Eric Klein, Cloudonix COO and author of The One: A Cruise through the Solar System, is the contextual communications expert that I interviewed at ITEXPO 2018. Automatically, I thought this must have something to do with recognition of people’s tone and other nuances of voice that we use to understand each other’s communication… kind of like what James Tagg, ex-CTO of Truphone and founder of the Penrose Institute, Hacklands and cen.ai Basic Intelligence Token (BIT) talked about at Cluecon 2017. When I asked Eric if my guess was correct, he responded with a description of use cases that includes the tech behind it and the way it makes solving customer service challenges big time.
He says, “We have one customer here in the USA that is running about 5 million devices on a very small footprint. We use 6 servers to manage their entire network. They wanted to offer a free service to their customers, not per minute, not via the PSTN connection. How do we do this over the top?”
Cloudonix COO Eric continues, “How do we use VoIP? They approached various CPaaS providers. All of them said something like, ‘You want 50 million devices with 10 million minutes per month. Okay, that is ½ cent per device. Okay, that will be 2.5 million USD per month.”
Response is typically, “No, that doesn’t make any sense. That is too expensive.”
So Eric says they built a solution that requires less server, does not connect to regular voice lines, doesn’t go to PSTN, no per minute fee. This allows them to do low bandwidth activities and low battery usage because they are using the SIP keep-alives … which help to keep the following from occuring: dropped calls, inbound calls from going straight to voicemail, only receiving some inbound calls, but not all, inbound calls that don't ring and inbound calls that automatically fail.
He notes that one of the side effects they discovered that is built into their system is the contextual communication. For example, their customer had an account with them for a car or a device and someone would call and say, “I need help. I need to know how to work this.”
Eric says, “If you have the policy number of the unit and the same unit as in the policy, they would give you service. The problem is that it wasn’t going to the person who had the same policy. What they found is because of the way we handle data out of stream back to their service, call center and CRM, they can now determine who the user is because it is already a two-factor authentication and they can determine the phone that they have which is registered with them.
“Because of the information on the phone inside the app, they are able to collect the data from the app… which page in my app are you on, which button did you click, what is the context of what you were doing? This information goes back to the call center and suddenly they know which device and which person is there. It is not just someone picking up the phone off the wall or off the desk … you actually know who it is. You can’t do that with regular caller ID identification. Now, it’s inside the data stream, fully allowing full blown data enablement from the app.”
“A good example is if someone is in an automobile accident. Everybody is safe. The first thing you have to do is exchange information with the other driver such as insurance and license. Call the insurance company to possibly have a tow truck take the car. All of this starts with, ‘Please type in your policy number. Who are you? Where are you? What happened?’”
“You go through a whole IVR menu and then you are finally with the agent. It may take 5-10 minutes’ worth of authentication and building a context of what is going on. You go into the app from the insurance company. You click the choice of ‘I had an accident.’ They know from the GPS of the phone where you are physically located. They know who are and what your policy is. This is already available with the setup of the Cloudonix app.”
“The agent may ask you to take a picture of the driver’s license of the other person involved which updates the system automatically. Now, ‘take pictures of the surroundings...you say there was no stop sign for you but there was for the other person? We need all this in case you need to go to court. You need a tow truck. It will be there in two hours. Let me send you a pizza and a bottle of something to drink while you wait…’”
Eric continues, “The claim can be completed through this simple app process while memories are fresh before the tow truck arrives.
“To take this one step further, partnered with the car company, sensor data can be read by the app off the car. What happened before, during and after the car crash? This reduces appraisal time and such.”
The above explains what contextual communication means.
“One can even hook up to Google Services for stress analysis and use it with a call center to see if a person is lying. The app can do transcription also. This whole setup makes processes available in a new way that are not available in traditional CPaaS,” Eric added.
I (Suzanne) mentioned that it was good that Eric described the technical process behind contextual communication and then gave a couple of examples. He replied that even developers need concrete applications of a technology to fully understand it. Like, it’s a wonderful technology, so what do I do with it?
One could apply the technique that Eric and I discuss here to a bank app for a mortgage company or to handle the kinds of challenges that companies like Uber and Food-to-Go have. It’s all about saving time and money and making the customer happy and making the customer want to stay aboard. Eric actually explains this use in detail also during the interview.
The use of contextual communication can help to reduce the number of agents a business needs to handle customer service, technical support and sales communications, or keep those agents and handle more customers. A happy employee is proud of the company and takes more initiative and a happy customer refers other happy customers, remember?
Eric discusses the fact that all the communications occur “in-app,” making it much more secure, even HIPAA-compliant, than traditional forms of communications. More information is available at cloudonix.io.
Learn from the most empowering companies at ITEXPO and other TMCnet conferences and exhibitions. (I'm with DIDX.net global wholesale DID number marketplace VP and Suzahdi.com custom designed cosplay and classic leather jacket business co-founder.)
