Fact Sheet

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Better Agent Tools. Sharpen is the first contact center platform built specifically with the agents in mind. By providin
Fact Sheet About Sharpen

• Founded in 2011 • 14 Global Regions • 40+ Data Centers • MOS Score

4.4 Hourly Average MOS Score for 2017 (highest possible quality)

• 99.999% uptime, financially backed

Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that helps companies create perfect customer experiences and improve agent satisfaction. Sharpen is committed to creating a better agent experience by developing software and relationships to solve communication problems. Designed for agent productivity and efficiency, Sharpen’s platform enables customer experience teams to establish a better relationship with their customers.

• 300 Global customers

SWEDEN 2 FRANKFURT MONTREAL OHIO 3 OREGON

3 IRELAND

NINGXIA

UK N. VIRGINIA 5

BEIJING SEOUL

FRANCE

3 N. CALIFORNIA TOKYO 3

BAHRAIN

HONG KONG 2 MUMBAI 2 SINGAPORE

Global Cloud Communications Sharpen POP Regions

#

Sharpen Data Centers

SYDNEY 3 SÃO PAULO 3

Sharpen Pending POP Regions

Sharpen is a better contact center platform. It’s a fresh take on a set of problems that have burdened the world (businesses and customers alike) for more than half a century. While other vendors make lofty claims about their technology or their methods, it doesn’t take much digging to find some limitations. Typically those limitations come from building software founded on the mindset of traditional on-premise contact center systems. Sharpen offers a cloud-native solution, one that is free of the limitations that come with the solutions of the past. The result? Sharpen creates happier, more effective agents who create happy, loyal customers.

Better Agent Experience Agent turnover lives at the center of every problem a contact center faces. Sharpen takes a holistic approach to defining Agent Experience by looking at three factors: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Empowerment, to improve every contact center.

Fact Sheet A Better Platform No two contact centers are the same, so why would a vendor offer a solution with limited flexibility and customization? With Sharpen’s web-based admin tools, extensive API interface, and [dot]CX scripting language, companies are given the keys to the kingdom, and are allowed to drive their contact center in any direction they’d like. With this amount of customization, companies can create the picture perfect experience for agents and customers.

Better Agent Tools Sharpen is the first contact center platform built specifically with the agents in mind. By providing agents with better tools, like Sharpen’s better omni-channel solution, Sharpen empowers agents allowing them to do their job more efficiently.

Better omni-channel Sharpen offers companies a better omni-channel solution. Agents have the ability to interact with customers on the channel that makes the most since for both parties, and offers agents the ability to seamlessly transition from channel to channel all within the same interaction. With Sharpen, agents are no longer required to work in multiple different systems and platforms, and can now solve customers problems quicker and more efficiently.

In-line training SharpenU delivers microlearning exercises in the agent’s queue. This in-line training helps agents learn with small, contextual lessons for improved retention and efficiency. No more shutting down operations for occasional training.

Workforce Management Managing a workforce doesn’t begin and end with numbers. Sharpen uses traditional scheduling tools as a piece of a much larger mission… improving supervisor and agent experience. With Shapen’s WFM features, companies get a high-level view of queue activity, or by-the-minute granularity for each agent. Look into any interaction of any type, review content, leave feedback, and start coaching conversations.

[dot]CX customization Sharpen has created the industry’s first object oriented programming language focused on customer service. With [dot]CX, companies are able to easily customize their platform and tailor it to the direct needs of their customers. [dot]CX usage is so simple even someone with no coding experience can create exactly what the company needs.

Sharpen Insights Insights puts a long list of predefined data points at your fingertips, then lets you combine them to create custom Derived Fields. Still not enough? Get exactly what you’re looking for with raw SQL queries. Pull standard data or create your own KPIs to suit your business, then display the data beautifully with custom dashboards. Save the results, or check one box and turn a static graph into a Live Chart for real-time analytics.

