INDIANAPOLIS, October 4, 2021 – Sharpen Technologies, developers of the agent-first omnichannel cloud contact center platform, signed a Master Agent Agreement with Intelisys, a channel-centric distributor of the hardware, software, connectivity and cloud services businesses need to support the hybrid workplace of the future. The partnership allows Intelisys’ network of Sales Partners to offer Sharpen’s award-winning CCaaS technology to its customers and prospects.
Sharpen lets users work from anywhere, seamlessly moving between calls, texts, webchats, emails, social media, etc., all in real-time and in a single interaction. With performance management built into its core CCaaS functionality, at no extra cost, agents are empowered with the knowledge of what is expected of them, how their work is impacting the business, and where they need to focus their attention in interactions—all without having to leave their queue. It also allows managers to easily coach agents and provide feedback, keeping their teams productive and aligned.
“Sharpen’s platform continues to gain traction in the marketplace, based on our unique ‘agent-first’ focus which yields a guaranteed 5-15% improvement in agent efficiency in the first 60 days and a proven ROI,” said Joe Davis, Sharpen’s Director of Channel & Partnerships. “We’re excited to expand our channel presence with the thousands of participating agents at Intelisys, as Sharpen provides comprehensive, expert pre-sales resources, combined with direct post-go-live support that ensures a best-in-class customer experience.”
Cory Shehan, director, Supplier Services at Intelisys said, “The demand for contact center solutions has skyrocketed as organizations have shifted to hybrid work. Sharpen has positioned themselves as a strong contender in omnichannel contact center solutions and we are thrilled to add them to our growing portfolio of top suppliers. This partnership with Sharpen will allow our Sales Partners to help their clients drive a better employee and customer experience and higher ROI.”
For more information about Sharpen partner opportunities, visit https://sharpencx.com/partners/.
Sharpen Technologies is the world’s first, truly agent-focused contact center platform built in the cloud for the cloud. The omnichannel platform lets users work from anywhere, seamlessly
moving between calls, texts, webchats, emails, social media etc., all in real-time and in a single interaction. Sharpen was recognized by Frost & Sullivan’s Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America for its “dramatic ROI,” “out-of-the-box integrations,” “powerful reporting and analytics tools,” and “demonstrable value.” In 2020 and 2021, it made the Inc. 5000, the magazine’s
annual list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. And, it is a “Best Places to Work” by both Inc. (2019) and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce (2017, 2018, 2021). Visit Sharpen on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the Sharpen blog.
Intelisys, a ScanSource company, is the nation’s leading technology services provider of business communications services, including voice, data, access, cable, collaboration, wireless and cloud. They’re dedicated to one thing – serving the needs and accelerating the success of the industry’s top producing telecom sales agents, IT Solution Providers, VARs, MSPs and integrators, as they leverage the power of recurring revenue in their businesses. Intelisys is a part of ScanSource, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCSC), a leading provider of technology products and solutions. ScanSource is at the center of the technology solution delivery channel, connecting businesses and providing solutions for their complex needs. They sell through multiple, specialized routes-to-market with digital, physical product and services offerings from the world’s leading suppliers of point-of-sale (POS), payments, barcode, physical security, unified communications and collaboration, cloud and telecom services. ScanSource enables its sales partners to create, deliver and manage solutions for end-customers across almost every vertical market. Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, ScanSource was named one of the 2020 Best Places to Work in South Carolina and on FORTUNE magazine’s 2021 List of World’s Most Admired Companies. ScanSource ranks #655 on the Fortune 1000. To learn more, visit www.Intelisys.com and www.scansource.com.
INDIANAPOLIS, September 28, 2021 – The Stevie® Awards for Women in Business, the world’s top honors for women entrepreneurs, executives, employees, and the organizations they run, honored Sharpen’s COO Pam Hynes with a Gold Stevie for Female Executive of the Year in the Business Products –11 to 2,500 Employees category. Judges called Pam an “innovative leader with a high impact.” And, they noted her “impressive track record of achievement that has seen entrepreneurial growth, innovation, and leadership at its best.”
In her 33-year career, Pam has been instrumental in building not one but two successful technology companies. Her first, Software Artistry, made history in Indiana by being the first tech company in the state to go public. Interactive Intelligence, her second, created thousands of jobs around the world and sold for $1.4 billion in 2016.
Since Pam joined Sharpen in 2017, the software company has made the 2020 and 2021 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America. And the 2021 Fast 25—Indiana Business Journal’s (IBJ) list of the 25 fastest-growing companies in the region. It has also been named a Best Place to Work by both Inc. (2019) and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce (2021). In 2020, Pam was named a Woman of Influence by IBJ.
“This achievement is only possible because of the great teams around me throughout my career,” said Pam. “I’ve been very fortunate to work with and for very talented entrepreneurs who were innovative, collaborative, and inclusive. I‘ve been blessed and truly enjoy what I do.”
More than 1,500 nominations from organizations and individuals around the world were submitted to the awards this year for consideration in categories including COVID-19 Response, Entrepreneur of the Year, Executive of the Year, Most Innovative Company of the Year, and Startup of the Year, among others. Stevie Award-winning nominations were submitted by organizations in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam.
