Anana vConnect

Virtual Business Line and Auto-Attendant Solutions from Anana

Imagine... Your perfect business receptionist – what is he/she like? Perhaps they are fluent in over 20 languages, never sick, always polite, discreet and efficient, friendly and fun.

Now by using vConnect and for a fraction of the cost of hiring the ‘ultimate PA’ you can create that person within your organisation.

vConnect offers the ultimate caller experience, allowing your business to create the persona (personality, accent, dialect and attitude mixed to meet your needs) which best represents your company.

Incoming calls are routed directly to the person or department requested by the caller. The system can be used as a customer facing receptionist, or purely for employees to contact each other so it works on the 'inbound' and 'outound' telephone interactions between your employees and customers, customers and employees/departments, and employees to employees. It also works ’out of hours’, indeed 24x7; long after your actual reception staff has gone home for the evening.

vConnect Business benefits

• Enables Carriers and Service Providers to offer managed/hosted "Virtual Business Line Services" to their enterprise clients
• Enables the Enterprise to give their customers what they want, without having to wait for an agent or receptionist to answer their call
• Consistent, fun, and high quality of service to all customers
• Maintains your brand equity and corporate value's 365 days a year, without getting tired, bored or irritated
• Reduce the load; reduced workload for call center (call centre) staff, eliminating the need to handle routine and very repetitive tasks
• Significant reductions in operational costs, human resources and office space
• Customer data, and employee data (like telephone numbers) are never exposed
• Your employees get to decide how and when they can be reached on any phone, at any time; or even how calls should be diverted to colleagues if they don't answer
• Integrated with Voice Messaging, Unified Communications, email, SMS, MMS and web2.0
• Integrates with social-media - to play corporate/business or even employee or departmental based Twitter announcements in the TOP or TAIL of interactions with clients in real-time; helping the business to extend social-media marketing to the telephone channel
• Handles spikes and fluctuations in call volumes.  If you want to do a large advertizing campaign, but don't have a large enough call centre to handle the resulting interest; then deploy vConnect. It scales so easily that you can get 1500 concurrent caller interactions on a single 1U 'pizza' box in your data centre.  Try replacing that with 1500 staff in a call centre quickly and efficiently! (yes, its impossible to do so without HUGE capex - even if you wanted to outsource it would take months to arrange in advance)

As employees come and go, corporate phone directories very quickly become out of date. (A typical enterprise telephone directory suffers 20% adds, deletions and changes each month!) With Anana v-Connect employees are able to configure their own contact numbers. V-Connect will then route telephone calls, in the configured order, to their mobile phone, desk phone, P.A.or a delegated contact. It can even route calls down a 'hunt-group' or cascade of colleagues until eventually one answers; and if that fails the attendant takes a message from the caller, and distributes it as an email and SMS alert to the affected department or employee!

vConnect’s unique ‘Whisper’ (in technical terms an assisted whisper transfer) screening feature gives you options - “Call from John Smith, take it, or divert to voicemail?”, and it is even possible to direct calls from specific priority callers (like the boss!), directly to your mobile phone even where all others are transferred to voice messaging or a colleague. Users can WHITELIST or BLACKLIST specific callers so that they are treated differently by the attendant; screening inconvenience from their interactions at worst, or at best; making sure that the special call from the client is always answered....and quickly!

The Web User Interface

vConnect business users and administrators log into the system through its remote web interface where they can make real-time changes to their schedule, availability, available contact points and whereabouts. They can even delegate other contacts to take their calls during certain times of the day, or even modify their current time-zone if they are travelling so callers back at home who may not be aware they are 8 hours away in real-time don't inadvertently wake them up at 4am in the morning!

Example vConnect Manage Profiles page

If the employee is subsequently unavailable at the time of an incoming call, vConnect can take a message for them, nofity the user by email and SMS of the message (and attach it for convenience) to the message so the employee doesn't have to 'dial-in' to retrieve the message.

The solution works 24x7 and never sleeps, takes smoke breaks, gets ill or takes a holiday.  It knows with 100% accuracy who is available right now, in real-time anywhere in the world; and in any language you wish to communicate in.  It readily becomes the trusted, automated receptionist that will work hard for your business; always.

Changes to the web2.0 backend IMMEDIATELY manifest themselves in the Voice User Interface. E.g. An employee updates his schedule and presses 'save'. The update immediately changes the underlying VoiceXML mark-up so that the service handles the next call as intended.  Indeed, the Voice User Interface and the Graphical User Interface are driven by the same underlying platform; the Anana Speech Applications Framework.  The single instance produces HTML, VoiceXML, CC-XML and drives leading Voice Media platforms; like the Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) in real-time.  No complex batch or update processing necessary.  Make the change, press save, and the entire service logic updates in milliseconds!