Learn More About Sharpen For more information visit www.sharpencx.com

You’re good. Let’s get better. Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that helps companies create perfect customer experiences.

Company Overview Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that helps companies create perfect customer experiences and improve agent satisfaction. Since its founding in 2011, Sharpen has remained committed to creating a better agent experience by developing software and relationships to solve communication problems. Designed for agent productivity and efficiency, Sharpen’s platform enables customer experience teams to establish a better relationship with their customers. Its cutting-edge technology also helps eliminate costly on-premise hardware and makes customers happier through frictionless interactions.

Executive Bios Cameron Weeks, Co-Founder / Chief Executive Officer Cameron has 13 years of experience with large-scale computing and software development. Since founding Sharpen in 2011, Cameron has lead the company through product ideation to today’s award-winning, first of its kind global platform. In addition to product development, Cameron has assisted in growing the Midwest Venture Capital market and is an active member of the Indiana Technology and Innovation Council advising on policies that affect technology-related companies in Indiana.

Bracken Fields, Co-Founder / Chief Technology Officer Bracken has been with Sharpen since inception, wearing many product-related hats along the way. Now as CTO, he is responsible for ensuring the products Sharpen builds are relevant to the market and highly available on a global scale. Bracken’s notable achievements include the creation of Sharpen’s global replication technology, Sharpen Q, and Insights.

Pam Hynes, VP of Customer Experience Pam is an experienced leader in providing cloud-based communications and engagement solutions to contact centers. Pam brings 30+ years experience working with the early tech startups that became public companies such as Software Artistry and Interactive Intelligence. Throughout her career, she has spearheaded a number of key initiatives focused on the best ways to service customers. She helped define the ways companies should engage customers to provide the highest levels of customer experience and has become a published author on the subject.

Bill Waller, VP of Customer Care and Enablement Bill brings over 20 years of management experience in technology companies to Sharpen. He was most recently VP of Global Support for Interactive Intelligence/ Genesys, managing the Global Operations and Support teams. At Sharpen, his teams are responsible for providing every improving customer care and pre-sales technical demos to prospects.

Austin Evans, VP of Strategic Growth Austin joined Sharpen as the first full-time employee. He has gone on to found and/ or lead multiple teams throughout Sharpen including Telecom Partner Program, Platform Enablement, and most recently Lead Generation. Austin’s has been included in the “Techpoint Tech 25,” honoring the 25 most influential non C-level managers out of the 80,000+ tech employees in the State of Indiana. He has also been one of 35 finalists for the “College Mentors for Kids Inspire Award” for starting ProjectTick, a social entrepreneurship that tracks, inspires, and connects kindness.

Murph Krajewski, VP of Marketing Murph has been in the contact center industry for nearly 20 years, in a variety of rolls. He’s seen multiple sides of contact center systems. As an alumnus of Interactive Intelligence, he’s gotten his hands dirty as a system admin, spent time with agents on the front lines of customer service, and has gathered insight on what it takes to provide great customer experience. Murph is focused on telling the Sharpen story, and using it to bring businesses into the modern age of customer service.

You’re good. Let’s get better. Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that enables customer experience teams to establish a better relationship with their customers. This global platform eliminates costly on-premise hardware, increases agent efficiency, and makes customers happier through frictionless interactions. Sharpen is committed to building a global community of companies who believe that a happy customer is a loyal brand advocate waiting to happen. For more information about Sharpen’s products and services visit sharpencx.com or contact us at 855.249.3357.

