Almawave and Cicero Partner to Provide Integrated Contact Center Solutions

By Peter Bernstein
Senior Editor

One of the things we keep hearing about as contact centers transform to include multi-channel/omni-channel capabilities is the need for integration of all types of information relevant to the customer journey that resides in various places. In addition, there is also a requirement that all of this information be easily visible for those who need it. This includes leveraging actionable insights gleaned from the increased use of big data and sophisticated analytics that enable enhancement of the customer experience when dealing with inbound or outbound interactions. 

An example of how “E”verything needed for enabling enterprises to have the best information available, particularly to frontline people in contact centers, is the recent announcement of a partnership between Cary, North Carolina-based Cicero Inc., a provider of analytics and automation software for the back office and contact center, and  Rome, Italy-based Almawave, a global provider of CRM, Big Data, text and speech analytics solutions.  The new partnership was created to bundle Cicero Discovery with Almawave's Iride Natural Interface product to meet the needs of contact centers in the midst of or contemplating multi-channel/omni-channel transformation.

This is an interesting combination.  Cicero Discovery is a tool that collects identified, targeted data from existing applications. According to the company, it provides user endpoint analytics by collecting activity data and mapping employee effort to highlight areas for improvement in business processes, compliance, training and application utilization. This enables business analysts and IT to target these areas with Cicero Discovery Automation to automate tasks and simplify workflows. It is being used by Almawave to access and pass this data between legacy and other end-user applications and the Iride Natural Interface.

The latter is a lot more than the name implies. Almawave's "Iride Suite" integrates semantics, statistics, automatic speech recognition, adaptive interface into a single platform.  In fact, as the partners explain, the aim is to enable contact centers to easily adopt Almawave's Iride Natural Interface as their single front-end multi-channel Customer Contact Management solution without the need for expensive, time-consuming integration projects.  

Cited as the specific benefits from the new integrated solution are its enabling contact centers to:

• Dramatically increase the operational efficiency with a significant cost savings
• Improve the employee experience and drastically reduce the need for training  
• Understand in real time the reason for any customer contact across channels
• Begin automating employee tasks and working with models based on process/case, reducing their effort during each customer interaction
• Improve the customer experience across contact channels
• Leverage legacy and other existing applications for easy integration and rapid implementation
• Drive CRM and other application actions

"Cicero's technology and experience in contact center environments have a perfect fit with our product strategy. With the integration of their product's capabilities, we can now offer to our clients enhanced opportunities to transform and simplify the way to engage with their end users, simultaneously improving overall satisfaction and achieving a new level of efficiency, never imagined before," said Valeria Sandei, CEO of Almawave. "We are very pleased with the initial results with our clients."

"Almawave's expertise and success in developing contact center technologies that reduce employee effort and improve the customer experience stands out in the industry," said John Broderick, CEO of Cicero Inc. "We're excited to have a leader in customer engagement complement their solutions with our technology. We look forward to working with Almawave on upcoming projects."

The goal of automation of business processes for use in transforming contact centers is two-fold. The first is obviously to put the right tools, in the right hands at the right time so they can handle interactions with customers with the best information available, and do so cost-effectively.  The second is to leverage the new ability to be responsive into enhanced customer experiences.  Getting both of these right requires a rather significant commitment to capturing and analyzing what information is needed by whom, when, where, why and how, i.e., assessments and a lot of integrations on the technology front. It also entails having a work force that can turn greater visibility into more compelling outcomes for customers.  It is why so much attention from solutions providers are now focused on a host of integrations and simplifying workflows.