“Pam is one of the reasons Sharpen is a great place to work,” noted Sharpen CEO Bill Gildea. “When you combine her unwavering commitment to ensure our customers’ and employees’ success, along with her leadership skills, attention to detail, and ability to hire–and mentor–great team members, you can see why she has been so successful at every stop she’s made.”
A list of Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie winners by category, can be found here.
Sharpen Technologies is the world’s first, truly agent-focused contact center platform built in the cloud for the cloud. The omnichannel platform lets users work from anywhere, seamlessly moving between calls, texts, webchats, emails, social media etc., all in real-time and in a single interaction. Sharpen was recognized by Frost & Sullivan for its “dramatic ROI,” “out-of-the-box integrations,” “powerful reporting and analytics tools,” and “demonstrable value.” In 2020 and 2021, it was named to the Inc. 5000, the magazine’s annual list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. And, it is a Best Places to Work by both Inc. (2019) and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce (2017, 2018, 2021). Visit Sharpen on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the Sharpen blog.
Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com.
INDIANAPOLIS, October 14, 2021 – Sharpen Technologies, developers of the agent-first omnichannel cloud contact center platform, came in at #1 on the Fast25, Indiana Business Journal’s (IBJ) annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in Central Indiana. The company has seen a revenue growth rate of 555% over the three-year period between 2018 and 2020.
“We’re honored to head this list of remarkable companies,” said Mike Simmons, Chairman of the Board and Sharpen’s largest investor. “We have a dedicated Indianapolis-based team coupled with a great group of investors–including Indianapolis’ own Elevate Ventures and Allos Ventures. That combination has fueled our growth and allowed us to succeed.”
Sharpen is the award-winning contact center platform that lets users work from anywhere.
Users can move between calls, texts, webchats, emails, social media, all in real-time and in a single interaction. With performance management built into its core functionality, at no extra cost, agents know what is expected of them. And, they have visibility into how they’re performing against those expectations. As a result, they can see how their work impacts the business and where to focus their attention in interactions. And they can do it all without having to leave their queue. It also lets managers easily coach agents and provide feedback, keeping their teams productive and aligned.
“Our growth, and this award, is a testament to the ingenuity and dedication of the Sharpen team,” said CEO Bill Gildea. “Our business model of partnering with our customers to help them deliver a superior customer experience in the most effective and efficient manner possible has been a win-win for all of us.”
Between 2018 and 2020, Sharpen increased subscription cloud bookings by more than 750%. It grew customer traffic volumes by 17.5x and also added 1625% new customers. And it expanded existing customer spending by 30% on average a year. The company also tripled the number of implementation partners, multiplied the number of sales partners by 10x, and secured $40 million in outside funding.
Along with grabbing the top spot on IBJ’s Fast25 list, Sharpen was named to the 2020 and 2021 Inc. 5000 lists of fastest-growing private companies in America.
Find more information about IBJ’s Fast25 here.
Sharpen Technologies is the world’s first, truly agent-focused contact center platform built in the cloud for the cloud. The omnichannel platform lets users work from anywhere, seamlessly moving between calls, texts, webchats, emails, social media etc., all in real-time and in a single interaction. Frost & Sullivan recognized the company for its “dramatic ROI,” “out-of-the-box integrations,” “powerful reporting and analytics tools,” and “demonstrable value.” In 2020 and 2021, it made the Inc. 5000, the magazine’s annual list of America’s fastest-growing private companies, and came in #1 as the fastest-growing private company in central Indiana in Indiana Business Journal’s 2021 Fast25 ranking. And, it is a “Best Places to Work” by both Inc. (2019) and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce (2017, 2018, 2021). Visit Sharpen on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the Sharpen blog.
Companies must have been founded prior to FY 2018 to qualify for the Fast25. They also had revenue of more than $1 million in 2018, and experienced revenue increases each year from FY 2018 through FY 2020. They had to be independent, privately held firms that are not subsidiaries or divisions of a parent company. Accuracy of entries was verified by letters from the companies’ outside accountants or through their tax returns.
IBJ Media was founded in 1980. The company owns the award-winning Indianapolis Business Journal, which publishes a weekly newspaper, daily news emails and two podcasts covering the central Indiana economy and business community. In addition, IBJ Media owns The Indiana Lawyer, an every-other-week newspaper covering Indiana’s legal community. Local entrepreneurs Mickey Maurer and Bob Schloss partnered to buy IBJ in 1990, bringing the news organization back to local ownership. Nate Feltman became a co-owner in 2017 and increased his ownership stake in 2020 when he became CEO. To learn more, go to www.IBJ.com.
Conversocial Acquisition Will Enhance Verint Customer Engagement Platform with Additional Social and Messaging Channels and Further Expand its Conversational AI Capabilities
MELVILLE, N.Y., August 10, 2021 – Verint® (NASDAQ: VRNT), The Customer Engagement Company™, today announced the expansion of the digital-first capabilities of its cloud platform through the acquisition of Conversocial. With this expansion, Verint’s market-leading conversational AI provides brands the ability to orchestrate customer journeys with a connected experience across their channels of choice.
