Altivon
Fostering the optimal Customer Experience

Over the last three decades, contact centers have grown in form and complexity—fundamentally transforming the nature of customer engagement. As the adoption of digital devices and perpetual connectivity altered customer communications, traditional-voice based channels have evolved into modern-day multi-channel contact centers, integrating chat, mobile, video and social media among others. Adding to the complexity is that customers will often move between channels for the same interaction and expect companies to be able to manage that reality including customer journeys that often start on the corporate website. Combining right channel strategy and proactive contact, companies today can focus their attention on improving the customer experience, by adding a human touch in along the mostly digital path – at the right time and in the right way. “Since our inception in 1989, our key differentiator has been to understand the pressing needs of the end customer in a given scenario and ensuring that the solutions are designed for enhancing and optimizing the customer experience,” explains Bruce Andersen, President and CEO, Altivon. Taking best in class technology in the customer interaction management (CIM) space and translating them into top-notch solutions, Altivon designs, develops, and deploys high value contact center solutions that enable organizations to deliver the best customer experience.

A Blend of Best Practices and Objectivity

Altivon’s all-in-one contact center solution (based upon either Interactive Intelligence or Genesys technology stacks) integrates applications from multi-channel routing to self-service voice response, to quality management and workforce management and beyond spanning the complete spectrum of functionality-required within a contact center. “With traditional solutions based upon technology silos, companies spend too much time on integration and multi-vendor management. However, the all-in-one solution enables them to focus on the business of customer experience, as opposed to running a contact center platform. This allows us to be responsive to client’s higher level business requirements,” explains Frank Tersigni, Chief Customer Officer, Altivon. However, even the best technology platform requires an organization with deep expertise, focus, experience and time tested processes to deliver against a company’s customer interaction needs both in the short term and over the long run.

While contact centers can produce a real competitive edge to enterprises today, those responsible for delivering the customer experience often struggle between functional and technical challenges. On the functional side, there is an increasing need to respond to the quickly changing business requirements caused by massive disruption in the nature of customer interactions. This includes providing a choice of media, increasing desire to self-serve, and a demand for reduced effort. On the technical front, the relatively recent availability of cloud based solutions challenge CIOs with an increasingly complex number of deployment architectures, often backed by a number of ‘promises’ from vendors. These promises may or may not be appropriate—where the nature of the application needs to be taken into consideration in making a deployment architecture decision with consideration being given to factors such as privacy, compliance, reliability, customizability, analytics, and desired control. “These factors differ from a contact center solution to an email solution,” says Andersen. In this scenario, Altivon’s dedication to contact center space and agnostic approach to deployment options enable the firm to bring advice, best practices, and objectivity to the game. “The key prerequisite for Altivon is to be given the opportunity to truly understand the business and technical challenges, in order to be prescriptive,” says Tersigni.

In one instance, Altivon worked with a nationally recognized brand that faced challenges in being responsive to their customer base. “This was due to the existing multi-vendor, silo based contact center,” explains Tersigni. The client had to consolidate their geographically dispersed contact center into one virtual center so that they could route callers to the right agent, regardless of location, and effectively utilize their large agent pool and thus deliver a more consistent and effective customer experience. To solve this not insignificant obstacle, Altivon offered a complete customer service contact center overhaul, including integration to network based interactive voice response (IVR), dialer, work force management integration, ensuring business continuity and simplified processes.

The Changing Face of Customer Service

Altivon solutions are built to support multi-channel interactions with a wide range of additional functionalities, providing measurable improvement to customers. For instance, the popularity of smart phones and portable tablets has tremendous impact on the contact center space. Used in myriad ways, mobile-apps encourage self-service and can seamlessly help customers switch between voice and chat. “There is a massive opportunity to change how users interact with mobile apps,” says Tersigni. When defining the top-notch solution for mobile customer experience, Altivon starts by reviewing the user’s current environment, including people, process, and technology. While mobile contact center solutions may focus specifically on integrating mobility into the environment, they also include additional contact center functionalities comprising inbound multi-media routing, call backs, video interaction support, work force, quality management, and so on. In many ways, mobile customer service with tight integration between mobile apps and contact center systems can be even more impactful on customer experience and cost savings than the introduction of CTI (computer telephony integration) was back in the 1980’s.

