Angel.com Releases Spring Forward
Angel.com today launched Spring Forward, the most recent version of its product offering.
Spring Forward includes new features designed to “put the caller first” and improve overall customer call experience by making automated systems easier to use, more efficient, and more effective. The solution also includes new features for virtual call center customers, including enhanced visibility and access options for agents and supervisors.
According to Dave Rennyson, president of Angel.com, the release—Angel’s first of the year—has three major prongs: enhancements to infrastructure, customer-driven enhancements, and “caller first initiatives.”
In the area of infrastructure, Angel made enhancements to its handling of call recording, added new monitoring and security capabilities, and separated the reporting cluster from the application to set the stage for more aggressive and robust reporting to be built into future releases.
“As a business intelligence parent company—MicroStrategy is our parent company—we’ve got a lot of expertise and capabilities here that we’re going to be bringing out in future releases to allow our customers to do deep analytics about how callers are using their [interactive voice response (IVR) systems] to enable them to tune the customer experience,” Rennyson says. “So separating out this reporting cluster was the first step in that.”
Among the many customer-driven enhancements are percentage-based call recording and the ability to transfer calls to any country in the world.
“This has been something that a number of our global customers who have offices in multiple countries [asked for],” Rennyson says. “A lot of this is opening up the framework of how you look at call centers and call queues in the virtual call center world. It’s a lot of innovation. And a lot of it is customer-based.”
In the area of caller first initiatives, Spring Forward offers improved date grammars that allow users to speak dates in multiple ways, new customizable system prompts, and the ability to set maximum hold times in call queues.
“We’re using this phrase ‘putting the caller first’ because if we put the caller first—for our direct customers—and we help them build better IVRs, we help the industry, we help people build better applications, and we help ensure that their customers are served better,” Rennyson says. “And if their customers are served better, in the end, Angel will have a good place with these businesses.”
According to Rennyson, when customers save time building [voice] sites, they can reinvest that time in site design.
“We believe that having an on-demand, rapid prototyping tool like Site Builder—which allows you to build voice sites so quickly—is a huge advantage for our customers in terms of speed and flexibility,” he adds.