Leila Kulter, Senior Director of Strategy & Growth, realized that the novel concierge program demanded comprehensive outreach to members with two key requirements. First, smart automated calls and texts, rather than manual outreach by the home specialists. And second, despite the automation, outreach had to be highly personalized, as the very nature of the service was a personal concierge.

Angi’s phone operation was centered around Nice InContact, with hundreds of Angi’s service agents using the platform on a daily basis. For customer support, the platform did what it was designed for. However, for proactive outreach Nice InContact was a bad fit. The team found two crucial limitations:

Limitation #1: Calls & Texts Not Coordinated

Nice InContact did not have native two way SMS. This meant the team would not be able to call & text members “with one voice”, namely to create a coherent experience for the member. On top of that, calls & texts would also come from two different numbers. This disconnect would not only mean a bad experience for members, but also for Angi’s home specialists. They would need to use one system for calls, and another system for texts, highly inconvenient and inefficient.

Limitation #2: No Customer Journeys, No Real Time Triggers

Like most other contact center platforms, Nice InContact’s was built for inbound customer support. Outbound dialing was based on uploading CSV files with leads, it had no customer journey (aka workflows) where by different customers would be assigned to different call & text treatments based on their personal and real time behavior. The result would be that members would be put into bulk calling lists (rather than behavioral journeys), and their real time actions would not be accounted for. This would lead to bad member experience and dramatically limit bookings..