It is the company’s view that the contact center represents one of the most critical applications of technology within most organizations. The system is customer facing, highly visible, requires many integrations to back office systems, complex in function and is now receiving strategic attention given the importance of customer experience as a competitive differentiator. For these reasons, Altivon believes that focus on the contact center is necessary in order to deliver on the requirements of its customers. Altivon’s fundamental solution set and associated professional services are based upon software from either Interactive Intelligence or Genesys, both of whom are market leaders in the contact center segment in their own right.

In an effort to add valuable third party capabilities to the core business, the company also partners with Mattersight—a SaaS-based enterprise behavioral analytics software provider, to perform predictive behavioral routing, that has the ability to understand characteristics of the caller, based on the calling number. The routing matches customer calls with the best available contact center agent on the basis of communication preferences, personality, and other behavioral characteristics. In order to ensure an effective customer experience, one can also route callers easily based on individual customer behavioral data and agent performance data. “The routing can produce value on a stand-alone basis regardless of what the customer’s contact center infrastructure is,” Andersen adds. “The key lies in blending the best in class solutions that we have in our portfolio, by analyzing the customer’s environment, requirements, and strategic imperatives—to deliver the most appropriate solution,” he says.

The key prerequisite for Altivon is to be allowed to truly understand the business challenges and opportunities, in order to be prescriptive

Fulfilling the Customer Experience Promise

“The best customer experience is delivered initially within a few weeks after initial cutover —when all the testing—quality testing, user acceptance testing, and load testing is done—to ensure that system operates as designed and without issue even at capacity. However, over time, quality can often erode as changes are made, requirements evolve, network issues occur, and the network may get plagued with slow speed. To avoid these scenarios, Altivon partners with TekVision—a software company offering real-time monitoring solutions that essentially tests Altivon’s applications, and customer’s system for broken branches in an IVR, bad network connections and other factors impacting customer experience. “If there is an outage at the technical system level, we are informed immediately. At an application and user experience level, this additional capability allows for our customers’ systems to be tested on a regular basis,” he says.

"Our key differentiator has been to understand the pressing needs of the end customer in a given scenario and ensuring that the solutions are designed for enhancing or optimizing the experience that our customers are able to provide to their customers"

Embracing the Learning Curve

“There is a significant learning curve required to be successful while delivering solutions in the customer experience space. Therefore, experience is a critical requirement in building the delivery and support team for extremely high service-level agreement demands from customers,” says Andersen. Altivon’s team of passionate and experienced workforce is keenly focused on understanding the prospects’ customer experience strategies, and imperatives. “We are extremely nimble and flexible, delivering successful projects to fit the specific or unique requirements of customers. Our expertise and product set from Interactive Intelligence and Genesys allows us to rarely be incapable of meeting those needs,” Tersigni asserts.

It is also important to note that the company has invested heavily in the post-cutover stage when many technology vendors transition to a reactive maintenance model. It is Altivon’s view that the changing landscape of customer expectations and the importance of customer loyalty to an organization’s success requires constant and continuous vigilance be applied to how well the contact center is meeting those evolving requirements. The company therefore has invested heavily in its customer success team consisting of account managers, customer care teams and a host of support programs.

The company is keen on continuing its focus on innovation and leadership areas of omni-channel routing, customer journey mapping, mobile based customer service and IoT (Internet of Things) integration with contact center solutions.“On our journey forward, we at the Altivon, will persist to consistently deliver projects on time, and on budget to ensure a fruitful customer experience for our clients,” says Tersigni. “The only reason we exist is to add value to our customers by turning our partner’s software into great solutions for clients. This will remain to be an ongoing focus at Altivon,” concludes the CEO.