Vonage at Dreamforce 2023
That’s a wrap for Dreamforce ‘23!
From 1,000+ informative sessions and workshops, to fun, networking and a star-studded speaker lineup, the world's largest software conference delivered once again! Before we look ahead to next year, here’s a recap of some of our amazing customer sessions!
The Converging Technologies Driving the Communications Revolution
Dreamforce kicked off with the breakout session, ‘The Converging Technologies Driving the Communications Revolution’, where Reggie Scales, SVP Global Sales Applications for Vonage was joined by Jim Marshall, IS Project Manager at Thunder Funding, the premier carrier services and freight factoring company in the United States, to discuss how the consolidation of communications channels continues to impact all industries across the globe - a trend that is many years in the making.
As the world embraces a hybrid and work-from-anywhere model, companies have had to think beyond singular, standalone solutions and consider how they can deliver the needs of customers, employees, and agents - all from a single platform. More and more, businesses want - and need - the option of a unified communications solution, seamlessly integrated with contact center capabilities, including access to Salesforce and business apps all within a single dashboard, that also provide the kind of fully programmable applications that enable them to transform how they communicate and operate from anywhere. In this session, Jim Marshall revealed how Salesforce and Vonage’s solutions have transformed Thunder Funding’s customer and employee experience, while increasing productivity.
“We have really reaped the benefits when it comes to leveraging both unified communications and contact center solutions integrated with Salesforce, partly through the valuable reporting and data offered”, Jim commented. “Most of our company is using Vonage Contact Center now to leverage its native ability to record troves of data within Salesforce, linked directly to our customer and prospect records. Vonage Business Communications provides a call experience for our internal users that combines standard mobile phone calls and SMS use with VOIP desktop and integrated options. We also benefit from extensive intelligent routing options and integration with third party services as required.
“By the end of the first quarter following Vonage Contact Center implementation, we measured a 60 percent reduction in main line call volume”, Jim added. “Callers were reaching who they needed to faster and more accurately, reducing the need for repeated conversations.”
Jim also explained how Thunder Funding has recently benefited from two-way conversations with Vonage Conversations for Salesforce, a configurable omnichannel messaging app powered by the Vonage Communications Platform, enabling businesses to serve customers directly from the Salesforce platform and delivering exceptional customer engagements, whilst blending bot and Vonage Contact Center agent interactions.
Thunder Funding can now send more than 5,000 messages per day to customers and prospects. Conversations are managed directly in Salesforce, keeping the context of conversations readily available, and can be escalated to an agent once a lead is qualified.
"Vonage Conversations for Salesforce has enabled us to handle two-way interactions with our customers through SMS and MMS, improving our response rates and elevating our customer engagement," said Jim. "Getting the app set up didn't require any coding and the platform offers extensive customization to fit our specific needs. Customers can now more quickly and easily communicate with our client support and sales teams and we have full visibility of conversations across each department, with real-time activities accessible to supervisors on our live dashboard."
The Science of Patient and Employee Engagement
On Tuesday afternoon, Jonathan Kershaw, Director of Product Management at Vonage, was joined by Dr. Paramjit Chopra, Founder, Chairman and CEO of MIMIT Health, to discuss the science of patient and employee engagement.
Visitors to our breakout session learned how MIMIT Health, a multi-specialty physician group that provides world-class healthcare combined with minimally invasive treatments by industry-leading doctors, achieved the Quintuple Aim in healthcare through digital transformation with UCaaS & CCaaS: from a 360 degree view of the client to natural language IVRs and omnichannel capabilities.
“We live in a paradigm of care where we are centered on the patient, we are connected to the patient and we collaborate to achieve patient success”, said Dr. Chopra. “We cannot do that without making sure that every team member is connected in an omnichannel paradigm, with omnichannel communications. And we wouldn’t be able to achieve this goal without a communications platform like Vonage Business Communications.
“We’ve achieved a very high return on investment, consistently meeting and exceeding our quintuple aims and experiencing rapid growth as well as financial success. We’ve really established ourselves as leaders in the new era of healthcare delivery.”
