Anana's value-added reseller relationship with Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories enables the integration incredibly innovative and successful "Virtual Hold Technologies" that lend powerful business benefits. Many enterprises and service providers effectively 'queue' callers waiting to speak to the next available agent by 'parking' these callers within the confines of the ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) or the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and then releasing them to the next available agent when one becomes available.

Most of us will already be used to prompts along the lines of "Your call is very important to us, so please remain on the line and we'll get you to the next available agent......." upon which you are returned to listening to music on hold.  Occasionally you may even hear "Your call is extremely important to us, please wait for the next available agent. Your expected wait time is 22 minutes".  Would you stay on the line when you heard either of these requests to waste your valuable time waiting on a call; that you are often getting charged for?  Certainly not!  At the end of the day, the consumer has a need, which is in the 'now', and needs to speak to someone.  Long periods of waiting in a 'queue' are frustrating, ineffective and blatantly tell the customer "Your call is not important to us, because if it was then we'd have enough people on duty to answer your call more quickly!".....

The industry accepts that it is very cost-ineffective to employ specialists or agents to handle all calls that hit the business.  It carefully balances average waiting times, with abandon rates and sets its own targets so that maximum operational efficiency can be exercised.  The customers don't accept this though.  They don't like it, and the message that waiting in queue's sends to them is one where their enquiry is NOT important.

Virtual Hold Technology is a clever adaptation on this theme, that allows the enterprise to pick 'valuable' customers out of the queue, and offer them a virtual place in the queue. This frees the caller to continue their activities, work, or other things, and the VHT solution will maintain their place in the 'queue' for them.  Cleverly calling them back just before they would hit the front of the queue, and immediately connecting them to the next available agent.  VHT is patented technology, aligned very well and tightly integrated into the Genesys IVR (GVP) and the Genesys Customer Interaction Management Framework.  Anana are specialists in the integration of VHT and Genesys in a wide range of scenario's, on a multitude of underlying technologies, not only for ACD and IVR integration, but the integration of VHT into the Web, for example, allowing an enterprises customers to book their own 'CallBacks' by filling in a simple form on the enterprise website.  This allows the Genesys technology and VHT to insert this user into the queue at the requested time, and call them at that time, with the customer records open on the agents screen and directly engage in activities/discussions with zero waiting in queue's.  The ability to do this before the fact, during the fact, and in a multi-channel way lends a very powerful additional layer of 'customer satisfaction' to the ability to fluidly and flexibly manage customer interactions against the opposing needs of the business from an 'expense' and 'operational' perspective.