The acquisition will expand Verint’s robust support for digital customer engagement with connections to most of the commonly used messaging channels, including Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more. Conversocial helps leading brands such as Google, Sephora, British Airways, and Hertz build and scale relationships via the personal touch and convenience of social messaging.
In recent years, customer conversations have shifted from public social channels to one-to-one personalized messaging and brands are increasingly looking for ways to turn messaging into a strategic commerce and care channel for customer experience advantage. According to Dan Miller, lead analyst at Opus Research, “For more than a decade, Conversocial helped brands add social networks and messaging platforms to their marketing and customer support channels. Verint’s clients will now benefit from the combined companies’ demonstrated ability to offer AI-infused self-service and assisted service to digital-first customers.”
With the Verint Cloud Platform, brands are able to accelerate digital-first strategies:
“Supporting Boundless Customer Engagement that goes beyond traditional care channels, we are reimagining what it means to be The Customer Engagement Company for a digital-first world,” says Verint’s Celia Fleischaker, chief marketing officer. “Adding new conversational AI and messaging channels to our digital engagement portfolio is another step in this direction and we welcome the Conversocial employees to Verint.”
“We help brands deliver better customer experiences over messaging channels, while improving brand efficiency and customer satisfaction,” says Conversocial’s Ido Bornstein-Hacohen, CEO. “We are excited to join forces with Verint, a leader in customer engagement to help organizations achieve their digital-first strategies.”
Transaction Details
Verint has agreed to acquire Conversocial, which has approximately 80 employees with offices in New York and London, for $50 million in cash, subject to certain closing adjustments. The acquisition is expected to close in Verint’s third fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions including the receipt of required regulatory clearances.
About Verint
Verint® (Nasdaq: VRNT) helps the world’s most iconic brands – including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies – build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement portfolio draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and The Science of Customer Engagement™ to help customers close The Engagement Capacity Gap™.
Verint. The Customer Engagement Company™. Learn more at Verint.com.
This press release contains “forward-looking statements,” including statements regarding expectations, predictions, views, opportunities, plans, strategies, beliefs, and statements of similar effect relating to Verint Systems Inc. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and they are based on management’s expectations that involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, any of which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking statements. For a detailed discussion of these risk factors, see our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2021, and other filings we make with the SEC. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release and, except as required by law, Verint assumes no obligation to update or revise them or to provide reasons why actual results may differ.
VERINT, THE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT COMPANY, BOUNDLESS CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT, THE ENGAGEMENT CAPACITY GAP and THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT are trademarks of Verint Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries. Verint and other parties may also have trademark rights in other terms used herein.
ActiveOps changes the game for enterprise EPM solutions, putting the productivity in Employee Productivity Monitoring
ActiveOps releases new automation to collect desktop task outcomes to add depth to existing EPM and WFM data.
READING, UK, 22/07/2021 -- ActiveOps PLC, the management process automation company, today announces a major update to its leading enterprise EPM solution, WorkiQ. This latest enhancement, Collector, adds a new automated data collection capability that enables organisations to measure specific task outcomes, giving them the ability to count completed work. This unique, advanced capability comes after listening to feedback from ActiveOps customers and makes WorkiQ the only EPM solution enabling enterprises to truly connect activity time tracking to work outputs.
Going beyond simple tracking of time spent in various activities, Collector counts work completed, providing a true picture of productivity and real-time productivity insights to managers. Using this data, enterprises can further improve operational performance and management effectiveness. Equally important, this new capability allows managers to measure effectiveness based on output rather than screen time, mitigating a leading cause of employee burnout.
This update to WorkiQ fills a major gap in the EPM market. While most EPM solutions can inform you how people are spending their time – with varying degrees of accuracy – until now, none have been able to tell enterprises how much work is actually getting done.
“This innovation changes the game for employee performance measurement,” says Richard Jeffery, CEO of ActiveOps. “The EPM market has really picked up pace as enterprises attempt to build and embed hybrid working practices, which require accurate data to succeed. Collector means that WorkiQ provides a lifeline for managers drowning in activity data – which of course is only part of the performance story. This automation gives managers more time to lead their teams and make hybrid working a success.”
As with all ActiveOps solutions, WorkiQ and Collector are built using the best practices of ActiveOps’ proven Active Operations Management (AOM) methodology. Combining EPM and AOM helps enterprises to use real-time data to reinforce good behaviours and create an environment where employee performance is continually improving – without sacrificing wellbeing.
EPM solutions like WorkiQ are increasingly recognised as essential for getting the full view of operations necessary to define, plan and deliver hybrid working at an enterprise level. When managers are supporting remote teams, and may themselves be based from home or the office, it’s very difficult to get visibility of teams, their workloads, and their challenges. As a result, protecting employees from burnout and making decisions about workload are largely guessing games.
Without enterprise EPM – or even with poorly implemented time trackers – enterprises will struggle to keep managers effective and to keep employees happy. If left unchecked, these issues will cause staff turnover to increase just as enterprises need everyone working at peak productivity to take advantage of markets opening back up in the wake of the pandemic.