Dorel Case Study How Global Company Dorel Juvenile Mastered Omni-channel Consumer Care Dorel Juvenile is the largest manufacturer of high-quality, safe and fashionable car seats. With a frontrunner mentality that matches their position as a global market leader, Dorel Juvenile desired to deliver consumer service that aligned with the innovation of their products. To maintain a strong connection with consumers through active engagement and service, Dorel Juvenile added various communication channels to its overarching consumer service strategy. This allowed issues to be reported from different portals such as Facetime, Facebook, Twitter, phone, email, web chat and video chat. Despite the wide range of communication options, Dorel Juvenile’s consumer care team operated in silos and agents could not seamlessly switch between channels during interactions. If a consumer’s problem could not be solved on the channel used initially, the interaction would end, forcing the agent to restart the conversation on a different channel. As a result, agents’ jobs became more complex and time-consuming as Dorel Juvenile struggled to forge together these various portals to create a smoother consumer experience. Accurate reporting was impossible, making it even more difficult to identify problems and resolutions. Agents even resorted to using their personal mobile phones in their efforts to solve consumer problems. In need of a cost-effective solution that handled all channels seamlessly, increased productivity, cut costs and boosted agent effectiveness, Dorel Juvenile sought the support of Sharpen Technologies, a contact center platform that supports a better agent experience and solves today’s biggest communication problems. Sharpen’s platform is armed with unique omni-channel capabilities, so Dorel Juvenile agents could interact with consumers across any channel including SMS, web-chat, email and phone calls all within one interaction. It also provided access to past history for consumers, allowing agents to see previous conversations and pick up where they left off. From these changes, agents improved the average inquiry handle time by 60 percent and were able to resolve 30 percent more calls with the same amount of staff members. Sharpen’s platform also helped Dorel Juvenile improve several critical processes. For instance, warranty returns previously required the consumer to send parts via mail, which could take a span of weeks to get resolved. Now, thanks to Sharpen, agents can receive pictures via text message while on the phone and complete the process the same day. Since implementing Sharpen, Dorel Juvenile has experienced a 32 percent gain in ROI and saved more than 20 percent in overall contact center costs. Dorel Juvenile supervisors also now have accurate data on KPI’s to make more informed decisions and determine if changes are helping or hurting the team’s performance. In addition, thanks to Sharpen’s platform, Dorel Juvenile also received multiple 2018 Stevie Awards for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service and Contact Center of the Year. These positive results prove omni-channel is no longer just a CRM initiative, but a way to ensure survival in today’s highly-saturated marketplace.

You’re good. Let’s get better. Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that enables customer experience teams to establish a better relationship with their customers. This global platform eliminates costly on-premise hardware, increases agent efficiency, and makes customers happier through frictionless interactions. Sharpen is committed to building a global community of companies who believe that a happy customer is a loyal brand advocate waiting to happen. For more information about Sharpen’s products and services visit sharpencx.com or contact us at 855.249.3357. 006 CS 0318

Druva Case Study

Introduction

In recent years, the maturing of the cloud has opened the door to entire industries, some nonexistent a decade ago. Through it all, Druva has remained a mainstay in optimization of the cloud, and has worked with many large corporations to fully reap the benefits of cloud services. Based in Sunnyville, California, Druva is a cloud data management and protection service provider. They offer a first-of-its-kind solution giving business greater visibility of critical information while reducing the risk, cost, and complexity of managing and protecting data. Druva has also been featured by Gartner as leaders in multiple research reports, including the Magic Quadrant. Druva’s contact center is located in India which brought many of the challenges with international locations, including poor call quality, and an inability to integrate their contact center platform with Salesforce. They found that their efforts to create a unique customer experience were directly blocked by the limits of their technologies.

Problem Before Sharpen, poor call quality made it hard for agents to understand, assist and inspire confidence in customers. Agents were often forced to ask customers to repeat themselves, making the job of successfully completing each interaction much more time consuming and tedious. This lack of quality also made it difficult for agents to give customers a feeling of confidence. On top of existing quality issues, Druva faced an even worse problem… they were being marched toward a cliff. The platform they were using had been slated for end-of-life, and their vendor’s option for the future took them out of the frying pan, and into the fire. Suddenly, Druva’s contact center operations were thrown into doubt, and they needed a strong solution they could move to quickly. In the pending change, Druva needed to find a solution that could maintain their tight integration with Salesforce.com. Though they had created a strong connection with Salesforce, agents were still working in multiple windows, often forced to sign out of one platform before being able to work in another. Druva needed a solution that was able to both continue their advanced usage and combine the functionality of both systems in order to dynamically analyze interactions, route them appropriately, and streamline the job of the agent. Using their previous contact center platform provider, Druva was often frustrated by the lack of transparency offered to them when their platform experienced issues or needed an update. Druva wanted to know why issues were occurring, and how they could prevent these issues from happening again. Unfortunately, Druva never received the level of clarity they needed to operate smoothly, and found themselves in the dark.

Solution

Sharpen was able to give Druva the assurance and clarity they needed, deep access to useful customer data, and the call quality to get over international hurdles. Immediately, Druva discovered the depth of visibility into Sharpen’s platform data. They could use either preformatted reports for simplicity, create their own custom reports from the long list of data fields, or use derived fields to merge data points and create their own KPIs. Beyond deep data, they were spared operational headaches around updates and maintenance due to Sharpen’s real-time updates in the cloud.

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Druva Case Study With Sharpen, Druva has high-definition call quality on a platform that delivers audio with a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.4 consistently, without requiring MPLS circuits. Sharpen gives Druva’s agents clarity to communicate with customers anywhere in the world. This makes it easier to understand and solve customer issues, reinforcing their reliability as a service provider. Druva has taken advantage of Sharpen’s deep integration with Salesforce.com, using customer data to dynamically route interactions to the best agent. The same relevant Salesforce.com data is presented to agents during the conversation in order to provide a full view of the customer and issue history. This lets agents work in one interface, with all data synced in real-time, making them more efficient and accurate. Druva has also become a more agile company. Thanks to Sharpen’s ability to spin up features in a short period of time, Druva can now quickly expand their operations. They have a better understanding of why problems occur in their contact center, and how they can prevent them from happening, which has resulted in fewer overall issues.

Results

“Before Sharpen, our call quality was terrible,” said John Stern, Director of IT. “Sharpen was able to provide us with great international call quality that has made the job for our agents so much easier.” “We are so grateful for the level of transparency that the Sharpen Care team offers us,” said Stern. “We now know why things began to have issues and we can be preemptive on our end to ensure these issues don’t happen as frequently.” Druva has seen significant improvement in their contact center performance since the implementation of the Sharpen platform, and avoided the pain of having their communications pulled out from under them. In fact, since the use of Sharpen, Druva has won multiple Stevie Awards for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service in 2017 and 2018.

You’re good. Let’s get better. Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that enables customer experience teams to establish a better relationship with their customers. This global platform eliminates costly on-premise hardware, increases agent efficiency, and makes customers happier through frictionless interactions. Sharpen is committed to building a global community of companies who believe that a happy customer is a loyal brand advocate waiting to happen. For more information about Sharpen’s products and services visit sharpencx.com or contact us at 855.249.3357. 007 CS 0318

