Displaying items by tag: video streaming

Russian digital services operator Tricolor has turned to Orange Business Services to modernize its customer service activities, leveraging technology from Genesys, a global leader in cloud customer experience and contact center solutions.

Tricolor provides digital services, including satellite television and video streaming, for 12.2 million households throughout Russia. By deploying Genesys Engage, the omnichannel and multi-cloud customer engagement solution to be used by hundreds of operators, Tricolor can now interact with its customers all across the country via voice, chat, social networks, instant messaging and e-mail by seamlessly using a single platform.

The solution allows Tricolor to maintain the level of service regardless of communications channel. Tricolor can now also use speech analytics, allowing it to identify the reason for customers’ calls. This in turn provides the company valuable data insights in order to optimize internal processes and allow further self-service provision to end customers. 

Working with Orange Business Services since 2018, Tricolor deployed this new solution on top of its existing infrastructure. The seamless transition to the new platform took only six weeks and did not impact current business processes nor the quality of services provided.

Orange Business Services experts first conducted an audit of the contact center’s internal procedures to draw up an analysis of functionality requirements. All stages of the contact center implementation were carried out in close cooperation with Tricolor.

“We are pleased that Tricolor chose us as a partner for this contact center implementation. An omnichannel platform makes it possible to engage with customers regardless of the communication channel. This is essential to provide a highly personalized customer experience. The benefits have already been seen by more than 500 of our customers around the world,” said Richard van Wageningen, senior vice president, IMEAR,  Orange Business Services.

“Tricolor cares about its customers, so it sought to optimize and improve customer support. Thanks to this innovative solution, we can significantly speed up the processing of calls and provide an omnichannel service. The Genesys Engage platform allows a contact center employee to see complete information on all customer requests in real time. They can then provide the necessary operational support regardless of the communication channel. In our database, there are already more than a 1.5 million user requests. Further data collection will make the work of the contact center even more effective. Introducing speech analytics allows enterprises to automate the assessment of service quality and improve interaction with customers,” said Ekaterina Pavlova, director of the service department of Tricolor. 

Facebook introduced a new platform for TV shows on August 9 called ‘Watch’. The platform will be available initially to a limited group in the United States on Facebook’s app, website, and television apps, the company said. Programming for the platform will range from professional women’s basketball to a safari show and parenting program.

“Watch is personalized to help you discover new shows, organized around what your friends and communities are watching,” Facebook said in a release. For example, users will find sections like ‘Most Talked About’ which highlights shows that spark conversation, and ‘What Friends Are Watching’ which will help users connect with friends about shows they are following.

“We’ve learned from Facebook Live that people’s comments and reactions to a video are often as much a part of the experience as the video itself,” Facebook said. “So when you watch a show, you can see comments and connect with friends and other viewers while watching, or participate in a dedicated Facebook Group for the show.”

The social media giant added a video tab in 2016, and there were reports circulating recently that the company wanted to become a source of professionally produced content, as opposed to content uploaded by users.

Facebook had signed deals with millennial-focused news and entertainment creators Vox Media, BuzzFeed, ATTN, Group Nine Media and others, Reuters reported in May, to produce shows for the video platform, both scripted and unscripted.

The company’s product director, Daniel Danker, said in a statement, “We’ve learned that people like the serendipity of discovering videos in News Feed, but they also want a dedicated place they can go to watch videos.”

“We hope Watch will be home to a wide range of shows -- from reality to comedy to live sports. Some will be made by professional creators, and others from regular people in our community,” Facebook chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “We're starting to roll out the Watch tab to a limited number of people in the US, and the plan is to bring it to more people soon.”

Zuckerberg added, “You'll be able to chat and connect with people during an episode, and join groups with people who like the same shows afterwards to build community.”

Content for ‘Watch’ would include a parenting show from Time Inc and a safari show from National Geographic, as well as videos from the Women’s National Basketball Association. Major League Baseball games are already being broadcast by Facebook, and the company said this will continue.

Facebook said it aims to make the platform open to any show creator as a place to distribute video. But the platform will face fierce competition in a crowded online streaming market, against the likes of Disney which recently announced plans to launch a streaming platform, as well as Netflix, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat.

Google-owned YouTube recently began allowing popular online video personalities to broadcast on the go using mobile devices, which challenges Facebook and Twitter’s live-streaming appeal. For about six years YouTube has supported live video streaming through computers, even broadcasting US presidential debates online.

The company has now moved into online portable device streaming, allowing YouTube content creators whose channels have more than 10,000 subscribers to broadcast through apps tailored for mobile devices such as smartphones, says product managers Barbara Macdonald and Kurt Wilms.

“It’s a launch that’ll put the power of live streaming in the hands of hundreds of thousands of talented creators, giving them a more intimate and spontaneous way to share their thoughts, lives and creativity,” said Macdonald and Wilms in a blog post. They said YouTube will launch the feature more broadly soon.

YouTube now challenges social media giants Facebook and Twitter that both already have added such capabilities to their mobile platforms. However, YouTube has added a financial incentive in the form of “Super Chat”, a toll that enables online video stars to generate revenue from fans willing to pay to “stand out from the crowd” by having their chat messages highlighted in bright colors and pinned to the top of text conversations.

Macdonald and Wilms said Super Chat “is like playing for that front-row seat in the digital age.”

Facebook began testing its live audio streaming service in December that will enable users to broadcast radio-style segments on the social network. The new tool came as an alternative to the Facebook Live tool that lets people stream live video to Facebook.

An audio-streaming option promised to be useful in areas where telecommunication networks have trouble handling the larger data demands of video streaming.