Vonage Debuts Skills-Based Routing and Real-time Sentiment Analysis Technology to Enable Advanced Contact Center Capabilities

HOLMDEL, N.J., March 12, 2018 --  Vonage (NYSE: VG), a business cloud communications leader, today introduced skills-based communications routing and real-time sentiment analysis - intelligent communications technologies that enable businesses to create their own routing plans and analytical view of agent and customer interactions for the contact center via building blocks. Developed as a part of the  Nexmo  Partner Program for Vonage's API Platform, these new technologies are first in a line of planned building blocks that enable greater flexibility and efficiency to create more meaningful customer relationships and better business outcomes. Skills-based routing and real-time sentiment analysis capabilities, paired with the Nexmo Voice API, can be used on their own, or to augment Vonage's or a third-party's contact center solution, allowing customer service representatives and agents to better engage with their customers in real-time. "Our new skills-based routing and real-time sentiment analysis offerings represent a brand new way for the industry to think about building an intelligent contact center — one that reflects the unique requirements of individual businesses," said Omar Javaid, Chief Product Officer for Vonage. "Vonage is redefining the contact center industry by providing businesses with building blocks to implement intelligent routing technology and the flexibility to determine where and how that routing is set up to deliver better business outcomes to their own customers." For enterprise contact centers, intelligent communications based on contextual information is becoming a core need as they strive to improve the customer experience and address customers' increasing demand for personalized, contextual communications. Digital native companies and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are also looking for the ability to design these experiences themselves, adding to and building upon their existing solutions as needed. Skills-based communications routing, as a fully open source building block, can bring enhancements to contact center capabilities which are flexible and limitless, and can be initiated from Vonage, its technology partners or the developer community. They easily extend to support new capabilities to differentiate a contact center's ability to engage with customers in meaningful, customized ways. In addition, because there are no license fees associated with the building block, significant cost savings can accrue compared to traditional options. Vonage's sentiment analysis building block can be added to any existing contact center solution in order to provide real-time analytics to agents and supervisors. With these capabilities, contact center managers can better monitor the interactions between customers and agents to ensure a smoother customer journey. With skills-based routing and real-time sentiment analysis, Vonage is providing applications to businesses to build customized, intelligent contact center capabilities according to their call routing and analytics preferences and specifications. For example, through skills-based routing, the developer decides which agent(s) has the best skillset to field a call from a Spanish-speaking customer, or which agent(s) would be best suited to field a sensitive call to a customer to collect fees. With the Nexmo voice API, skills-based routing technology can also enlist real-time sentiment analysis capabilities via APIs to gauge the temperature of a customer interaction, pulling in a supervisor or escalating a customer issue if needed, in real-time, creating a smoother customer journey for deeper relationships and increased loyalty. About Vonage Vonage (NYSE:VG) is redefining business communications. True to our roots as a technology disruptor, we've embraced technology to transform how companies communicate to create better business outcomes.  Our unique cloud communications platform brings together a robust unified communications solution with the agility of embedded, contextual communications APIs. This powerful combination enables businesses to collaborate more productively and engage their customers more effectively across messaging, chat, social media, video and voice. The Company also provides a robust suite of feature-rich residential communication solutions. Vonage Holdings Corp. is headquartered in Holmdel, New Jersey, with offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Israel.  Vonage ^® is a registered trademark of Vonage Marketing LLC, owned by Vonage America Inc.