What We Did at Awaken and CallScripter in 2019

At the start of a new year, it is always good to look back at what changes the previous year brought to the organisation, and it is always a surprise to see just how much a dedicated and hard-working team can achieve. As a company we have moved forward in leaps and bounds over the last year, so let’s take a look at some of the highlights that we have achieved.

A New Dawn Awakened

The biggest change for us was the launch of the new Awaken brand. It is hard to believe that just 12 months ago this didn’t exist, however, the shift in branding has been a huge boost for us as a company. The launch of the www.awaken.io website and consolidation of our product range under the Awaken brand has brought our existing CallScripter agent guidance product under the same umbrella as our newer products. This has given us a firm base from which we can continue to grow and develop new products and features going forward.

Growth in Our Excellent Sales Team

As we continue to grow our brand and expand our customer base we needed to grow our sales & account management teams too. These new additions have quickly become part of the family and will help drive the growth of new customers as well as maintaining the great relationships we have with our existing customer base. Therefore, we want to welcome:

• Thomas Perkins
• Fabienne Valentine
• Jack Goldsworthy
• Nathan Mushod

We are sure that all of them are going to be a great asset to the organisation as we help our customers get the most from our products.

New Exposure

As part of increasing awareness of our new Awaken brand, we attended the Call and Contact Centre Expo for the first time. This took place at the Excel Centre in the heart of London’s Docklands in early 2019. This show was a huge hit and we received some great positive feedback from a large number of attendees. This is something that we look to continue doing into the future and we have already booked our spot for this year’s conference which will take place in March 2020. It will be great to catch up if you are there, drop us a message to arrange.

Expanding the Product Range

Hard though it is to believe, we started 2019 with only a single product. CallScripter, our amazing agent scripting tool, but with the innovations we had up our sleeves we needed to add several new products to our range, and hence the Awaken brand was born. We developed four new products to add to our offering in 2019. This has enabled us to stick to our philosophy of keeping things simple by allowing customers to implement our systems without the need to disrupt existing processes. This means that customers are able to adopt any of our products into their existing processes quickly and efficiently and start seeing the results without having to go through months of project planning and implementation. This has allowed us to continue pushing the envelope with what we are able to deliver with each product.

Awaken Scripting

The continued development of CallScripter has allowed us to add several key features to the product in 2019. Some of these are to enable connections into our own suite of products, but others are standalone features that our clients have been requesting. Getting data out of the product is something that organisations are increasingly looking at doing as business intelligence reporting becomes key. Therefore, we added the ability to not only export data to our Awaken Insights product, but also the ability to schedule data extractions from CallScripter so that the data can be picked up by other reporting tools. We have also been working hard on making CallScripter work better with other third-party tools and services. This has meant releasing out of the box integrations with platforms such as Salesforce, Amazon Connect, Odigo and RingCentral as well as integration with our new Awaken Dispatch product. We have also enabled connectors to services such as WhatsApp and various SMS platforms such as Twilio, Cirrus and Bandwidth so that we can better meet the needs of our customers.

Awaken Conversations

This is one of the most exciting additions to our product portfolio released in 2019. Awaken Conversations is our cloud-based voice analytics software. This is a powerful product that uses machine learning to constantly improve the way it detects and analyses speech patterns. This means that not only are we able to look at the sentiments behind what is being said, but we can also identify the emotional quality of the voice and words as well. Using a combination of spoken words with acoustic attributes we are able to eliminate more false positives compared to standard speech analytics solutions. This means we are able to provide an accurate emotional score for each call that helps give a foundation for better training and positive reinforcement of agents.

Awaken Dispatch

This is a product that is born out of our Telephone Answering Service customers in the US and Canada but has also proven very popular with our facilities management and insurance customers. The product enables users to manage their own schedules using a simple web portal and enables customers who have a requirement for an on-call feature to better manage resources and communication.

Awaken Translate

Real-time translation has always been at the pinnacle of voice communication technologies. This is something that the general public has become increasingly aware of with tools like Google translate becoming widespread across mobile devices. As a commercial tool though, a rugged dependable voice translation service enables businesses to grow and adapt to a wider global market. Our Awaken Translate product is seeing the realisation of just such a concept. Having an online real-time translation tool means that team sizes can be kept smaller as the requirement for niche language experts is reduced. Capable of supporting multiple languages near-instantaneously this product enables call agents to respond quickly to spoken or written requests from customers. Understanding the conversation in their own language and then able to respond, just as easily, getting messages translated back to the customer. This helps to increase customer satisfaction as they feel that they are not fighting against the agent to get the help that they need.

Awaken Insights

This is our business intelligence product that incorporates data from not only our Awaken products but is also capable of bringing in data from other customer systems such as CRMs and telephony systems to provide a one-stop-shop for all your call-related data reporting needs. This lets business owners see a range of data in one place across departments or functions with ease. Getting to the information they need to make key business decisions quickly and easily.

Customer Growth

Of course, along with all the new products and innovations that we have brought to market in 2019 we have also expanded our customer base considerably. 2019 has seen us bring on board several key clients as well as developing our existing user base. North America has been the biggest growth market for us during 2019 with around 60% of our new customers coming from the region. These have included a Tier 1 bank that is leveraging our CallScripter software to standardise across their 20,000 plus agents to provide guidance for their call answering and customer service improvement. We also saw one of the largest global claim’s management administrators embrace CallScripter to help provide guidance for their agents. Europe has seen a facilities management company look to utilise CallScripter across all its EMEA contact centres for dispatching jobs and aiding its agents. It is not just CallScripter that is seeing client uptake though; Awaken Voice has proven popular and has been adopted by one of the top call tracking companies to provide enhanced voice analytics for their company and they are seeing great results from their use of it.

Final Thoughts

2019 has been a positive and successful year for us as an organisation. It has seen our product line grow and the creation of the Awaken brand has been received well and given us a level of cohesion. Our customer base has continued to grow, and we have been able to expand our marketing channels to take advantage of new opportunities. 2020 will look to build upon the success of last year and here’s hoping that when we do this next year we can have as many positives as this year.