Drew Doble, Product Manager at ActiveOps, adds: “I am proud of this innovation from our product team. ActiveOps focuses on the health of the entire operation, and Collector allows us to put purpose and perspective into individual and team activities, without the need for cyber security style monitoring. This is about productivity, and that is where most EPM solutions get it wrong.”
With the addition of Collector, WorkiQ provides:
For enterprises, this data brings:
“We will continue to develop WorkiQ into the next generation of EPM solutions, with new capabilities and data layers to give our customers in depth insights into productivity and enable further performance improvements,” added Drew Doble.
Collector is available as part of the WorkiQ Premium package which provides data and insights into desktop activities and applications usage, employee wellbeing and now specific task outcomes.
About ActiveOps
ActiveOps helps organisations turn operational management from a guessing game into a game-changing source of efficiency and value. Our platform – including Workware+, the Active Operations Management (AOM) Method and OpsIndex – provides real-time employee productivity monitoring and workforce management technologies for a 360° view of your operations – both digital and human.
With more than 20 years of experience managing complex operations in labour- and knowledge-intensive industries such as banking and insurance, ActiveOps enables managers to transform productivity, secure employee wellbeing and create a platform for confident, constant transformation and market leadership.
DALLAS, TX, USA, May 19, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- ActiveOps (LON: AOM) today announced a series of hybrid events aimed at helping enterprise workforce operations (both for back and front office employees) utilize technology and analytics to drive better and more timely decisions as they return to the office. Kicking off with an executive breakfast in Dallas, Texas, on May 25th, the roadshow will be travelling to Atlanta, and Tampa in June 2021, with additional cities in both the US and UK,
announced in the coming weeks, as local government COVID protocols are aligned.
The workshops are designed to address the growing certainty that, regardless of the precise structure of your workforce, the future of work is hybrid. The pandemic has radically altered perceptions of what workers can and cannot achieve online, both for employers and employees. It has demonstrated that not only is it possible for
enterprises to survive without having all their employees in the office all the time – it can even be a way to thrive. Hybrid working is also proving attractive to employees; according to Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index, over 70% of workers want flexible remote working options. Coupled with research revealing that over 40% of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this year, the ability of organizations to provide this flexibility is fast becoming a matter of survival in the war for (remote) talent. Yet that pressure has to be balanced with the need to make hybrid working sustainable – employees need to feel they are being looked after. Still, productivity and performance need to remain high as businesses and economies recover from the pandemic.
On top of this, in the short term, one of the significant challenges that organizations face is the rise of burnout, digital fatigue and poor mental health in their workforces. Countless studies point to dangerously high levels of burnout and stress, with employees reporting that they feel increasingly disconnected from managers and colleagues.It is also evident that most teenagers are involving in drug habit as a result of stress and anxiety.In such cases it is always better to approach drug inpatient rehab as they can help you to overcome drug addiction or you can also look for alcohol rehabs near you as they can help you to overcome alcohol addiction.
The question for business leaders is: how do you create a successful hybrid workplace, combat the wellbeing challenges employees face, and keep productivity and performance high?
Many leaders are facing an unprecedented risk of the cost of attrition – it has never been easier for employees to entertain job movement. Effective and appropriate employee experience is more important than ever, and having structured, accurate and timely data is fundamental to that opportunity.
One way for business leaders to stay on top of the data and tools necessary for a successful hybrid workplace is to network with other leaders facing similar challenges. Joining a CEO group can provide a valuable forum for discussing best practices, learning from others' experiences, and staying up-to-date on the latest trends and technologies in employee experience and performance management. By connecting with other leaders and learning from their successes and failures, business leaders can gain the insights and motivation they need to create a workplace culture that attracts and retains top talent.
As we’ll discuss in our roadshow, the answer centers on data – and finding new tools and methods to gather, analyze and interpret that data to build and maintain a solid and supportive company culture that prioritizes both performance and wellbeing.
“Our customers are already ahead of the market, using smart tools to gather workforce data, to forecast and plan, and to deliver the right hybrid workforce for their needs – both in the short term across June and July and across the balance of 2021 and into 2022,” says Spencer O’Leary, CEO of ActiveOps North America. “Our hybrid roadshow is designed to educate through discussion and benchmarks and help people find a method to balance decisions for employers and employees. Most importantly, to those companies that manage the transition with data a competitive advantage.”
The roadshow is called The Future Fit Hybrid Workforce is built around three key measurable elements:
Balance – 2021 and into 2022 will be about finding the right balance of many new variables. How many and which employees will return to the office, and who will work from home? How will employers expect these employees (and their manager), both remote and in-office, to balance flexible work schedules? How will they deliver excellent outcomes both for customers and employees?
Performance – Organizations will embark on a new relationship with performance. One that helps the employee thrive in a hybrid work environment while supporting the company objectives to deliver world-class customer service in a world that is also adapting to a hybrid delivery model.
Wellbeing – Employee retention, burnout and performance will need to be at the center of managers’ decision-making. Faced with more variables in work, time and people than ever before, managers will need specific data from workforce systems to make intelligent decisions and lead effectively.
