workflows with artificial intelligence
Illustration of customers conversing with a smart IVR bot during customer service calls.

Agents deal with a high volume of both inbound calls and outbound queries daily. Trying to get through every question one at a time is the biggest time-suck in contact center operations. The automated features in CPaaS solutions help agents work more efficiently by filtering high-priority inquiries to live agents.

For example, many cloud contact centers come equipped with smart, conversational, interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities that take customers through digital self-service menus on a call or with a chatbot. Customers won't be directed to press certain numbers to make their way through the self-service menu. Conversational IVR lets customers go through self-service menus using natural dialogue as if they were speaking with a human agent. This way, customers with routine questions can resolve their issues independently without a live agent getting involved.

Through smart, skills-based routing features, calls are either routed to a digital self-service menu or assigned to a live agent based on the complexity of the issue and the customer's specific needs.

Voximplant Kit comes with an AI-powered voice bot that lets you automate 80% of your contact center's routine calls. The built-in smart IVR technology detects 80 different languages and handles natural language processing, so callers can converse with the voice bot in their natural speaking voice. And if you want to give your brand a signature sound, you can pick an IVR voice that best suits the voice and tone of your company-there are 248 IVR speech synthesis options for you to choose from.

Automate more of your agents' workflows, so they can spend less time answering simple FAQs and more time focusing on complex issues.

Level up operational efficiency and agent satisfaction with CPaaS

Ready to give it a try? Contact us and get started with a free trial!

Happy agents are the driving force behind a positive customer experience. As you adopt more tech into your business processes, remember to consider the specific features that will help your agents help your customers. When agents have tools, like the flexible no-code solution Voximplant Kit, that empower them to do their jobs well-it's an all-around win for your business.

And once you've figured out how to run your contact center more efficiently, think about other features you'd like to incorporate. Additional capabilities, like programmable voice, messaging, and video, are possible with our advanced CPaaS solution, Voximplant Platform. With Voximplant Platform, you can boost your contact center's performance and productivity by tackling more complex communication scenarios.

Sign Up for a free Voximplant developer account or talk to our experts

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5 Tactics to Strengthen Your Contact Center Operations with Technology | Voximplant.com

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In our fast-paced, digitally focused world, customers want personalized service at lightning speed. A Hubspot survey of 1,000 customers found that 90% of people expect a response from a live customer service agent in ten minutes or less. Because expectations are so high, the pressure is on for customer service agents to consistently provide quick, high-quality customer experiences.

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4 IVR Strategies That Take Your Customer Calls from Good to Great

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4 IVR Strategies That Take Your Customer Calls from Good to Great

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In our fast-paced, digitally focused world, customers want personalized service at lightning speed. A Hubspot survey of 1,000 customers found that 90% of people expect a response from a live customer service agent in ten minutes or less. Because expectations are so high, the pressure is on for customer service agents to consistently provide quick, high-quality customer experiences. Offering an elevated level of service with such a fast turnaround is next to impossible with manual support alone. And even if you have some digital tools in your tech stack, traditional contact center technology can fall short when it comes to efficiency. That's why choosing no-fuss technology that automates your contact center's routine operations is essential for making tasks more manageable for your agents.

If you're involved in evaluating cloud contact center services, you've likely recognized two distinct categories and a big difference in the amount of technical expertise required to implement them. You're attracted to the ease of use offered by contact center as service (CCaaS) offerings, but their fixed functionality doesn't fit your business needs. In contrast, a cloud contact center built on a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) offering provides unlimited flexibility, but requires expensive software development resources to build a complete solution.

Striving to offer the best service possible, contact centers are usually very quick to adopt new technologies and try out innovative solutions. Successful implementation of speech technologies can create a great competitive advantage for a company.

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4 IVR Strategies That Take Your Customer Calls from Good to Great | Voximplant.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In our fast-paced, digitally focused world, customers want personalized service at lightning speed. A Hubspot survey of 1,000 customers found that 90% of people expect a response from a live customer service agent in ten minutes or less. Because expectations are so high, the pressure is on for customer service agents to consistently provide quick, high-quality customer experiences.

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Where CPaaS Deploy their Networks - a Comparison

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Where CPaaS Deploy their Networks - a Comparison

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A couple weeks ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage in its US-EAST-1 region. As so many services rely on AWS, this outage had a broader impact, causing outages and various issues with Amazon's own Ring services, online retailers, and even the New York City MTA. In addition, a couple major Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers also reported issues (Voximplant was not impacted), potentially impacting the communications of many of their customers.

