With the Release of In-App Voice, Users Can Make Calls from Anywhere

Here at Vonage, we spend a lot of time talking about customer journeys and how digital solutions are shaping the customer experience as it exists today. Whether you’re a small brand or a Fortune 500 enterprise, you need to reach and engage with your customers over digital channels like Voice, Video, and Messaging.

 Collectively, these are the delivery point of the customer experience, and we work with our partners and customers to build more engaging interactions across those mediums. Frequently, these interactions take place in contact center environments, transforming what historically has been viewed as a cost center into a driver of unique customer experiences.

That’s just one of the many reasons we’re excited to announce the GA release of our In-App Voice product. 

“That’s nice, but what does it do, and what does it have to do with customer experience?”

In-App Voice, powered by the Client SDK, enables WebRTC connections in mobile and browser-based applications. With it, you can enable click-to-call scenarios that use IP instead of traditional carrier connections; data-based calling that lives directly in mobile apps; or Desktop Termination to your Contact Center using an internet connection.

“OK … but why is that important to the customer experience?”  

There’s a number of answers to that question, but at their core is expanding a brand’s reach to engage with a customer over voice channels. Using In-App Voice allows you to quickly and easily grow your contact center capabilities, bringing on new locations without having to establish brand new carrier connections.

The voice communication happens over an IP connection, meaning anywhere you have an internet connection, you can have a contact center agent. This helps with staffing for 24/7 support, as well as in today’s remote work environment, where large-scale contact centers packed with people are not feasible for health and safety reasons. With In-App Voice enabled, agents have the tools they need to deliver a great customer experience within a single-pane-of-glass interface that features a view of the current call, the overall customer relationship, and any relevant data. And that single pane of glass can directly benefit the customer’s interface as well, enabling click-to-call scenarios directly embedded in the web or mobile app experience, with no need for IVR navigation—the customer can be automatically routed based on where they clicked.

Also, before we start talking too much about the use case, it’s worth noting one of the most powerful new features in this release—the addition of our RTC Webhook, which lets you capture all events, call quality, and signaling data to more specifically customize your call flows.

But there is so much more that can be done beyond establishing a WebRTC-based connection.  The real opportunity for providing a differentiated customer experience comes when you start layering in features like Text-to-Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition, and Websockets for AI. With these tools in the mix, you can offer customers more choice on how they engage with your brand in every voice interaction.

You can also offer self-service scenarios like natural voice IVR systems, voicebot FAQs, and virtual agents, reducing wait times and getting to resolution faster. Adding the ability to self select not only gives the customer more choice but ultimately gives more time and bandwidth to your live agents to field inquiries that require a more nuanced conversation.

And it’s worth noting that this isn’t all about the contact center—after all, it’s a WebRTC-based In-App Voice connection that the Client SDK delivers, enabling voice calling anywhere there‘s an internet connection. If you’re a marketplace retailer, for instance, and need to connect buyers and sellers over mobile- or browser-based apps, you can do that, too, and make it a seamless and integrated component of the peer-to-peer interaction.

There’s plenty more that you can do with In-App Voice. For a deeper look, check out our In-App Voice page or Developer Docs. And, of course, if you want to learn more about how Vonage can help power unique customer experiences, please reach out to us.