“The dawn of the hybrid office presents an enormous opportunity for HR, Operations and IT to truly collaborate on the future of work,” says Michael Cupps, SVP of Marketing at ActiveOps. “True to our theme of hybrid work, we are offering our roadshow attendees the option to attend in-person or virtually. Whether you are eager to socially network with your peers face-to-face or want to fit the roadshow around other commitments and attend remotely, we will have speakers, fun and food for all.”
Learn more and register for the upcoming events. Don’t forget to check back regularly on our Events page as ActiveOps adds additional cities in the US and UK to the roadshow in the coming months.
About ActiveOps
ActiveOps helps organizations turn operational management from a guessing game into a game-changing source of efficiency and value. Our platform – including Workware+, the Active Operations Management (AOM) Method and OpsIndex – provides real-time employee productivity monitoring and workforce management technologies for a 360° view of your operations – both digital and human.
With more than 20 years of experience managing complex operations in labor- and knowledge-intensive industries such as banking and insurance, ActiveOps enables managers to transform productivity, secure employee wellbeing and create a platform for confident, constant transformation and market leadership.
Michael Cupps
ActiveOps
+1 972-484-5200
email us here
As consumer behavior and expectations continue to shift and become more complex with the COVID-19 pandemic, Salesforce’s role in the customer service industry is also evolving. Today Salesforce announced a new Workforce Engagement product built to help service leaders in the contact center ensure they have the right agents with the right skills staffed at the right time. We sat down with Melissa Matross, SVP of Product Management, to learn more about the importance of Service Cloud Workforce Engagement and how this new product will make service teams’ jobs easier, while optimizing processes to meet any influx of customer service demand.
Workforce management as an industry has been around for over 30 years and historically, it has been all about operational efficiency — making sure that service centers have just the right number of people with the right capabilities to meet customer demand. It was very machine-oriented, and service agents were essentially viewed as cogs in that machine.
Since then, two major things have happened. First, service centers have evolved and become much more operationally complex. For example, more channels have been introduced, which makes forecasting and planning much more complicated and difficult to navigate. Back in the day, it used to be that every agent was on one call at a time, and it was only on that one channel (phone) that a customer was reaching out. Now, with the advent of other channels like chat and text, an agent can handle multiple customer inquiries at once. So a question that businesses are asking themselves is, “How can we manage our service team staffing needs, while we have agents working across a variety of different channels at a moment’s notice?”
Automation has had a direct impact on the agent’s quality of life — in a positive way.”
Melissa Matross, Senior Vice-President Product Management, Salesforce
Secondly, AI and automation have become key factors in service optimization, scheduling and planning — and that’s really where the engagement piece comes into play. Automation has had a direct impact on the agent’s quality of life — in a positive way.
Building a service center fully equipped to meet today’s demands has never been more critical, especially as we continue to battle through the COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s service agent is required to be able to engage on more platforms and touchpoints than ever before – checking email, text messages, scrolling a Twitter or Facebook feed, etc. Further, they’re expected to pull customer data from more sources, log more detailed service transactions, be proactive in customer service outreach, and more — all to keep up with an ever-growing demand for fast and quality customer service.
Melissa Matross, Senior Vice-President Product Management, Salesforce
Last month, I found myself in a Starbucks parking lot frantically waving my phone in the air, desperate for a WiFi signal. I had moved to a new home the previous week, and with my internet not yet set up, I had to hit the road to do my job. It took five customer service calls, three trips from a technician, and an in-store visit before my WiFi was functioning. The experience was a glaring reminder of how much more the service industry could do to create a better experience for customers — and why it’s so important that we get it right. At Salesforce we understand the pressure on service teams, and we’re dedicated to helping our customers provide great service to their customers.
When it comes to existing Workforce Management solutions, there’s a crucial element of “engagement” that is often missing. Engagement that frees service professionals from mundane manual tasks and allows them to focus on what matters the most — delivering exceptional customer service.
Of course. Engagement in the context of the workplace falls into a few different categories. One is an effort to develop employees that want to do their jobs successfully and help drive great outcomes for customers. Essentially, at its core, an engaged employee is one who is motivated to deliver great service and support the company mission.
In today’s new distributed way of working, engagement is driven by several different factors and considerations. Employees are asking themselves, “Am I learning? Am I growing? Do I have a career path here?” Engaged employees are always learning and growing, and typically have a clear vision for what they perceive as their desired career path, which they might not have had before engagement became a priority.
Secondly, engagement in a distributed workforce means enabling agents to ask questions and get support within their own teams. Our Workforce Engagement capabilities provide the proper tooling to help service agents get the information they need and collaborate with peers, effectively creating an environment that allows them to be successful. Engagement is having ownership, empowerment, collaboration, and an individualized career path at one’s own fingertips. This is why we decided to name our product Workforce Engagement; it’s more than just Workforce Management.
As capabilities for service professionals have become increasingly complex, the expectations for what agents have to be educated on and able to do have evolved as well. As automation handles the simpler customer service tasks, service professionals find themselves addressing more complicated cases on a regular basis. This means there are several additional skills that an agent needs to acquire. So now, not only do agents need to handle customer inquiries on a variety of channels, they also have to develop interpersonal skills that allow them to address these more complex cases.
