Challenges Are the Inspiration for Exceeding Expectations

The Vail Platform

The Vail Platform delivers leading-edge voice and audio analysis technology, evaluating the quality and character of voice interactions to provide new opportunities to improve customer experiences. Vail’s platform is the base for millions of customer interactions and pre-integrates with the cloud-based, carrier-grade enhanced network services, and sophisticated automation and analytics solutions.

Vail’s services are built on top of a platform of extremely performant building blocks that has seen over 25 years of continual improvement; all facets of this platform are regularly adapted to meet the ever demanding needs of our customers and the sheer scale of ports we now operate. Each platform component is designed to be highly available, scalable, maintainable, and reliable (N+N redundancy).

At the core of the platform is a Vail developed industry leading SIP stack. Additional platform services include:

• Vail developed routing engine (RACC)
• Call Detail Record (CDR) system
• Recording System
• VoiceXML/CCXML interpreter
• Whistle Engine
• Voice Clarity Measurement Enhancement (VCME)
• Prosodica
• Speech Analytics
• FreeClimb cloud API

Security and Compliance

We are responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of our products, solutions, and services, including hardware, software, networking, and facilities. Maintaining the highest security, regulatory and contractual compliance standards is vital to protecting the infrastructure we provide to our customers. Our standards are designed and managed in alignment with the nation’s largest financial and healthcare institutions, and is comprised of:

• Level 1 PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) Certified
• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability) Compliant
• Hosted in SOC 1 (Service Organization Control) and SOC 2 Compliant Data Centers
• CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information) compliance
• FCC (Federal Communications Commission) registered

Vail’s platform takes a multi-layered approach to managing authentication, fraud and denial of service attacks, and our dedicated 24/7 operations team focuses on prevention, detection, and mitigation of security threats.

Our security program is assessed multiple times every year through internal security reviews, and through audits performed by independent external assessors and risk management teams. Additionally, disaster recovery and fail-over modes on critical parts of our infrastructure are regularly tested without service impacts.

RACC provides the ability to control key elements of voice services at the network level to both operations and business-level users. This includes directing inbound customer-facing toll or toll-free numbers to a combination of destinations through the use of routing rules, as well as being able to initiate and complete Network Transfers to secondary destinations. Destinations can include:

• OnNet (within the dedicated voice network)
• OffNet (DID or toll-free)
• SIP Destinations (IP addresses)
• Network Destinations (i.e. emergency messages or announcements

In addition to the basic routing logic, RACC contains configurable call Retry Logic and Alternate Destination Routing (ADR) functions, which provide flexible and automatic failover capability. The RACC platform also allows integration with external IVR (Interactive Voice Response), ACD (Automatic Call Detection), and CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) systems, so that routing logic can be configured within RACC and/or via an external program.

Advanced features available in RACC include:

• Network Recording
• Network Queuing
• Dynamic IVRs (DIVR)
• Geographical Routing
• Pre-Route Messages
• Cradle-to-grave Reporting
• Voice Clarity Measurement and Enhancement (VCME)
• Prosodica

Mobile apps are an essential component of every enterprise’s customer services strategy, especially as they evolve into virtual assistants that rely on text and voice messaging. However, when the caller needs to escalate to a voice interaction with a live agent, context is lost in the transition of the call to the PSTN. Preserving this call data securely and providing a great customer experience is the goal of every enterprise call. Traditional PSTN solutions have also become more expensive and difficult for service providers to maintain, and most enterprises don’t have the infrastructure or resources to build an analogous solution.

Whistle Engine is an embeddable IP-endpoint technology available for mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop (Windows and MacOS). Integration is fast and reliable, and the secure data-passing capabilities support authentication and call context preservation, leading to better customer experiences. Whistle Engine is also HD-capable, improving call quality, and mitigates DoS attacks, shielding your contact centers from malicious internet assaults. All-in-all, this flexible and scalable softphone solution results in reduced operating costs and an improved customer experience.

Conversational self-service applications have been around for decades and, historically, managers responsible for maintaining these applications felt largely in the dark or forced to collect data from multiple sources, when all they really wanted to know was: “How are my consumers using the system and how can we improve their experience?” CUE provides customers insight to:

• Application-specific KPIs
• Predictors of success
• Critical points on a customer journey
• Parts of the application where callers spent too much time or fall out most often
• Most visited paths through an application
• Common customer requests

The CUE gateway receives application events, which are aggregated, analyzed, and published in real time to a secure dashboard and mobile (iOS) app. Application configuration is highly flexible and extensible, allowing developers to capture only those details important to their unique customer experience.