With this in mind, now is a good time to look at how CPaaS offers leverage public cloud infrastructure and review the factors involved in providing reliable, high quality communications services. In this post we will review the public cloud infrastructure used by several major CPaaS vendors and discuss the implications of their choices.

How Cloud Communications Platforms Build their Networks

All cloud-based Software as a Service providers (SaaS) need to host their code on a server somewhere. That code needs to be connected to various Internet exchange points so those services can reach customers and partner service providers. These providers generally have two choices for where to host their infrastructure:

1. Public cloud providers - the big cloud computing companies that run various API's and cloud infrastructure services. The most popular ones include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud as well as many smaller ones.

2. Data center providers - offer lower-level access to servers and Internet Service Provider without all the added software layers on top. Examples include companies like Equinix, INAP, and servers.com. Many of these companies have started to add services that make them look more like the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers of the big public cloud providers.

The big public cloud providers have grown to be massive with giant ecosystems of supporting products. These tend to be the most popular choice for use by Cloud Communications Platforms. However, independent data center providers do still find some use for niche needs not fulfilled by the big players.

How a Cloud provider's infrastructure impacts CPaaS services

The choices a CPaaS provider makes for its cloud infrastructure has many impacts for users of those services. The real-time, personal, and often mission-critical nature of communications makes it particularly challenging to implement compared to other applications. Since even a momentary outage is noticeable during a call, communications application providers must offer a highly reliable service while maintaining high quality. In addition, communicating using microphone or camera brings unique privacy implications. These choices are major factors in how a CPaaS chooses to deploy their networks.

Reliability through Redundancy

There are many facets to providing reliable services over the Internet. Outside of code development best practices and rigorous Quality Assurance processes, the best defense against major issues like an outage is redundancy. Redundancy is ultimately about avoiding single points of failure that could take down a service. The bigger, more complex the network the more potential points of failure there are. A well designed network will have duplicate software processes running on redundant hardware with multiple, independent network routes. In practice this means setting up:

1. Redundant servers / processes - ensuring that should one server or software process have critical issues, another will take its place.

2. Redundant data centers - in the relatively rare case that a physical data center facility has an issue - such as in a flood or construction accident - there should be redundant physical facilities.

3. Redundant cloud providers - the last resort is leveraging multiple cloud providers.

Redundancy at the server or process level is often achieved via a load balancer element that distributes traffic among multiple servers. Should one server fail, the load balancer can send traffic to other processes - so long as the application is able to handle it. Of course the load balancers themselves should be set up in a redundant fashion too.

Redundancy at the data center level is often built into modern cloud platform offerings. For example, major cloud providers often host several physical data centers in physical areas that provide similar latency characteristics. Should one of the physical data centers have issues there are procedures for automatically routing traffic to alternative data centers. These providers may also provide tools for helping to share data and traffic across regions.

That last level of redundancy is cloud provider redundancy. Although it is rare, human error and dumb luck can take a cloud provider offline. Bugs in the use of a specific cloud vendor's SDK can potentially cause cloud-provider specific issues too. A multicloud architecture that depends on multiple cloud providers is the best defense in these cases. Multicloud architectures may utilize multiple public cloud providers as well as independent data centers for the ultimate redundancy.

Latency: closer is usually better

Real Time Communications are very sensitive to latency - the time it takes voice and video data to travel between callers. Low latency is usually one of the best indicators of good media quality. Generally the closer a user is to the entity they are communicating with, the better. The path taken by a given VoIP packet may be subject to twists and turns along the way - but just like a highway, a short, direct route usually gets you there faster.

For this reason, CPaaS providers should strive to host their services in data centers that are close to users. This is particularly important for media-handling elements such as media servers, gateways, and SBCs that handle media and are directly in the communication flow.

Of course there are practical limits on what makes sense as well as real costs to running more data centers than what is truly needed. Just like highways usually have limited on-ramps and off-ramps, the same is true of the Internet connections between data centers. It is not practical to have a data center in every city, but network designers should strive to have a data center in the general region.