The role of the service center is shifting from being a cost center to a profit center.”
Melissa Matross, Senior Vice-President Product Management, Salesforce
Specifically, soft skills and empathy are necessary for each customer service interaction. Usually when a customer contacts a service department, they have a problem that needs to be addressed. This, paired with the fact that we are in unprecedented times as a society means customers are looking for more than just a simple one-and-done interaction. They’re looking for understanding and appreciation for their needs as a customer, and to feel valued and prioritized — no matter how big or small their inquiry might be.
The role of the service center is shifting from being a cost center to a profit center. A customer service department is not only the face of the brand and the first line of communication with existing customers, it’s an opportunity for brands to build life-long loyalty through investment in consumer trust and genuine care. Ultimately, service agents don’t only need to stay up-to-speed on where to communicate with customers, they need to understand how to best communicate with them in a human way.
Current workforce management solutions are inefficient. In fact a majority (83%) of workforce planners are using spreadsheets in some capacity — even if they have also implemented a workforce planning tool. These teams spend a ton of time loading and cleaning data sets so that they can be useful. Not only does this take time, but it also makes service teams less dynamic. Because of these inefficiencies, they can’t respond as quickly to changing demands.
Secondly, contact centers typically have several different tools to manage their workforce operations and optimize their teams, each with a different function. They have the CRM solution, where they can see a customer’s information at the beginning of an interaction. Then, separately there are routing solutions that calibrate based on scale, schedule or availability. What you have is a number of disparate, on-premise solutions that are not communicating with each other — leading to operational inefficiency and confusion.
With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, we’re providing service teams with a cloud-based, connected solution — all on one platform. We are now able to connect all these disparate systems, making it much more seamless to manage — as well as making the data flow more streamlined.
Workforce Engagement also helps minimize any risk of manual error — not only by removing the manual input, but also with constant monitoring and outlier detection. If there is something in the historical data that might be compromising the accuracy of a team’s forecasting, we flag it directly to them — rather than having them sift through and find the anomaly themselves.
There’s a significant lack of visibility right now, specifically as we navigate this pandemic and as service teams remain distributed. Historically, contact centers have had fairly strong management oversight — but that layer is now lost given the move to remote work. Gaining visibility into what’s happening on a moment by moment basis is much more challenging. Service Cloud Workforce Engagement is helping alleviate the stress of this change — not only allowing service agents to focus on delivering an exceptional trusted service, but eliminating age-old inefficiencies along the way.
San Francisco — December 2, 2020 — Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today introduced Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, a new dynamic workforce planning product that will help service leaders organize their entire workforce from anywhere and distribute the right work to the right agents based on skills and service channel.
With COVID-19, contact centers are dealing with a huge surge in the volume of questions across service channels like phone, chat, text and social media. At the same time, service leaders are managing staffing resources amid the transition to the work-from-home environment. Many are relying on legacy workforce management technology to organize their teams — disparate, on-premise solutions and spreadsheets that were never designed to manage globally distributed workforces. In today’s all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, companies need technology that offers a connected view of the employee and customer, all on one cloud-based platform.
“Delivering service is more complex than ever with agents working from anywhere and volumes of customer support requests spiking,” said Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager, CRM Applications at Salesforce. “With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, Salesforce will arm the contact center with a connected solution — all on one platform so our customers can remain resilient and agile no matter what tomorrow may bring.”
Service Cloud Workforce Engagement will help companies deliver exceptional service by using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict customer service demand, enabling companies to staff the right agents, with the right skills, at the right time. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, agents will have a single workspace that integrates all of the data, systems and coaching they need to deliver personalized service and resolve issues quickly. Salesforce will be the only provider who offers a complete customer service suite — Core Service, Digital Engagement, Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce Field Service and now Service Cloud Workforce Engagement — all on one CRM platform. Today’s announcement includes:
Companies across all industries can use Service Cloud and Workforce Engagement to scale their service efforts as they grow and face unexpected surges in customer demand.
“Due to our continuous global growth, and as people find more value in outdoor activities and exercise amid the pandemic, we have seen a huge global increase in customer demand across our channels over the last few months,” said Thomas Kohl, Head of Customer Service at Canyon Bicycles GmbH.
With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, we can leave spreadsheets behind and automate this process on the Salesforce Platform with great accuracy, which benefits our staff as well as our customers.
Thomas Kohl, Head of Customer Service, Canyon Bicycles GmbH
“While this is great for our business, it is really challenging our ability to plan, staff and optimally cover this demand. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, we can leave spreadsheets behind and automate this process on the Salesforce Platform with great accuracy, which benefits our staff as well as our customers.”
“As we scale globally, we are looking to automate our workforce management capabilities across different service channels, skills and teams,” said Rudi Khoury, EVP of Marketing & Customer Experience at Fisher & Paykel. “In order to do this, we need a tool to help us optimize our workforce. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, we will be able to perform all of this and more, adding to our productivity and service quality while creating better experiences for both our customers and our service agents, alike.”
