Thrio: Groundbreaking AI-powered CCaaS Platform

The way to thrive in a “Customer is the King” economy is to be highly responsive to customers’ ever-evolving demands. This responsiveness makes you a pacesetter that leads the competitive pack. Consumers are demanding a wider choice of contact channels, stronger relationships, flexible customer service options and quick-to-respond customer service. All these factors have increased the pressure on Contact Centers – they must deliver the best possible customer experience with consistency!

Organizations are progressively moving towards ‘as a service’ technologies as they look for models that are flexible and enable better responsiveness and service quality in today’s customer-centric environment. Contact center service providers’ cloud-based offerings focus on cloud as a deployment option versus conventional on-premises alternatives. By putting the contact center in the cloud, businesses avoid not only capital equipment expense, but are also

able to adapt to new technologies quicker and more economically.

We present to you Thrio, who has worked with companies big and small to solve for customer service, sales, and marketing applications. Enterprises of all sizes, from small shops with three agents up to publicly-traded entities in regulated spaces with over 200 agents, find Thrio compelling for the same reasons. Today, software isn’t just a service you subscribe to. The vendors you depend on are the lifeblood of your business, touching every part of your operations.

With Thrio, the option to get to a real person on the other end of the communication is always there. Your inquiries don’t disappear into an endless queue, and you won’t get a generic response back. Thrio clients enjoy the ability to have real people ready to help at every step of the process. This ability to both automate and provide high-touch personal service is a hallmark of the Thrio solution.

We conversed with Edwin Margulies, CEO, to dig in more about Thrio, Inc

Q. Why is CCaaS essential and how does it work?

CCaaS is essential because it is the modern and reliable way to equip your enterprise with customer-pleasing software and infrastructure. The days of cobbling together disparate pieces of software and hardware on site are quickly fading into the rear view mirror. There are three main reasons why enterprises are quickly shifting over to CCaaS from legacy systems: 1) Future-Proofing. It is much easier to acquire and deploy the state of the art in the cloud. You can try it, make sure it is good for you, or move on. Really great CCaaS vendors like Thrio are constantly upgrading their platforms with the best technology available. So it is not your burden to search around for tech any more; 2) Security. The hypercloud vendors including Azure, Google, and IBM have literally hundreds of security experts on staff and have all passed rigorous security certifications unlike most enterprises. It is not a stretch to say that the top Hypercloud vendors have better security than the majority of enterprises; and 3) Economies of scale. Much of the cloud-based infrastructure can be shared across tenants whilst maintaining security. This makes CCaaS much more affordable versus legacy approaches.

Q. What are CCaaS trends today?

One of the biggest trends in CCaaS today is the adoption and use of AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI can be used for bots, speech recognition on IVR, intelligent routing, classification of business transactions, compliance score carding, and transcription to name a few. The trick is surfacing these technologies at the application level in an easy-to-use and productive way. This is what Thrio does with

its AI-based offering. Thrio does not do AI for the sake of AI, but rather to move the needle of productivity for agents and customers alike.

Q. How did the idea of setting up Thrio spring off?

First, Thrio’s founders and executive team are industry veterans, having launched and made successful other firms like Telephony@Work (acquired by Oracle), and SoCoCare (acquired by Five9). At the onset, Thrio founders wanted to continue to bring great software to enterprises in the spirit of its previous ventures. The vision to ‘democratize’ AI-based Contact Center technology at a global scale has been consistent and now being realized with Thrio. This so that both small and large companies can afford the technology and deploy it easily. Until now, only very large companies have been able to afford sophisticated contact center technology owing to all of the vendors that are involved in a robust solution. Thrio helps its customers to drastically reduce vendor count as an ‘all-in-one’ provider to achieve this affordability. Based on this vision, our mission is to become the world-wide standard for excellent customer service.

Q. How does Thrio Digital help connect with customers and prospects on their channel of choice?

Communication is truly influenced by generational cohorts. That is to say, that people of different age ranges seem to migrate towards certain channels of communication. It is crucial that you are able to identify your constituency and enable communications with them based on their preferences, not yours. Thrio Digital helps in this regard because it’s not just about omnichannel, but also bots, virtual assistants, and digital forms. So no matter how someone wants to communicate, there is a way to serve them. Thrio Digital allows companies to connect with their existing and prospective customers on their channel of choice via SMS, a chat, chatbot, social media, email, or web, offering a seamless transition between channels. It allows relationship managers to initiate lead capture, sales qualification, appointment scheduling, product registration, sentiment feedback, and other workflows.

Q. Explicate on Thrio Native Process Automation being the best way to ease complex interactions.

Thrio NPA is the company’s answer to third-party Robotic Process Automation. Customers are tired of paying large sums to cobble third-party automation onto their platforms and then paying huge fees to integrate. Thrio NPA is native, so all of that expense is eliminated. NPA includes a workflow engine, decisioning, and an action matrix to enable complex, multi-step interactions in a few clicks. The input-output workflow engine handles a vast array of automated tasks, from basic IVR functions to multi-step processes that may include pulling and pushing data via API. The input-output action matrix replaces traditional scripting tools with dynamic text display and input buttons that change what an agent may say depending on the context. It has 72 unique, reusable workflow functions, an easy-to-use “No Programming Required” interface, a built-in workflow visualizer, the ability to integrate with 3rd party systems, routines, and databases, and the ability to embed workflow triggers in any agent or customer-facing form or script.

Q. What measures have you taken to safeguard and protect customer data?

Thrio is Very Secure. Using third party auditors, the Thrio team has been certified for HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR and HITRUST CSF, for example. This ensures the highest level of security and privacy especially for clients in the health care, insurance and financial services industries. All private data is encrypted “in flight” and at rest. Thrio has consistently passed all audits and security department vetting with flying colors.

Q. What is the latest news of Thrio?

The latest development news at Thrio is our investment in Digital Transformation with very specific Supervisor-to-Agent tooling for live coaching. It’s one thing to enable omnichannel, and it’s quite another to pull in supervisors to provide “over the shoulder” support even if the agents are remote. This Digital Live Coaching includes the ability for Supervisors to “visually whisper coach” agents while they are in digital transactions with customers. All of this is built into the platform at no upcharge.

Meet the exemplar personality

Edwin Margulies, CEO. With over 41 years in the industry, Edwin is well known as a pioneer of modern contact center and automation solutions. He is a veteran sales, operations, and product strategy leader. He has a long track record of successful mergers, acquisitions and IPOs. These include Telephony@Work, SoCoCare, Dialogic, and Telecom Library. His disruptive inventions for enhanced networks and contact centers have transformed standards for entire industries.