Tag: Vonage

Singapore – Global cloud communications provider Vonage, a part of Ericsson, has announced the launch of generative AI for Vonage Conversational Commerce to provide better support for businesses. 

Leveraging the advanced generative AI capabilities of Jumper.ai that are seamlessly integrated with its Conversational Commerce solution, Vonage equips businesses with the resources necessary to establish personalised, real-time connections with customers across various platforms. This approach enhances the acquisition of valuable customer data and optimises operational efficiency through automation.

The latest enhancements to the Vonage Conversational Commerce solution, driven by generative AI, like the addition of a marketing template content generator, live chat assistance, and intuitive knowledge base inquiries, are making an impact on customer interactions across various touchpoints for modern enterprises, benefiting agent, marketing, and customer support teams alike.

Core to these new AI-powered capabilities is the introduction of AI-powered assistance in live chat interactions. The live chat will help agents tailor their responses and provide better customer service in real-time. 

Through enhancements that boost live chat response times and refine communication by providing agents with tools to adjust their tone and responses accurately, AI is empowering businesses to elevate agent productivity and enhance overall communication effectiveness.

Also part of the new offering is a content generator, which is designed for crafting WhatsApp-based marketing templates, empowering brands to speed and simplify the production of diverse marketing content and significantly reduce the workload on marketing teams. By cutting down on the time and effort needed to create different marketing messages, marketing teams can now handle multiple campaigns while ensuring each message connects with individual customers. These user-friendly templates enable businesses to establish meaningful connections that generate genuine leads and boost profitability.

Additionally, Vonage’s conversational commerce can now provide AI-powered answers through Knowledge Base, helping reduce human dependency and allowing a knowledge base AI bot to interpret user queries, parse through knowledge base documents, and answer user queries directly.

By utilising documents uploaded as the knowledge base to respond to queries and streamline customer support, Knowledge Base eliminates the need for canned, impersonal responses, delivering a more personalised experience for the customer. 

Vonage Conversational Commerce users can also now initiate WhatsApp referral campaigns right from the dashboard, giving them the ability to acquire new customers without additional marketing overhead costs. 

Lastly, Vonage has introduced Conversational Commerce APIs, allowing third-party apps to integrate with the Jumper.ai dashboard. This facilitates conversational marketing and commerce capabilities through integration with platforms like MoEngage and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These APIs empower marketers and product owners to upgrade from basic notifications to interactive conversations, leveraging Vonage’s capabilities to share product catalogues and facilitate transactions, thereby converting notifications into sales.

Generative AI-powered enhancements to the Vonage Conversational Commerce powered by Jumper.ai solution are currently in beta and will be generally available in the second quarter of 2024. 

Savinay Berry, EVP of product and engineering at Vonage, said, “We are seeing a significant increase in demand for integrated AI capabilities that can easily be expanded across platforms as businesses recognise the efficiency and customisation possibilities that generative AI offers. By integrating state-of-the-art generative AI capabilities with our Conversational Commerce solution, we are empowering users to generate creative content, automate tasks, and improve the overall user experience.” 

Speaking on these updates, Krishna Baidya, Sr. director of information and communication technologies at Frost & Sullivan, also shared, “Advancements in generative AI can be harnessed to significantly enhance Conversational Commerce solutions, empowering e-commerce marketers and online retailers to seamlessly connect with potential customers while delivering a personalised experience.” 

“Infusing generative AI with the knowledge base, brands can respond to queries and streamline customer support, ensuring efficient and reliable self-service options during conversations. Adding AI-powered assistance in live chat interactions will boost agent productivity and communication effectiveness,” she added. 

Meanwhile, Kamila Skötsch, global CRM team lead at HolidayPirates, said, “With WhatsApp and Vonage, we’ve been able to better identify and market to the top 25 percent of our active subscribers. Our subscribers using WhatsApp are faster to act on deals than people using other channels, generating more traffic to our partners with click-through rates as high as 40 percent and some messages receiving a 97 percent open rate.” 

Singapore – Vonage, a worldwide cloud communications company that helps organisations accelerate their digital transformation and a subsidiary of Ericsson, announced today a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This collaboration seeks to speed up the availability of innovative solutions to millions of developers on AWS Marketplace.

In this partnership, Ericsson’s 5G network capabilities and AWS services will combine with Vonage’s platform, which offers communications APIs and network APIs that interact with CSP networks. Customers will be able to use the network for innovation and improve their overall customer experience thanks to this connection, which will enable AWS and Vonage to develop a variety of solutions. 

Vonage Fraud Protection will soon be available on the AWS Marketplace and will consist of multiple parts. These include the Fraud Defender solution powered by AWS generative artificial intelligence (AI) services, the Vonage CAMARA-based API SIM Swap (which will be in alpha upon release), and the Verify and Number Insights APIs paired with Amazon Rekognition. Vonage hopes to accelerate the market rollout of network API capabilities by continuing to build solutions such to this one with this improvement. 

