Edify announced it is shipping the newest generation of its multichannel enterprise CRM application, Edify 8. Upgraded features in the new release include natural language speech recognition, integrated text-to-speech capabilities and an e-service suite supported by a unified knowledge repository.
It is the first Edify product that supports the SOAP (simple object access protocol) and SAPI (text-to-speech engine) standard, Steve Bell, director of marketing for Edify, told CRM Buyer Magazine.
The new tech direction holds out the possibility that Edify could move toward Web services at some point in the future, AMR Research analyst Louis Columbus told CRM Buyer.
“Relying on SOAP and XLM (extensible markup language) technologies, Edify is setting a strong pace towards creating Web services, if they choose to go in that product direction in the future,” he said.
Blending Tech
Edify has carved out a niche for itself by blending sometimes disparate technologies — such as wireless, telephony, voice recognition, e-mail response and linguistic processing — on one platform, Gartner analyst Esteban Kolsky told CRM Buyer. The newest release is fairly complete, and extends many of these technologies, Kolsky said.
Many businesses are dealing with a much more technically savvy customer than traditional customer service systems are designed to support. However, to improve customer service, enterprise systems must be able to support customer contacts via multiple channels, Kolsky stressed, as well as through a centralized solution.
The Edify 8 platform is comprised of C-Server (a multichannel e-business application server), the Edify Runtime Engine (a graphical drag-and-drop environment for rapid application development and deployment) and Edify Natural Language (an advanced natural language processing technology that powers Edify’s e-mail and Web self-service applications).
Products supported by the platform include Voice and Wireless Suite, vCSR eService Suite, a contact center suite and the Edify Customer Feedback & Analysis suite.
Building Blocks
Edify’s design decisions are based on the recognition that companies do not want to reengineer their CRM operations, but would rather augment what they have, Bell said.
“On a single platform, companies can add a full service e-suite, a full contact center desktop, and voice and speech recognition capabilities, in any order they choose,” he said. “Because it is thin-client based, if a customer already has some element of the application and wants to augment it, rather than throwing out the application entirely, he can use our XLM application to add what he wants.”
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