As an example, if you have a caller in New York City, you don't want their traffic travelling to San Francisco so that they can talk to someone roughly 100 miles away / 150 km in Philadelphia. A good target round-trip latency is 150 ms. The time it takes light to travel through fiber in a straight line from New York to San Francisco and back is nearly 40ms. Adding a more realistic path with delays added by many routers along the way will add many multiples to that latency, bringing it well above 150ms. You really want that traffic to traverse a data center somewhere closer. A New York City based data center would be ideal, but usually somewhere on the East Coast will generally give very acceptable performance.

Data sovereignty & localization

Many countries have laws regulating the control and storage of cloud-based data. These rules may specify how governments can access user data and the systems this data is hosted on. Beyond requiring that companies comply with their user data and security laws, data localization efforts actually require some initial data handling within national boundaries. In addition, some companies may prefer their data be handled within a certain region to aid in compliance with broader security and privacy regulations. For example, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires protection of EU citizen data, even outside of EU borders. Many companies have chosen to keep their data within the EU rather than deal with compliance issues raised by hosting data outside of the EU.

The only way to comply with data sovereignty efforts is to host servers within the countries that require it. Global providers may offer data residency options that allow data to be stored in a specific country or data center.

CPaaS Data Center Analysis

A reverse-IP address lookup analysis of several major CPaaS providers yields some interesting results. One can examine how a CPaaS has built its network by analyzing its publicly listed IP addresses. We looked at Twilio, Vonage/Nexmo, and Messagebird to understand their geographic footprint and data center providers.
The methodology section further below describes how this analysis was conducted.
Continental Coverage

True geographic coverage requires at least one data center located in each continent. Here is how these providers compare across the globe:
Number of unique countries with at least one data center
No CPaaS covered every continent. Unsurprisingly, there are no public data centers for the miniscule Antarctica population. However, none of the CPaaS providers have a datacenter in Africa. Only Voximplant and Twilio cover all the remaining continents.

Country Coverage

As mentioned earlier, coverage in specific countries may be required for regulatory or policy reasons in addition to the reduced latency that closer proximity usually provides. The below maps illustrate where these CPaaS vendors have servers.
Unique countries with at least one data center highlighted for each CPaaS. Note the map is to scale, so some small countries, like Singapore are difficult to see.
All the CPaaS above had data centers in Singapore. Nexmo is unique in offering a Canadian data center for North America. Voximplant is very unique in offering many data centers in 9 countries throughout Europe, including:

Datacenter Provider Diversity

This analysis can also reveal who is providing hosting and IaaS behind each CPaaS:
Unique hosting organizations used by each CPaaS
All of the CPaaS examined has some reliance on major public cloud providers. Twilio and Messagebird had no multi-cloud architecture, with IP addresses indicating only one major cloud platform provider. Voximplant is unique in that it uses several public cloud providers. In addition, Voximplant also utilizes several independent data centers giving it the most diversity.

Voximplant's Networking Approach

Voximplant started building its network early-on with a multi-cloud approach. As its customers required broader coverage and the company went global, it was relatively easy to extend this infrastructure to different cloud providers and independent data centers. As a result, Voximplant is not limited to the locations offered by major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services. This has the added advantage that it can very flexibly add new data center locations for unique customer demands or where performance requires it. Multicloud also allows us to provide better redundancy without reliance on a single cloud vendor. Lastly, this diverse set of infrastructure also provides a robust foundation for data sovereignty needs.

Moving forward, Voximplant will continue to offer a diverse, multi-cloud environment. Some data center providers may be consolidated to help keep costs low and streamline operations. At the same time, we expect we will continue to add new data center locations that improve performance and help our customers with compliance.

Make sure to use our getMediaResources API for the latest list of IP addresses by type, Of course you can always contact Voximplant for more information and guidance too!

Methodology

CPaaS must share their IP address information so that firewalls can be programmed to allow traffic from the CPaaS. IP address lookup tools can be used to determine the datacenter provider and the general geographic location where that IP address is located.

ipapi was used to perform the reverse IP lookup analysis. Where possible, only IP addresses associated with handling media - i.e RTP - were used as these are the most sensitive to latency and reliability needs. In most cases there were no apparent discrepancies between the data centers used for signaling vs. media.

ipapi returns a country, city, region, and organization for each IP address. Org is used to determine the DC Providers values. The org and region fields were combined to determine unique data center regions (DC Regions) for comparison. In cases where a block of IP addresses was provided, a single IP address was analyzed within this block.

The full analysis can be found here. See below for specifics on how the IP addresses were obtained for each CPaaS vendor.