5 Steps to Successful Customer Engagement
Day two of Dreamforce began with our breakout session, 5 Steps to Successful Customer Engagement, with Jay Bellissimo, Chief Operating Officer at Vonage and Brian Gressett, IT Senior Director of Sales & Marketing Technology at Credit Associates.
Visitors to this session learned how to utilize their data, deploy intelligent contact centers, develop omnichannel strategies, get started with automation, and deliver upgraded experiences for employees and customers.
Brian commented, “We have used Salesforce for more than 14 years and implemented Vonage because of its seamless integration with Salesforce, to allow our agents to use a single solution while fielding calls and cases as they either enroll new clients or assist existing clients.
“Since implementation we have seen an increase in client engagement across the board. We have improved contact rates and increased overall speed to contact on new web leads. This of course drives an increase in new client enrollments. We use the power of Salesforce reporting combined with all the great data that Vonage feeds directly into our Salesforce Org to create insightful dashboards that show our managers how well our agents are performing when completing outbound campaign calls. We all know in today's fast paced world, every second counts and we want our clients to know we are here and actively working on their behalf each and every day.”
Brian continued, “We also leverage Conversation Analyzer, Vonage’s Speech Analytics solution, to stay ahead of client escalations by quickly identifying keywords heard during the call that could single out a dissatisfied client. We then take immediate action to address those concerns. This results in improved client retention metrics and helps us to remain a leader in our industry.”
So what’s next for Credit Associates? “What’s next is adding to our array of Salesforce and Vonage products”, explained Brian. “We are very interested in Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice, which enables real-time call transcription that can then drive “next best actions” to be presented directly within Salesforce to our contact center agents. With this technology we can better address client questions and concerns, while quickly defusing what could become a client cancellation. This technology will also improve the overall knowledge and skill set of our agents.”
Before opening for Q&A, Jay summarized Brian’s five steps to successful customer engagement - deploying an intelligent contact center, visibility into the customer journey, analytics, automation and measurement.
The 3 Hallmarks of Exceptional CX
Vonage later participated in a theater session at the Dreamforce Campground, exploring the theme of the three hallmarks of exceptional CX. Reggie Scales, SVP of Global Sales Applications at Vonage and Chris Cushing, Consumer Experience Leader at Hallmark Cards, took to the stage to reveal how the leading manufacturer of greeting cards embraced the shift towards digitized shopping experiences, providing a personalized and memorable customer experience across multiple channels.
“One of our strategic priorities is to modernize our technology infrastructure and business processes, including an enhanced direct to consumer website and an iOS app that soft launched over the summer”, said Chris. “We also know that consumers expect a single, consistent profile across all of the places they shop and interact with us – in our Gold Crown retail store network, on Hallmark.com, within our streaming entertainment services, and our Care group. We’ve built knowledge articles to encourage self service and added virtual assistants for common requests. One of our Einstein chatbots focuses specifically on order status and the returns process for Hallmark.com orders and we’ve been able to replicate the experience using the Vonage Virtual Assistant to provide real time order details. We’ve also built in self service for our Crown Rewards loyalty program and are consistently finding that 30 percent of our consumers are engaging with self service. We have also found that when consumers interact with our virtual assistants before connecting with an agent, the calls are generally shorter, which reduces our cost per contact.”
Asked about how technology has transformed Hallmark’s employee experience, Chris commented, “We’ve looked to partners, including Salesforce and Vonage to help us get there and have made tremendous progress over the past four years by integrating these solutions into our consumer contact center. With Vonage’s solution, we’ve been able to start each call with a screen pop, we’ve been able to skill our agents in a more granular way that’s allowed us to route work more effectively. We’re able to set the priorities and then allow the logic to deliver the work across our internal and outsourced teams without regularly chasing the queues and reskilling throughout the day. We’ve also been able to reduce the overall number of team supervisors and refocus much of their time on coaching and development. Our overall handle time has decreased by more than a minute!”
And that’s a wrap! Read Vonage’s exciting announcements from Dreamforce here:
