Orlando, FL – Waterfield Technologies, a leading provider of customer service solutions, and Voxeo, the Unlocked Communications™ market leader, have partnered to address the unique customer care and communication challenges facing today’s financial institutions (FIs). This partnership will revolutionize the way banks and credit unions interact with their customers in five major areas to improve customer retention, competitive positioning and profitability.

“Focusing on customer loyalty and engagement has always been key to successful revenue growth for companies; however, the current economic pressures facing banks and credit unions across the country has amplified the importance of these initiatives,” said Anne Bowman, chief customer officer at Voxeo. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ loyalty to their primary banks fell to 23 percent in November 2011 from 32 percent in September 2010. “Banking customers are more likely than ever to switch their primary bank, creating a huge need for the industry to hone communications efforts that lead to increased loyalty,” she said.

Voxeo optimizes the way companies communicate with their customers using Interactive Voice Response (IVR), text, mobile web and social media. Waterfield has joined the Voxeo Connect partner program as a Certified Partner to offer deep expertise building and deploying solutions for financial institutions.

Together, the companies will deliver advantages in the following key areas:

1. Customer Experience Improvements. By leveraging the latest technologies and best practices, financial institutions can better balance the conflicting goals of improving customer loyalty while lowering costs. Many financial institutions haven’t updated their voice customer service channels in years. Waterfield and Voxeo enable personalized self-service capabilities that dynamically adapt to individual customer preferences, streamlining common requests for a better user experience and resulting in fewer overall transfers to a representative. The solution is also “multi-channel ready,” for a unified customer experience across voice, text, chat, mobile web, and native mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.
2. Proactive Customer Care. The most progressive financial institutions are using outbound IVR and SMS to offer customers the information they need, when they need it–and even before they know they need it. For example, outbound efforts can provide payment reminders, notifications and low-balance alerts to improve customer loyalty while reducing overall support costs. The solution easily integrates with common core banking platforms and utilizes existing business intelligence systems to enable personalized up-sell and cross-sell offers that drive revenue and increase Customer Lifetime Value.
3. Integrated Business Intelligence. IVR systems are a frequent source of customer as well as organizational frustration. When self-service is done properly, it’s a win for the customer and the business. The Voxeo and Waterfield solution offers built-in, actionable analytics and reports to eliminate the “black box” aspect of legacy voice platforms thus enabling customer-focused teams to easily pinpoint issues in real-time, better understand customer behaviors, and identify opportunities to enhance the overall service experience. This baseline understanding will empower organizations of all sizes to adapt and evolve their customer strategies to compete in today emerging financial marketplace.
4. Self-Service Administration. Unlike legacy IVR systems, Voxeo and Waterfield offer a solution built on known web standards for flexibility, control and ease of management. This standards-based platform enables FIs to utilize their existing IT staff to make routine changes and update self-service menus as dictated by the business. This capability represents a fundamental shift for FIs who have historically been captive to black box legacy IVR vendors for maintenance and upkeep of critical customer-facing voice channels.
5. Simplified Security and Regulatory Compliance. Banks are facing increased regulatory pressure to protect the privacy of customer data. With a 100 percent standards-based, certified-compliant solution and capabilities such as two-factor authentication and in-queue PIN validation, Voxeo and Waterfield ease the complexities of ensuring automated customer interactions are secure.

John Marino, president at Waterfield Technologies, said, “Industry analysts acknowledge Voxeo as a leading provider of IVR and multi-channel self-service. To that, Waterfield adds many years of financial services experience and pre-built interfaces to most of the common core platforms utilized throughout the industry. The combined solution positions our customers to take advantage of the latest technologies to build stronger, more profitable relationships with their customers and better compete for new customers.”

“Institutions that view their contact centers and services as a cost of doing business will struggle in a market where the source of differentiation has shifted to the customer experience,” said Denny Adams, director of channel sales at Voxeo. “We’re partnering with Waterfield to help financial institutions uncover opportunities to improve customer loyalty, drive more revenue and achieve bottom-line costs savings.”

About Waterfield Technologies

Waterfield Technologies is a leading provider of multi-channel customer service solutions for financial services and enterprise organizations worldwide. The company’s suite of solutions provides our customers the opportunity to improve the speed, quality and efficiency of customer, business partner and stakeholder interactions while reducing their overall assisted-service operating costs.

About Voxeo

Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web, unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 250,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web at www.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com or twitter.com/voxeo