Voximplant

All of Voximplant's IP addresses are available via its getMediaResources API. As noted above, the focus was on media handling endpoints, so the following URL was used:

http://api.voximplant.com/getMediaResources?with_mediaservers&with_sbcs for the final analysis.

Twilio

Twilio publicly lists its service regions here. The following links were used to aggregate this IP address information:

https://www.twilio.com/docs/video/ip-addresses#media-servers

https://www.twilio.com/docs/stun-turn/regions

https://www.twilio.com/docs/sip-trunking/ip-addresses
https://www.twilio.com/docs/voice/api/sip-interface#ip-addresses

Vonage lists the IP addresses for Nexmo SIP addresses here. Vonage uses different IP addresses for Tokbox, its video calling API. Vonage lists the Tokbox locations here, but the IP address list is only available for Tokbox users on the Enterprise plan. As this data was not fully available for verification, and that infrastructure is only used for a more limited set of services, the Tokbox specific locations were excluded.

MessageBird

MessageBird lists its IP address information here. The SIP RTP servers information was used for analysis.

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Where CPaaS Deploy their Networks - a Comparison | Voximplant.com

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A couple weeks ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage in its US-EAST-1 region. As so many services rely on AWS, this outage had a broader impact, causing outages and various issues with Amazon's own Ring services, online retailers, and even the New York City MTA.

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Personalized Service 101: What it is and How to Deliver it

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Personalized Service 101: What it is and How to Deliver it

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In our fast-paced, digitally focused world, customers want personalized service at lightning speed. A Hubspot survey of 1,000 customers found that 90% of people expect a response from a live customer service agent in ten minutes or less. Because expectations are so high, the pressure is on for customer service agents to consistently provide quick, high-quality customer experiences. Offering an elevated level of service with such a fast turnaround is next to impossible with manual support alone. And even if you have some digital tools in your tech stack, traditional contact center technology can fall short when it comes to efficiency. That's why choosing no-fuss technology that automates your contact center's routine operations is essential for making tasks more manageable for your agents.

Growing a business involves lots of moving parts, but no matter how large your customer base gets, customer experience (CX) should hold a top spot among your business responsibilities as your company grows.

If you're involved in evaluating cloud contact center services, you've likely recognized two distinct categories and a big difference in the amount of technical expertise required to implement them. You're attracted to the ease of use offered by contact center as service (CCaaS) offerings, but their fixed functionality doesn't fit your business needs. In contrast, a cloud contact center built on a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) offering provides unlimited flexibility, but requires expensive software development resources to build a complete solution.

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Personalized Service 101: What it is and How to Deliver it | Voximplant.com

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For many consumers, personalized customer service is key to good customer experiences (CX). According to a 2020 survey by Gladly, close to two-thirds of respondents said that "lack of personalization makes [them] feel like a ticket number." Businesses wishing to meet and exceed customer expectations need to make personalized service a top priority.

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How IP Messaging Features Hold the Key to E-Commerce Success

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How IP Messaging Features Hold the Key to E-Commerce Success

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Growing a business involves lots of moving parts, but no matter how large your customer base gets, customer experience (CX) should hold a top spot among your business responsibilities as your company grows.

In our fast-paced, digitally focused world, customers want personalized service at lightning speed. A Hubspot survey of 1,000 customers found that 90% of people expect a response from a live customer service agent in ten minutes or less. Because expectations are so high, the pressure is on for customer service agents to consistently provide quick, high-quality customer experiences. Offering an elevated level of service with such a fast turnaround is next to impossible with manual support alone. And even if you have some digital tools in your tech stack, traditional contact center technology can fall short when it comes to efficiency. That's why choosing no-fuss technology that automates your contact center's routine operations is essential for making tasks more manageable for your agents.

For many consumers, personalized customer service is key to good customer experiences (CX). According to a 2020 survey by Gladly, close to two-thirds of respondents said that "lack of personalization makes [them] feel like a ticket number." Businesses wishing to meet and exceed customer expectations need to make personalized service a top priority. But personalization goes beyond making movie recommendations or using a customer's name in an email subject line. When it comes to personalized service, it's paramount that you deliver relevant, valuable, and speedy support to promote positive customer experiences. In this article, we'll break down what personalized service means, why it's so important to CX, and how you can deliver personalization service to your customers.