The SIM Swap network API is intended to allow developers to determine, among other things, whether fraudulent behaviour was engaged in the recent SIM card transfers of a phone number. Vonage’s new Fraud Defender API is designed to identify fraud signals in advance, and its Verify API makes secure, silent authentication easier. The Vonage Number Insights API also has the ability to score fraud.

With the use of AWS generative AI services, our solution’s fraud detection skills will be further improved. Businesses will be able to improve customer satisfaction while strengthening their defences against mobile fraud thanks to this connection. 

Speaking about the partnership, Kathrin Renz, vice president of AWS Industries, said, “AWS and Vonage have a shared passion for helping customers deliver innovation and value. Working together with Vonage, we aim to drive new industrial and enterprise applications across industries that combine 5G networks and technologies like generative artificial intelligence to fuel new products and enhance the overall customer experience.” 

Meanwhile, Niklas Heuveldop, Vonage CEO and head of business area global communications platform for Ericsson, stated, “By working with AWS, we will accelerate our ability to embed communications and network APIs in applications and deliver new product offerings for AWS and Vonage customers. With network APIs, we are exposing new capabilities from within the 5G network that have never been available before, allowing existing applications to be enhanced with network information and enabling the development of a new class of applications.” 

Speaking about the fraud detection, Nick Laidlaw, chief technology officer at Voicify, said, “Voicify already integrates Vonage’s communications APIs into our conversational AI experiences tailored for the restaurant industry. With the new Fraud Protection Solution that includes AWS and the addition of network APIs, such as SIM Swap, we can enhance the level of security we offer for SMS and telephony, ensuring transactions are secure and valid and reinforcing our commitment to providing a trusted conversational AI service.”

Singapore – 80% of APAC customers are likely to take their business elsewhere as a result of poor experiences, and 61% of consumers will not tolerate bad experiences and will walk away after just one or two bad encounters, according to the data cloud communications agency Vonage in their ‘Global Customer Engagement Report’ for 2024.

In connection to this, the report stated that APAC consumers claim that their poor experiences are mostly consisted of long wait times when speaking with an agent (63%), no way to speak to customer service via voice/phone (59%), lack of 24/7 support availability (48%) and lack of self-service support (46%).

These findings are especially important, given that the global data revealed that APAC consumers continue to prefer a range of channel options when communicating with businesses, with mobile phone calls (36%), messaging/non-SMS apps (31%) and phone calls via apps (29%) ranking high in preference. However, less than half (42%) indicated they are “very satisfied” when communicating with businesses.

As such, these findings underscore opportunities to leverage AI. With tools like AI-based virtual assistants, businesses are equipped to provide quick resolution, reduce frustrations and ultimately provide a more targeted and personalised experience for the user. 

With AI, businesses can specifically address urgent customer inquiries, provide smarter self-service at scale, and deliver smart interactive voice responses and skills-based routing to connect customers with an agent best suited to handle their query, preventing and mitigating a bad customer experience. 

Lastly, report findings demonstrate that consumers are embracing AI to make their experiences better. In fact, responses show a likelihood that chatbot and video chat usage will more than double within the next year, with 10% using chatbots today and 23% expected usage in the next six to 12 months. Additionally, 13% indicate they’re using video chat today, with 26% expected usage in the next six to 12 months.

Talking about the findings, Joy Corso, chief marketing officer at Vonage, said, “This data underscores that, to differentiate on customer engagement, businesses need an omnichannel communications strategy that allows customers to contact them seamlessly across their preferred channels.”

“Those that do will also benefit from the ability to leverage the powerful capabilities of AI across communication channels, such as voice, video, messaging, and chat, enabling them to augment live customer support. This goes a long way to ensuring personal and real-time customer engagement at every touchpoint,” she added.

Singapore – In collaboration with global customer relationship management (CRM) software company Salesforce, global cloud communications firm Vonage has launched Vonage ‘Conversations for Salesforce’, a configurable omnichannel messaging app powered by the Vonage Communications Platform. 

Vonage’s new app provides a flexible and scalable way of sending SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp messages from within Salesforce, making it easy for businesses to develop custom workflows using standard Salesforce tools.

This feature aims to enable businesses to serve customers directly from the Salesforce platform and deliver exceptional customer engagements, whilst blending bot and Vonage Contact Center (VCC) agent interactions.

With Salesforce as a single source of truth for customer data, users can participate in a conversation and access the entire customer history. Response-handling can also be automated with chatbots or routed automatically to the right agent or organisation to enable fast resolution.

Savinay Berry, EVP, product & engineering at Vonage, said, “Vonage ‘Conversations for Salesforce’ unlocks the power of delivering personalised two-way interactions with customers from Salesforce, enabling engagement at scale with SMS, MMS and WhatsApp channels while blending bot and VCC agent interactions.”

“Based on Salesforce’s best practices and latest tools, the app overcomes the constraints of existing solutions and is enabling conversations across the entire organisation,” he added. 