As a Virtual Business Line Solution

As much as vConnect may be readily deployed by the Enterprise business themselves it also lends itself incredibly well to the service provider, carrier or local telecommunications company to offer as a managed or hosted service to all of their local Enterprise or B2B community.  Anana is happy to deploy the technology in a true multe-tenanted shared environment that is easy to manage up offer reliably n the Carrier context.

vConnect  also links to incumbent core telephony network technology for even more depth in functionality; for example; to Location Based Service infrastructure (LBS) so the physical location of endpoints and callers can be readily established.  A good example of this would be a National Sales Force in the United States covers 3 time zones.  A caller in New York places a call to the business concerned and asks for the SALES department.  vConnect will link in real-time to the employee directory, and lookup the current phone status on the core network and physical location in real-time and build a hunt-group for regionally local employees, who's phones are currently swithed on in the EASTERN Time zone only; and cascade to the CENTRAL or MOUNTAIN TIME ZONE at a second level.  Functions like transfer to 'nearest representative' also apply of course. 

 Other integrations include the detailed integration of vConnect into Voice Messaging; allowing the carriers standard voice messaging platform to be used as the dedicated repository for messages received and transmitted to each employee.  This enables Visual VoiceMail on devices like the iPhone or other Smart Phones to be included as an integral part of a virtual business line solution.  Add to this social-media aware voice messaging Voice User Interface (see its4u social-media aware voice messaging service description here)

In certain markets 1-800 or freephone services lend themselves well to vConnect; giving carriers the ability to offer 1-800 virtual business line solutions to the enterprise that generate revenue on the telephony side as well as the ultimate convenience as an enhanced service revenue generator to the business solutions team. It is not uncommon for the carrier to charge 'subscription' or monthly 'rental' for vConnect on a site or per user level basis.  With hundreds or thousands of business' suppoted on a very small footprint of equipment it is a very cost effective value added revenue generating service.

“I would have lost that deal if they hadn’t been able to get through to me at 9 o’clock in the evening”

“Makes us sound great, and so professional” “Customers just call me so they can speak to her!”

Anana is a vibrant, dynamic, high-energy technology company specialising in speech solutions with a refreshing approach to business communications. We are full of original ideas and actively use our expertise to transform these innovations into elegant solutions for your company. Anana ‘plug-in’ ready to go solutions like vConnect doesn’t mean there’s anything ‘standard’ about the applications. Each system we provide is ready to be transformed to reflect the unique character and personality of your individual business and it is emminently extensible.  Reliable yet malleable.

Anana have been providing speech application technology to large corporations for many years and every system has exceeded business expectations.
Anana v-series features. The range of pre-built speech applications bring advanced business functionality and plenty of personality to industry leading VoiceXML Speech Platforms like the Genesys Voice Platform. vConnect has been qualified and tested on GVP 7.6, 8.0 and 8.1 and VoiceGenie (VGP) 7 series of platforms. It supports any speech technology via the industry standard MRCP (Media Resource Control Protocol) Speech Engines; e.g. Nuance Speech Recogniser 7, 8 and 9, IBM, Telisma, AT&T Watson, Loquendo etc

Personality and caller experience can change automatically and dynamically, dependant on who is calling, where they are calling from, the dialled number, time of day, or if there are any current events or offers that the caller should be made aware of; including the insertion and playout (text to speech) of the latest offers on TWITTER or FACEBOOK, Hi5, RenRen, LinkedIn or any other Web2.0 social-media engine or framework.

vConnect operates in multiple languages, making the most of the advanced features of Multi Language speech recognition engine performance and capability.

Built ready to plug into your existing industry standard back end system interfaces, such as those already in place for your web site, minimising the effort required by your IT Department.

Examples of vConnect in Action

Please note; this is a very powerful BRAND demonstration and is expressed here to show how much focus is put on human-factors; and meeting callers brand expection head-on. 

This second example is more 'middle of the road' and would representative a classic enterprise persona.

What happens if the caller has absolutely no idea what they want, who they want, or even why they called your business?

You can also try vConnect at any time by calling Anana on +44 (0)8444 999 888 and ask for "Dave Tidwell" [Who may quickly live to regret the offer!] and you'll hear and be using vConnect in real-time.  If you'd like to see the backend or the vConnect capability set from the perspective of the 'employee' or the managing administrator then contact Dave as noted above to arrange a demonstration.