Designed by Versay Solutions, and hosted by Vail Systems, CUE’s cloud-based service supports applications running on the Vail Voice Platform, Avaya Experience Portal, Cisco Voice Portal, and the Amazon Echo, among other platforms.

Quality in telecommunications has traditionally been measured by perfect replication of the source signal at a destination. However, in phone calls, not all signal is actually beneficial to the conversation - Vail believes that a like-for-like call isn’t good enough.

VCME filters out detrimental pieces of audio signal, or noise, and optimizes the call signal to make voice interactions clearer and more understandable for all parties in the conversation. Voice Clarity Measurement provides scores for several clarity indicators for each leg of a call. This offers objective feedback on the call quality of both carriers and contact centers in the solution. Voice Clarity Enhancement delivers benefits for the three most watched metrics in a contact center – call handle time, repeat call rates and customer satisfaction scores – by selectively enhancing voice frequencies and removing distractions like background noise and static from the caller and agent’s environments.

VCME’s cloud-based patented digital signal processing technology is integrated with Vail’s proprietary voice platform, which reliably processes billions of calls every year. Customers using VCME enjoy calls that are more efficient, more satisfying, and more successful.

Call centers typically assess performance in vital aspects of the operation using metrics such as Average Handle Time, First Call Resolution Rate and Customer Satisfaction. However, these metrics can be difficult to manage, as improvement in one is often detrimental to another. This complexity makes it challenging to improve an agent’s performance, particularly when feedback includes complex and conflicting recommendations.

Prosodica is a brand-new technology that listens to conversational patterns and speaking prosodics to rate on-call performance in real time using a single metric. Prosodica brings operational best practices to every call by continually providing agents with feedback and guidance to improve their efficiency and effectiveness while helping them deliver better customer experiences.

By evaluating the performance and experience of every single call, it becomes possible for operations to understand which agents perform best on what types of calls and even at what times of day. Call centers can use this information to optimize routing rules to drive a reduction in average handle time while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction and reducing call backs. Uniquely, Prosodica also engages the agent in a gamified working experience that can help improve daily performance while reducing long-term attrition and operational costs.

Historically, call centers relied on manual listening and agent/customer self-reporting to monitor the things that take place during calls. However, this approach is labor intensive, it typically generates little data, and the data generated is often biased. Speech analytics systems can solve several of these problems, but these technologies can be complex and capitally intensive to implement.

We make it easy for call centers to utilize solutions with pre-integrated speech analytics technology hosted on Vail’s platform; pre-integration allows for immediate solutions without the need for complex IT projects or capital investment. Further, our speech analytics solution integrates with Prosodica to automatically select and analyze the most interesting calls. And for clients newer to this technology, Vail provides expert consultation to ensure a solid return on investment.

Using speech analytics, our clients better understand why their customers call and what makes up their most complex calls, while also spotting product or service issues voiced by their customers. This leads to better customer experiences, more rapid defect detection and a better overall understanding of customer needs. These insights are automatically generated, so customers additionally avoid the expense of staffing call listeners for quality evaluation.

FreeClimb helps developers quickly and easily integrate Vail’s telephony technologies into their software applications and offers the highest standards of security and stability in the industry.

With FreeClimb’s voice and SMS capabilities, you can build essential functions into your applications like:

• 2-factor authentication and/or verification
• Outbound calling for critical alerts
• In-call recording
• IVR (Interactive Voice Response)
• Number masking
• Payment reminders
• Outbound SMS

Features available via FreeClimb include:

• Local and Toll-Free Phone Numbers (auto-enabled for both voice and SMS)
• Voice Calls
• Call Queuing
• Call Recording and Storage
• SMS Messages
• Short Codes
• PCI DSS Certification and HIPAA Compliance
• Enterprise-Grade Support

Learn more and sign up for a free trial and $50 credit at FreeClimb.com.

Small businesses may not have the time, technical or financial resources to build a bespoke phone system for their business and yet want to provide a quick and easy way for customers to reach out to them. A good customer service is critical to converting a one-time buyer to a loyal customer.

Telekit makes it easy for customers to contact the business, talk to the owner or their support team and ask questions about their products and services. This is made easier by providing templates for announcements (e.g., greetings, special offers, etc.) and menu options (e.g., order questions, location, etc.) to quickly get the users started while having the flexibility to modify them. We also provide the option of purchasing a new business phone number from us or transferring over their existing phone number.

By providing great customer service, small business owners can connect with their customers to build trust and foster customer loyalty. We believe that Telekit will make that a reality.

Learn more and sign up for a free trial at Telekit.com.