Vonage Conversations for Salesforce is part of the full Vonage AI Acceleration Suite for Salesforce, a portfolio of AI-capable, low-code/no-code programmable components that aim to help speed business transformation and seamlessly integrate with Salesforce applications to enable personalised conversations across omni-channel communications.

Singapore – Cloud communications provider Vonage has announced an artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration suite to aid in the development of applications that deliver smarter solutions to drive business productivity and better experiences and engagements.

The new AI suite allows businesses and developers to deploy omnichannel customer journeys that use the power of AI and customer data to incorporate intelligence and automation into their customer experience applications.

For Vonage, the need for new and intelligent applications is accelerating as organisations look to enhance digital engagement for every stakeholder–which includes the customer, agent, and employee–to address each unique use case. They have also noted the rise of a new community of non-developers or so-called ‘citizen developers’, who are looking to create applications with real-time communications and seamless digital experiences.

Vonage’s suite solutions can be used together, flexibly in different combinations, or individually according to application needs. In addition, developers extend use cases and build specialised applications on top of other solutions with open access to Vonage communications APIs for voice, video, SMS and messaging.

Savinay Berry, EVP for product and engineering at Vonage, said that to meet evolving customer needs – and demand – for better ways to connect across channels of choice, enterprises today are looking for solutions that speed and simplify the development of intelligent, AI-powered customer experience applications.

“Vonage AI Acceleration Suite enables businesses to create better outcomes and enhance productivity with AI processing and programmable solutions that are essential for developers and non-developers alike to meet this growing demand for simpler and faster methods of application development to create a better overall customer journey,” Berry said.

Singapore – Manulife Singapore, a provider of insurance and financial planning solutions has partnered with Vonage a global cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, to enhance customer engagement in the Asia Pacific region.

As part of the partnership, Manulife Singapore will use Vonage’s SMS API to deliver automated and timely notifications for one-time passwords (OTPs), policy notifications and promotional messages to its customers in the region, including Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and China. 

In addition, Vonage APIs enable businesses to easily build intelligent, intuitive customer experiences directly into their existing applications, systems and workflows, enabling communications across any channel and on any device for better customer engagement.

Sunny Rao, Senior Vice President, API Global Sales of Vonage, said adopting digital solutions and personalised customer experiences has become critical to meeting changing customer expectations and strengthening brand loyalty. In fact, 71% of Singaporean consumers were more likely to buy again from a brand that treated them like an individual. 66% only buy from brands that understand their preferences, such as communicating through their favourite channels1.

“SMS remains a vital communication format in the Asia Pacific region, where mobile penetration continues to rise, with 1.8 billion subscribers expected by 20252. Vonage’s solutions can help businesses create seamless customer journeys through automated communications solutions. This ensures that businesses are engaging with customers on their preferred channel in a continuous and timely manner,” Rao said.

Both the number of application-to-person (A2P) messages and their value are growing as brands add mobile and digital channels to interact with their existing customers and recruit new ones. 1.3 trillion A2P SMS messages were sent in 2020, in emerging Asia Pacific, accounting for 70% of all A2P messages worldwide. It is expected that the number of A2P SMS messages will reach 1.9 trillion by 2025.

As a Vonage API Services customer, Manulife Singapore’s developers also benefit from priority support via a designated support team contactable through all channels and access to an Enterprise Service Manager who can assist with on-boarding and ongoing project success.

Singapore – Japan-based virtual space office platform VoicePing has tapped global cloud communications company Vonage to power its virtual reality travel experience via its Dokodemo (Anywhere) Door Trip service, which uses 360° photography and video, as well as VR goggles and a computer, to enable users to enjoy virtual travel as if they were there in real life.

To provide a high-quality VR travel service, VoicePing needed to implement superior video calling capabilities quickly and seamlessly within their application and at scale. Using the Vonage Video API, VoicePing built a VR travel service that enables overwhelmingly realistic video playback, two-way voice communication, and automatic AI translation. 

In addition to Dokodemo Door Trip, VoicePing and MetaReal are developing a variety of VR services powered by the Vonage Video API, including Dokodemo Door Party, which creates a realistic karaoke experience; VR Therapy, which allows users to experience therapy in a virtual space; and VR Music, a live music distribution service. 

Kei Shimizu, project manager at VoicePing, said that their company aims at building solutions that empower people around the world to interact with anyone, anytime, anywhere, language-free, and enjoy their lives, work, and lifestyles through the use of the latest technology.

“We chose Vonage to develop the video function within our advanced VR experiences because Vonage provides high-quality video and audio, is easily implemented and operated within our applications, and has global reach and scale to grow as user adoption grows around the world,” Shimizu said.

Meanwhile, Amitha Pulijala, VP of product, platform services, AI and video at Vonage, commented that they are proud to enable innovative businesses at VoicePing to build immersive, interactive virtual experiences around the world.

“The pandemic has greatly restricted the ability to travel and experience new countries and cultures, and caused a major shift in the way we engage with one another. As more and more experiences become virtual, demand continues to increase for experiences that rival in-person interaction,” Pulijala said.