“Salesforce’s vision for workforce management will allow us to balance efficiency goals with our people and culture goals, which prioritizes celebrating agent skills and providing an engaging place to interact with their workday,” said Nigel Piper, Executive General Manager, Customer at Xero. “A centralized view of future capacity will enable us to make better decisions around reactive service delivery, together with shifting effort into proactive engagement with customers.”
Service Cloud Workforce Engagement is expected to become generally available in the first half of 2021. Pricing information will be made available at general availability.
Service Cloud is built on Salesforce Customer 360, giving companies a 360-degree view of their customers and enabling the delivery of trusted service experiences on the world’s most complete platform. Across every channel — whether it’s messaging, communities, chat or phone — Service Cloud is enabling Trailblazers to deliver human-centric service that is personal, intelligent, trusted, and inclusive.
Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, available globally in June, helps customer service teams unify their people, planning and process to accurately route cases to the right agents with the right skills at the right time.
In 2020, customer service contact centers underwent dramatic change. Agents started working from home, customers increasingly turned to digital channels, and many industries saw surging demand for service. More than ever, businesses faced pressure to have the right agents readily available to help customers when they needed support the most.
As the landscape of the pandemic shifts, the future structure of the contact center is uncertain. But the goal remains clear: provide unimpeded service with highly qualified agents.
Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, Salesforce’s dynamic workforce planning product, is helping service leaders do just that. Melissa Matross, SVP of Product Management, sat down with one of them — and he happens to work just down the virtual hall. Jim Roth, EVP of Customer Support at Salesforce, has been using the product with his own team and shares what it’s been like to serve as the first customer for this transformative product.
Jim: We were looking for a workforce management solution when we learned that Salesforce was planning to build one. We got to shape the vision from the beginning, weighing in on the features that matter most to service leaders.
For the past year or so, we’ve been giving feedback along the way and pilot testing the product’s capabilities. I’m really excited about the ability to combine demand forecasting, shift scheduling, case routing, and agent training in a single integrated platform — that’s never existed before.
Jim: Our team of support engineers around the world support Salesforce products in 11 languages, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Customers can reach us by phone, chat online support requests, and we also offer a ton of self-service resources.
We closed our physical offices in March 2020 in response to the pandemic. Before that time, only 216 of our agents worked from home.
“In just over two weeks, we moved around 2,800 support engineers from around the globe to a work from home setting.”
Jim Roth, EVP of Customer Support, Salesforce
In just over two weeks, we moved around 2,800 support engineers from around the globe to a work from home setting. We faced the same challenges that many other companies did during the process, including making sure agents had the right equipment and connectivity. It took a lot of long days to execute, but the fact that all our applications were cloud-based really helped.
Jim: One of the biggest transformations we saw over the past year was a rapid increase in demand for live agent chat with our team. A year ago, chat was just over 7% of our case volume. Now, it’s nearly 16%. We knew there was latent demand for this channel with customers — especially with people increasingly preferring digital channels these days — so we made it more accessible and expanded it to additional products.
When someone sends you an email or fills out a web form, you generally have 4 to 48 hours to respond. With that kind of asynchronous channel, it doesn’t matter much what time an agent starts work or when in their day they handle that query.
With live chat, people expect a response in minutes, if not seconds. It matters whether an agent comes in at 8 a.m. or 8:15 a.m. With more emphasis on synchronous channels, scheduling resources for individual agents has now become a critical capability.
“Today, most companies schedule work in silos by channel. The power of the Workforce Engagement product comes from using a unified but flexible set of logic to forecast, plan and schedule across all channels, from voice to chat to email and beyond.”
Jim Roth, EVP of Customer Support, Salesforce
That’s one reason we’re so excited about omnichannel planning on the Workforce Engagement platform. Today, most companies schedule work in silos by channel. The power of the Workforce Engagement product comes from using a unified but flexible set of logic to forecast, plan and schedule across all channels, from voice to chat to email and beyond. The platform allows you to overlay arrival patterns, service requirements and capacity models for all these cases for true omnichannel shift scheduling, which has long been an unmet need in the industry.
Jim: The Workforce Engagement product gives you visibility across all channels, so you can actually allocate capacity and staff agents across every channel and product seamlessly, instead of doing things manually or in separate teams. You can dynamically manage an omnichannel workforce easily from anywhere, matching the ideal skill and channel with the customer’s needs at just the right time. Automation with artificial intelligence (AI) can come in to optimize capacity planning of your service team, improving the experience for both agents and customers. There’s so much power in tying everything together in one platform for the entire lifecycle, from forecasting to training.
Speaking of training, I’m also excited about the platform’s ability to provide personalized real-time call center coaching and on-demand training anywhere through myTrailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform. Arrival patterns are random, and you don’t know when exactly an agent will be idle or busy.
Traditionally, when we have an eight hour training class for our agents we take them out of the queue for all eight hours. The Workforce Engagement platform lets you divide the eight hour class into bite-sized chunks on Trailhead and deliver the training during agent idle time, which is good for customers and good for our utilization.
Eighty-eight percent of service professionals report that the pandemic exposed technology gaps in their jobs
New Service Cloud innovations give organizations the technology they need today to support agents working from home, in the field or in a hybrid model – all in one system
Estee Lauder, Smile Direct Club and Sonos embraced Service Cloud 360 to meet new customer expectations
San Francisco — April 21, 2021 — Salesforce, [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today introduced the next generation of web security and SaaS — technology to support changing customer service expectations and provide connected, personalized service from anywhere on one digital engagement platform.
Over the last year, service agents moved quickly to work from their kitchens and living rooms, but relied on legacy technology—disparate, on-premise solutions and spreadsheets—that wasn’t designed to manage globally distributed workforces. At the same time, agents were reeling from a monumental surge in the volume of customer requests across all digital channels and new, in-demand experiences like appointment setting and curbside pickup.
Today, parts of the world are beginning to re-open—53% of U.S. consumers plan to fly on a plane by the end of this year, and 97% plan to shop inside a store. Reopenings will also introduce a slew of new questions around updated policies, protocols, and safety measures. This adds a new level of challenge for agents, who will be on the frontlines, and who are already contending with increased workloads and more demanding customers. In fact, 82% of consumers expect to continue contacting customer service at pandemic-level rates yet just 36% of service professionals feel fully prepared to handle a surge in service and support cases.
“We are on the cusp of a great reopening of society, and companies know they need to move quickly to seize the moment”
Clara Shih, CEO, Salesforce Service Cloud
“We are on the cusp of a great reopening of society, and companies know they need to move quickly to seize the moment,” said Clara Shih, CEO of Service Cloud, Salesforce. “While customers and companies alike are eager to return to in-person experiences, digital behaviors we learned and grew accustomed to during the pandemic are here to stay.”
According to a Forrester report authored by Kate Leggett, VP Principal Analyst, Forrester, “Customer service leaders must stay abreast of three megatrends in 2021 as they weather the storm: AI-fueled digital experiences underpin great customer service, modern agent desktops empower agents to best serve customers, and customer service technology enables resilience and sustainability.1
For companies to thrive, they need to make every customer engagement — from online to curbside to in-person — more valuable and empower their service employees to quickly help, whether they are working from home, are in the field, or working in a hybrid model. Today’s announcement includes key updates to Service Cloud Voice, Workforce Engagement, Visual Remote Assistant, and more, all applicable across industries from retail to manufacturing.
With many contact center leaders planning to maintain remote or hybrid work, old ways of working — like handling one support channel at a time or looking over a desk to ask a coworker or supervisor for help — are now obsolete. COVID exposed an opportunity to deliver great service from anywhere.
Service Cloud Voice brings together phone, digital channels and CRM data in one central view for service agents, and offers the agent real-time call transcription and AI-powered guidance on recommended next steps. For the first time, customers can connect their existing phone systems into Service Cloud Voice with Service Cloud Voice for Partner Telephony, creating a unified agent and digital channel experience to deliver faster, smarter and more personalized service.
Businesses have had to rethink their operating model and create a more flexible workforce. For example, with retailers seeing less in-store foot traffic, service associates working on the store floor need to have the ability and the training to also support digital requests in the contact center. But in this new environment, it’s critical more than ever to have the right customer service agent —with the right skills —talking to the right customers at the right time.
Service Cloud Workforce Engagement is a new workforce planning product that uses artificial intelligence to help service leaders predict how many requests will come into the contact center, and on which channels — including phone, email, web chat, text and social. Service leaders can intelligently plan staffing needs, matching agents to work based on their skills, availability and shift preference. Agents have a single workspace that integrates data, as well as real-time coaching and on-demand training from anywhere with myTrailhead, an online learning platform integrated directly into Service Cloud.
Eighty-one percent of service decision makers report that they are accelerating digital initiatives, and in the past year Einstein Bot conversations surged 706%, while service channels like chat, messaging apps and video support saw double-digit adoption gains.2
“Eighty-one percent of service decision makers report that they are accelerating digital initiatives”
Einstein Bots are intelligent chatbots that simulate human conversations and can quickly resolve common issues like processing a return or checking a flight status. In doing so, they empower agents to devote more time and resources to complex problem-solving and customer interactions. In just a few clicks with Salesforce’s low-code capabilities, customers can deploy a new chatbot by leveraging Pre-Built Einstein Bots to assist with service requests.
Field service is undergoing a massive transformation as in person safety and new precautions and ways of interacting become essential for how businesses reopen and effectively stay open. Office buildings, sports stadiums, and malls will need to ramp up to address throngs of people excited to be back together in the community again. Sectors including food service, manufacturing, sanitation, and utilities in particular are increasing their use of Salesforce Field Service to prepare for the surge in infrastructure and servicing demands– everything from elevator maintenance, lights and air quality systems as people return to work, to concert and sports venues, airports, and museums. These indoor spaces have largely sat vacant for the last 12 months, and require checks and maintenance before they are ready for prime time.
As companies continue to limit in-person interactions and prioritize employee health and safety, delivering trusted and effective visual support will remain important. Mobile technicians can reduce time on site by using Visual Remote Assistant, which allows technicians and agents to see what the customer sees through video support, so they can resolve complex issues from anywhere.
As companies pivoted quickly during the last year to serve their customers in new all-digital ways, they turned to Service Cloud to keep up with changing customer expectations and anticipate customers’ needs.
