HTK, the UK specialist in public mass-notification solutions using mobile technology, is expanding into customer service and marketing automation with the launch of its new web-based digital media platform, said to provide a unified and personalised approach to customer interaction. HTK Horizon delivers a more effective and valuable customer experience by integrating mobile SMS, MMS and WAP with a wide range of other inbound and outbound communication technologies, including interactive voice response (IVR), email and web as well as fax, pager and Airwave SDS.
HTK Horizon is said to be ideal for a wide range of applications from sales and marketing, billing and payments and customer service, to operations management, meeting reminders and providing emergency warnings and information via text message, email or voice depending on customer preferences. Being aweb-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, it is also claimed to be fast to implement and easy to integrate, with on-demand, usage-based pricing and no up-front costs.
By integrating with CRM data, acquired customer knowledge and geographical mapping tools, HTK Horizon is claimed to deliver ‘one-to-one' personalised interaction to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty while reducing costs and enhancing revenue potential. The system also supports full integration with VoIP-enabled contact centres.
"Because most of us have our mobile phones with us most of the time, they present an attractive proposition for companies to communicate and interact with their customers," says Marlon Bowser, CEO at HTK. "But getting it wrong can be a disaster and too many companies have tried using mobile technology to save costs at the expense of customer satisfaction and loyalty. HTK Horizon is designed to reduce these friction points and provide customers with an experience that is tailored to them individually. By harnessing and integrating the very best in customer interaction technologies and making it easy to access via the web, Horizon can help organisations of any size return to good old fashioned customer service, and well as saving money."
Horizon lets users send personalised outbound messages across a range of communication channels, while inbound response channels can be set-up for end-to-end campaign management, with dashboard style reporting in near real-time. Additional plug-in applications enable the automation of a wide range of day-to-day business processes such as appointment and payment reminders, marketing campaigns, customer surveys and information capture.
HTK says it has worked with several customers in the development of Horizon, including Cable & Wireless, BT and Specsavers. UK mobile operator O2 is already said to be using Horizon to interact with its pre-pay and post-pay mobile customers, using SMS call-to-actions and personalised inbound IVR response.
"HTK has helped to revolutionise the way we manage our information IVR," says Chris Brown, Communications Manager at O2 UK. "Ultimately, they have delivered a market leading solution that gives our millions of customers a personalised, easy way to self-serve a huge range of information, maintaining great customer experience and satisfaction."