Press Release Sharpen Technologies Featured in 2017-2018 DMG Consulting Cloud-Based Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report INDIANAPOLIS (Nov. 29, 2017) – Sharpen Technologies, a cloud contact center platform with an agentfirst focus, announces today it is featured among a handful of top cloud-based contact center infrastructure vendors worldwide in a new report from leading industry analyst firm DMG Consulting LLC. DMG Consulting’s 10th annual edition of the Cloud-Based Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report presents the foremost, authoritative analysis of this dynamic and rapidly growing IT sector. The report provides detailed coverage of the competitive landscape, vendors, products, and trends and challenges that are driving this market. It also addresses market share, projections, adoption rates, benefits, return on investment, pricing, customer satisfaction and implementation best practices. “The cloud-based contact center infrastructure market is one of the fastest growing IT sectors in the overall contact center marketplace, a trend we expect to continue for at least the next 5 to 8 years,” said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “In the past 20 years, vendors have invested millions of dollars to build their solutions, supporting networks and operations to run them. The time has come for vendors to move the market forward with new and innovative designs, architecture, functionality, user interfaces and best practices.” According to the report, the vast majority of organizations are lagging in the implementation of true omnichannel contact centers. Sharpen’s omni-channel contact center solution provides unified and integrated omni-channel support for inbound/outbound and blended voice, email, chat, SMS, co-browse, social media, video, fax and voicemail. Sharpen was also one of three vendors to receive a “perfect score” in the category of system security. “Sharpen is proud to be recognized within a handful of top industry vendors as the adoption of cloud contact center infrastructure continues to garner momentum across all verticals,” said Cameron Weeks, CEO of Sharpen Technologies. “Our inclusion in the report affirms our work to maintain a leadership position in the industry and is evidence that the market is changing in ways that demand a vendor like Sharpen.” Founded in 2011, Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that helps mid-size to enterprise-level companies create perfect customer experiences. Designed for agent productivity and efficiency, Sharpen offers a solution for both customer service and outbound sales teams. Through better technology, the company is creating happier agents and outstanding customer experiences. To learn more, visit https:// sharpencx.com. -###-

About Sharpen Technologies Sharpen Technologies is committed to creating better agent experience by developing software and relationships to solve communication problems. Its cloud-native contact center platform enables customer experience teams to establish a better relationship with their customers. The company’s global platform eliminates costly on-premise hardware, increases agent efficiency, and makes customers happier through frictionless interactions. To learn more, visit https://sharpencx.com. For media inquiries, contact Kasie Pieri at [email protected] or (317) 202-2280 x22. PRESS CONTACT: Kasie Pieri - Dittoe Public Relations (317) 202-2280 x.22 [email protected]

Press Release Sharpen Technologies launches new programming language to bring complete customization to customer service. INDIANAPOLIS (Oct. 19, 2017) – Sharpen Technologies, a contact center platform with an agent-first focus, today announces the launch of [dot]CX, a new programming language that empowers companies to provide complete customization in customer service. In conjunction with the Sharpen platform, [dot]CX enables companies to build custom contact center solutions for voice, text and data to improve both the agent and customer experience. A cloud-based solution, [dot]CX allows companies to write and modify their own apps within Sharpen’s environment without the need to provision or manage servers for any application or backend. The programming language ensures that Sharpen’s platform remains secure while giving companies better access to the data they need to provide customers with truly proactive support. “Too often, cloud contact center vendors claim to offer APIs and options for customization but implement these solutions in ways that tie users back to an on-premises methodology,” said Cameron Weeks, CEO of Sharpen Technologies. “[dot]CX is the first true object-oriented programming language focused on customer service. It lives completely in the cloud on the Sharpen platform, giving our clients total freedom to customize their customer service tools with maximum availability, security and freedom from relying on local resources.” With the introduction of the [dot]CX language, Sharpen is opening the door to a new way of approaching customer services. Businesses of all sizes can create experiences by focusing all their attention on creating applications, rather than maintaining the infrastructure to support them. Founded in 2011, Sharpen is a cloud-native contact center platform that helps mid-size to enterprise-level companies create perfect customer experiences. Designed for agent productivity and efficiency, Sharpen offers a solution for both customer support and outbound sales teams. Through better technology, the company is creating happier agents and seamless customer experiences. To learn more, visit https:// sharpencx.com/developers . -###-

About Sharpen Technologies Sharpen Technologies is committed to creating better agent experience by developing software and relationships to solve communication problems. Its cloud-native contact center platform enables customer experience teams to establish a better relationship with their customers. The company’s global platform eliminates costly on-premise hardware, increases agent efficiency, and makes customers happier through frictionless interactions. To learn more, visit https://sharpencx.com. For media inquiries, contact Kasie Pieri at [email protected] or (317) 202-2280 x22. PRESS CONTACT: Kasie Pieri - Dittoe Public Relations (317) 202-2280 x.22 [email protected]