Angel Launches Hosted IVR Platform For VARs

Hosted interactive voice response (IVR) solution provider Angel.com is making two moves today: First, a rebranding to just “Angel.” Second, the launch of Angel 4.0, the latest release of their flagship product, designed to roll all the various aspects of their product line into one cohesive platform. Here’s the scoop.

The rebranding, says Angel Director of Marketing Dave Toliver, was probably overdue — Angel.com sounds less like a modern hosted IVR solution provider with clients like Macy’s and Barnes and Noble and more like a late-90’s bubble burst victim. Rebranded as Angel, the company still targets SMBs, but Toliver says they’re “moving upstream” and seeking larger enterprises too.

As for the Angel 4.0 SaaS customer management platform, Toliver says that it takes the various aspects of IVR — like voice authentication and name and address capture — and adds things like interactive text response by way of SMS, text chat, e-mail, or even social media on the web.

Most, if not all, of these aspects were previously available to customers in piecemeal fashion, Toliver says. But this is the first time Angel is providing its resellers with a “cohesive whole” unified hosted call center solution, he adds. Adding features to a deployment down the line gets that much easier, Angel asserts.

On the backend, Angel 4.0 can connect to what Toliver described as a huge range of databases, mainly CRM. Angel has also announced that the platform is enabled with majority shareholder and former parent company MicroStrategy-powered business intelligence (BI), making the whole system smarter and more able to predict what the customer needs.

Speaking of resellers, Toliver says that when Qwest started offering Angel’s services white-label under their own brand in July 2010, it opened the door for larger resellers to do the same — though he says Angel is still working out specifics. And Angel is still counting on smaller VARs to leverage their technology and the reseller’s own expertise to close deals that might otherwise have slipped by.

Angel says its platform is of huge utility to the health care vertical, since voice biometrics can make a sound recording as good as a signature in the eyes of the law, and since its focus is on more “human-like experiences.”

We’ll be keeping an eye on the newly-minted Angel going forward, so keep an eye on The VAR Guy for updates.

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