While CTI technology in recent years (especially Salesforce’s Open CTI platform) has helped make the phone experience more intelligent for customers and agents, a new service from NextCaller aims to turn the traditional concept of caller ID on its head.
NextCaller is the most recent in a trend of new services (similar to Datacoup and others) that offer value on both sides of the consumer/business coin. With these services, consumers typically get something useful for free (or even get paid) while businesses pay on the back end for access to that consumer data.
So how does NextCaller work?
Businesses can put this button on their support site
- Consumers sign up for free and fill out a basic profile (including language, contact info, billing info even)
- In return they get to cut to the front of the phone queue when they call a company who uses the NextCaller service
- When the support agent takes that call, they get instant access to the customer’s profile/billing info (regardless of whether that customer is in the CRM or not)
- Businesses pay 10 cents for every customer profile they access through NextCaller
It’s a win-win situation for both consumers and businesses, and according to NextCaller, the 10 cent per profile cost is easily justified:
Inbound identification can cost $2 per call, including name, address, and billing info. Our data-rich profiles can reduce these costs by up to 90 percent.
What does this mean for companies on the Service Cloud platform? NextCaller already has an API available that could be easily called from the Service Cloud console when a new call comes in. I would also expect that an AppExchange package or a pre-built integration will be available in the near future.
The service is of course only as good as the data it can provide to businesses, but it is a promising new option for a very painful part of the phone support experience.
Let us know what you think, would you try using NextCaller? Either as a consumer or a business? Leave us a comment or reach out @perficient.