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How IP Messaging Features Hold the Key to E-Commerce Success | Voximplant.com

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Growing a business involves lots of moving parts, but no matter how large your customer base gets, customer experience (CX) should hold a top spot among your business responsibilities as your company grows. In our fast-paced, digitally focused world, customers want personalized service at lightning speed.

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Voximplant Kit vs Talkdesk: Comparing contact centers for the small and medium enterprise

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Voximplant Kit vs Talkdesk: Comparing contact centers for the small and medium enterprise

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Any contact center manager considering a new cloud communications solution needs to do their "due diligence" before choosing a provider, including those in small to medium enterprises. The stakes are high for SMEs because your needs are unique and there are significant differences in the available providers. Your decision not only affects your organization's budget, but also its business processes, customer experiences, and agent work environment.

Two well-recognized contact center as a service (CCaaS) providers that merit consideration by any SME are Talkdesk and Voximplant. Both target the needs of the SME, but their solutions offer different levels of flexibility and features which can affect your operations. SMEs with multinational operations should also consider differing geographic coverage and multilingual capabilities, too.

In this article, we'll compare Voximplant Kit with Talkdesk CX Cloud from the perspective of an SME contact center manager. We'll provide background on each company and describe the features, prices and service delivery capabilities in their respective products. Our goal is to give you the information any manager in an SME needs to make an informed decision.

Business overview

Voximplant and Talkdesk have many similarities in their background. They both were founded in Europe and continue to maintain their R&D operations there. They are both privately held companies that have been in business for about a decade. Even though they share a European heritage, both companies are focused on the US contact center market.

Talkdesk focuses on CRM integrations

Talkdesk got its start in 2011 serving small and medium enterprises when most CCaaS were focused on larger organizations. Since then, it has broadened its market focus and claims over 1,800 customers, worldwide, including many large enterprises.

When the company was founded, it made an early decision to build its Talkdesk CX Cloud on the Twilio communications platform as a service (CPaaS). This means all the underlying voice telephony and messaging functions are delivered by Twilio. The integration is seamless to customers. However, the partnership affects the Talkdesk cost structure because prices charged to customers must cover the cost of using Twilio services.

By leveraging the Twilio platform, Talkdesk was able to focus its resources on building user interfaces that are easy to use and integrating its service with popular CRM systems. These innovations enabled it to build early success with SMEs.

Today, TalkDesk serves its diversified customer base from nine data centers, providing coverage for customers in the US, Europe, South America and parts of Asia. Its coverage map leaves gaps in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. You should investigate its voice quality and service levels, if you have operations in India, Ukraine or similar locations.

Voximplant builds on voice communications expertise

Voximplant was founded in 2010 as a CPaaS provider. Its business grew rapidly as application developers were attracted to the scalability and quality of its communications services. In 2020, the company added the Voximplant Kit CCaaS to its offerings. The company currently touts over 30,000 active customers across its product lines.

Voximplant Kit targets SMEs with features that make it easy to deploy a complete contact center in minutes, while providing flexibility to customize the service to your requirements. Kit builds on the company's extensive voice communications expertise with innovative speech recognition and natural language processing features (see below).

Because Voximplant operates its own CPaaS platform, it has an inherent cost advantage over Talkdesk. Prices for the Kit service don't have to recoup the cost of passing all communications through a third party CPaaS service.

Product architecture comparison

In addition, Kit leverages the established Voximplant data center infrastructure which includes 14 locations distributed across five continents. When compared to Talkdesk, Voximplant offers better coverage for European locations from its many data centers there.

Features Comparison

As you'd expect from any credible vendor in the CCaaS market, both Voximplant and Talkdesk have covered the baseline features needed by any SME. Here is a partial list of features offered by both providers:

ACD

Voice activated IVR

Modern GUI for agent, supervisor and admin

No-code configurability

Omnichannel support (messaging channels supported by each vendor listed below)

AI-driven automation

CRM integrations (listed below)

Outbound dialer

Call recording

With the basic features covered by both vendors, your evaluation should consider the unique features of each offering and how they could aid your business.

Voximplant Kit Unique Features

Voximplant Kit is fast to build and deploy. It features a unique visual builder that enables you to activate a fully functional contact center in as little as ten minutes without writing any code. Designed for non-technical personnel, Kit enables you to build custom IVRs, messaging interfaces and agent routing strategies through a simple drag-and-drop canvas.

Once your contact center design is complete, it can be activated in seconds. The entire process is self-service and available 24/7. You can make changes to your contact center at any time.

With Voximplant Kit, ease of use doesn't come at the expense of flexibility. A broad variety of function blocks with optional features provide fine-grained controls. This enables you to deliver highly personalized customer experiences and tailor Kit to your business processes. In addition, you're not locked-in to the functions and call flows offered in the visual builder, because Kit can be customized with optional JavaScript code.

If you think AI-driven contact center functionality is out of reach for an SME, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the voice automation offered by Voximplant Kit. The company has been a leader in this area through its work with Google and other major AI providers. It has years of experience integrating virtual agents with its telephony environment. Through its partners, you can build voice activated IVR services in 40 languages and dialects that will enable you to deliver automated services to a wide user base.

Kit offers a choice of five speech synthesis integrations, including Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Yandex. This gives you a range of synthesized voices from which to choose to represent your brand, and flexibility to access the combination of features, languages and prices needed for your business.

Rounding out the Kit feature set are out-of-the-box integrations with popular messaging channels, including WhatsApp, Viber and Telegram. A Facebook Messenger integration is around the corner, too. From a CRM standpoint, Voximplant offers a direct integration with Zoho.

Talkdesk CX Cloud Unique Features

Talkdesk's earliest innovations include a high level of integration with CRM systems. The company began by integrating with Salesforce and has expanded to include direct integrations with over 60 cloud-based CRM vendors. These integrations enable screen pop, click-to-call, and other productivity-enhancing capabilities.

The company continues to innovate in this area with the introduction of its app store, AppConnect, which enables customers to add third-party productivity applications to their CX Cloud service. The store includes 50 applications across a range of categories, including workforce management, analytics, screen sharing, secure payments, and even headsets.

Talkdesk offers a suite of optional workforce engagement management (WEM) tools. These are tools most often used by large enterprise contact centers to manage agent performance. They include online training, workflow management, and coaching capabilities.

Similar to Voximplant, Talkdesk offers AI-based automation. Talkdesk recently launched virtual agent and agent assist capabilities. Virtual agent uses natural language processing to provide a fully automated, self-service experience over the voice channel. Agent assist uses AI to recognize caller queries and provide agents with responses in real time on their screens. Both of these optional features are new and only available in a limited number of languages. If your contact center handles non-english speaking callers, you should check to be sure Talkdesk offers support.

Rounding out the feature list are integrations with popular messaging channels, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WeChat, RCS and Apple Business Chat.

Service Reliability and Uptime

Like most organizations, SMEs compete on the quality of customer experience and contact center outages can blemish CX. You may think all cloud providers offer similar reliability, but there are substantial differences. Outages happen more frequently with certain cloud vendors than with others.

Variations in reliability and uptime can frequently be attributed to the diversity and redundancy built into the service provider's architecture. Let's evaluate the Voximplant and Talkdesk architectures.

Talkdesk relies on a single cloud infrastructure platform for all its services which makes it more vulnerable to outages than Voximplant, which operates a highly diversified multi-cloud platform. All Talkdesk communications services are delivered by the Twilio CPaaS. When Twilio experiences an outage or service impairment, it directly and immediately impacts the Talkdesk service.

This CPaaS diversity analysis reveals that Twilio's service runs on a single provider's cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services. In contrast, Voximplant uses fourteen different cloud infrastructure providers, giving it much more diversity and immunity from outages and impairments. When any Voximplant cloud provider experiences a problem, it can immediately switch to an alternate provider.

Cloud diversity comparison

Many Talkdesk customers learned how these vulnerabilities can affect their business when AWS experienced an outage at its US East data center in November, 2020. This outage disrupted service to Twilio customers, which impacted Talkdesk customers, in turn. During the outage, calls were prevented from de-queuing and being routed to agents.

Business models

Voximplant is very easy for SMEs to do business with. The company is super responsive to busy contact center managers. It recognizes you need to focus on service delivery and don't want to get bogged down with vendor negotiations. In contrast, some Talkdesk customers complain the company is slow to respond to sales inquiries.

Voximplant pricing is 30% lower than Talkdesk

Both companies offer similar pricing models. Their fees are based on these factors:

Monthly recurring charge based on number of agents enrolled in the service

Telecommunications usage (measured in minutes)

Telephone number rental

Optional features, which include omnichannel, recording, speech recognition, etc.

Both companies offer multiple pricing tiers based on the number of agents enrolled in the service. The more agents enrolled, the lower the monthly recurring fee. Also, the service fees enable you to deploy an inbound or outbound contact center for voice channels, only. Additional voice features (e.g. speech recognition, recording, etc.) and non-voice features (messaging channels, PCI compliant payment, workforce management, etc.) are considered optional and are available for additional fees.

Voximplant offers 30% lower monthly recurring fees and we think other pricing elements are substantially less expensive, too. Recurring fees for Talkdesk start at $65 per seat, per month and Voximplant fees start at $45.

While Talkdesk doesn't publish fees for optional features, telephone numbers or telecommunications usage, we estimate a Voximplant will come in much lower than Talkdesk. This is because these services are priced to compete in the CPaaS market, which is more aggressive than CCaaS. Prices for Voximplant are published here.

Getting Started

In line with the company's self-service philosophy, you can start a Voximplant Kit free trial at any time, online. The 14-day trial gives you access to the full Kit feature set and includes telecom usage credit.

Talkdesk customers report that creating a Talkdesk account is " easy but not quick. " First, you have to complete an online form and wait for a Talkdesk solutions consultant to contact you. Once you've been qualified, Talkdesk provides a 14-day free trial and a $5 credit to try out and test Talkdesk. During this trial period, you'll be able to access only the baseline telephony features.

Support

When something goes wrong, you want to be able to quickly fix it. You want the peace of mind that comes with knowing there are multiple support resources available and you want to be able to engage the resource you need, when you need it. This includes access to well organized and documented knowledge bases, plus live technical agents.

Both companies offer multiple levels of support with similar resources, including knowledge base, plus phone and chat with a live agent. Their plans are differentiated based on response time SLAs and service uptime.

Choose the best solution for your business

SME contact centers are different from large enterprise contact centers. They don't require the advanced features used by enterprises and they don't want to pay enterprise prices. Yet, SME managers often want the flexibility to tailor the experience to their customers and business processes. These factors make Voximplant Kit an excellent fit.

On the other hand, if your organization is rapidly growing toward a large enterprise and needs to integrate a range of CRM, WFM, analytics and training systems, then Talkdesk may be a good solution.

As always, we advocate a thoughtful analysis of both options before selecting a vendor. They are both excellent solutions, depending upon your organization's particular needs and resources.

Sign Up for a free Voximplant developer account or talk to our experts

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Voximplant Kit vs Talkdesk: Comparing contact centers for the small and medium enterprise | Voximplant.com

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Any contact center manager considering a new cloud communications solution needs to do their "due diligence" before choosing a provider, including those in small to medium enterprises. The stakes are high for SMEs because your needs are unique and there are significant differences in the available providers.

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6 Industries that Must Use Voicebots: Why and How

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6 Industries that Must Use Voicebots: Why and How

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For many consumers, personalized customer service is key to good customer experiences (CX). According to a 2020 survey by Gladly, close to two-thirds of respondents said that "lack of personalization makes [them] feel like a ticket number." Businesses wishing to meet and exceed customer expectations need to make personalized service a top priority. But personalization goes beyond making movie recommendations or using a customer's name in an email subject line. When it comes to personalized service, it's paramount that you deliver relevant, valuable, and speedy support to promote positive customer experiences. In this article, we'll break down what personalized service means, why it's so important to CX, and how you can deliver personalization service to your customers.

A couple weeks ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage in its US-EAST-1 region. As so many services rely on AWS, this outage had a broader impact, causing outages and various issues with Amazon's own Ring services, online retailers, and even the New York City MTA. In addition, a couple major Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers also reported issues (Voximplant was not impacted), potentially impacting the communications of many of their customers. With this in mind, now is a good time to look at how CPaaS offers leverage public cloud infrastructure and review the factors involved in providing reliable, high quality communications services. In this post we will review the public cloud infrastructure used by several major CPaaS vendors and discuss the implications of their choices.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are meant to make customer calls more efficient-but sometimes they get in the way.

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6 Industries that Must Use Voicebots: Why and How | Voximplant.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For many consumers, personalized customer service is key to good customer experiences (CX). According to a 2020 survey by Gladly, close to two-thirds of respondents said that "lack of personalization makes [them] feel like a ticket number." Businesses wishing to meet and exceed customer expectations need to make personalized service a top priority.