Afiniti Commended by Frost & Sullivan for its Vision of Using AI to Strategically Match Customers with Service Agents in Contact Centers

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Apr 11, 2019, 08:00 ET

The solution creates significant productivity and cost benefits for contact centers and a rich customer experience for callers

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the global AI-powered customer routing solutions for the contact center market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Afiniti with the 2019 Global Visionary Innovation Leadership Award. Afiniti cultivates empathetic and personalized interactions by utilizing machine learning algorithms to identify subtle patterns of human behavior and pair customers with contact agents in unique ways. It enhances both operational effectiveness and the overall customer experience (CX) by increasing the rates of retention and up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Therefore, by optimizing service-to-sales, it delivers measurable improvements in enterprise profitability and customer service.

"Traditionally, call distribution assigns an incoming call to the next available agent. Afiniti's platform, in contrast, enables real-time optimized pairing of individual contact center agents with individual customers by identifying subtle patterns of human interaction," said Mohamed Alaa Saayed, ICT Industry Director & Fellow. "When an agent is free, the solution evaluates the nuance of his/her behavior to predict their suitability for the call. The AI layer also examines the traits of callers in the queue before they are assigned to an agent, mostly out of sequence."

Conventional performance-based routing (PBR) strategies are skewed toward higher-performing agent groups, which results in significant adverse long-term consequences, such as rising attrition levels, lower overall contact center performance, and inefficient use of higher- and lower-performing agents. Afiniti's solution fosters excellent client and agent satisfaction. Its technology-agnostic solution is known for fast deployment—on average less than eighty days—and those deployments are now moving even faster where Afiniti is natively installed within its clients' infrastructure.

Afiniti integrates with a client's customer relationship management (CRM), sales, and telephony systems at the back end, allowing it to route calls and then trace them when they result in a sale. Typically, the company allocates no fixed costs to the client and charges no per-seat or per-month pricing. Most of its clients do not pay for the hardware, software, or even a service fee; it presents a complete 'zero-cost-to-try' model. Overall, Afiniti reports that it often delivers between 4 percent and 6 percent performance enhancements across revenue, cost, and CX metrics.

"Afiniti's ease-of-use, scalability, and business agility are a result of its integrations with the solutions of industry leaders like Genesys, Cisco, Aspect, Avaya, and Altitude," noted Saayed. "The company services a comprehensive range of sectors including financial services, hospitality, insurance, retail, satellite, TV, telecommunications, and utilities. With more than 150 installations in 21 countries, the company has impacted more than 1 billion interactions of approximately 600,000 optimized agents in various verticals. Its superior value proposition is expected to drive an even greater number in the coming years."

"We are honoured to receive this award and have Frost & Sullivan recognise the results our unique technology is delivering to our clients today," said Chris Farmer, Chief Marketing Officer at Afiniti.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan bestows this award upon the company that demonstrates excellence in growth and customer value. It recognizes the superiority of the product/service as well as the overall customer, purchase, ownership, and service experience offered, which has resulted in the recipient company seeing above-market growth and greater share of wallet. The award lauds the growth, diversification, and sustainability strategies of the company.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About Afiniti

Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing™ uses artificial intelligence to identify subtle and valuable patterns of human interaction in order to pair individuals on the basis of behavior, leading to more successful interactions and measurable increases in enterprise profitability. Afiniti operates throughout the world and has measurably driven billions of dollars in incremental value to its clients.

Afiniti has over 150 deployments in major enterprises across a range of sectors, including telecommunications, insurance, financial services, hospitality and healthcare, and has optimized more than 600,000 agents and 700 million customers. Afiniti's technology continually learns and improves, analyzing 1.3 million interactions every day to refine its pairings. For more information, please visit https://www.afiniti.com.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.

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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan