Thrio, Inc.: Comprehensive AI-powered CCaaS platform

Thrio is a groundbreaking AI-powered CCaaS platform. We feature inbound and outbound voice engines, a complete suite of digital channels (email, chat, SMS, social), and AI-driven Situation Routing and journey management. Our Thrio team consists of leading contact center experts. The technology we pioneered in our first product has been both innovative and durable. Enterprises still rely on it today for core business functions, nearly 20 years after its introduction in the marketplace. With Thrio, clients get supercharged sales and services, enriched interactions with adaptive AI-driven software, and faster deployment and seamless updates. That is Thrio in a nutshell: industry-leading technology and reliability that blows away the competition. The following conversation with Ran Ezerzer, Founder and CTO of Thrio provides more profound insights into the company and the solutions that they offer to their clients.

What are the challenges CIOs face in the Contact Center space and how Thrio address them?

There are two related challenges facing CIOs. The first has to do with cloud migration, and the second relates to the performance of existing cloud deployments. Enterprises moving from prem to cloud are rarely ready to make the jump all at once. This may be due to concerns about reliability, the need to extract value from existing capital expenditures, and the critical importance of a clear migration path. We can help address all these issues as enterprises begin or complete migration from prem to cloud flexibly, as Thrio can be deployed as a complete system or an overlay on top of existing platforms.

For CIOs in enterprises with contact centers already in the cloud, reliability and scalability are key issues. Large cloud contact center platforms have historically experienced fluctuating and unpredictable uptime, and enterprises cannot afford that uncertainty. Thrio’s reliable, redundant, federated cloud-on-cloud system is a solution to those issues. We can monitor load, spin up additional resources on the fly, and push updates to individual microservices without interrupting the system at large. Additionally, enterprises may have encountered issues scaling with existing cloud contact center solution providers. Thrio’s architecture allows for significant seat counts without issue. Finally, federation means that Thrio can be deployed into the cloud provider of your choice, allowing enterprises with specific requirements for data protection certifications and other needs to be accommodated with ease.

What are some of the trends that you expect to have an impact on Contact Center space and how is Thrio planning to incorporate them?

Two key trends are driving the contact center space in 2019. First, interest in artificial intelligence continues to grow every quarter. The promise of increased efficiency and improved CX has garnered tremendous interest. However, the market is still finding its feet in terms of how to deploy AI in ways that actually deliver value beyond a superficial level. Second, enterprises are looking for flexibility at all levels in contact center platforms, from agent role definitions to the ability to mix and match platforms themselves-- voice from one platform, digital offerings from another, for example.

Thrio was designed, architected, and built from day one to capitalize on these market directions. The heart of the Thrio platform is a seamless, practical AI decisioning engine that orchestrates Thrio microservices to simplify and optimize complex workflows and empowers agents to improve CX. We know that implementing AI can be intimidating and time consuming, and we’ve made it incredibly simple and powerful at the same time.

On the platform level, Thrio can be deployed as a complete solution or as an overlay on existing environments. At the agent level, Thrio offers fine-grained control over roles, skills, and permissions, allowing enterprises to empower agents as they see fit.

Together, these capabilities let Thrio deliver on the true promise of a cloud platform: our flexibility and extensibility mean that no two enterprises will use Thrio the same way, and we make these different business cases simple and easy to implement.

“Our cloud-based easy to use contact center suite combines artificial intelligence with affordable sales & service software for businesses of all sizes.” Please walk us through this statement.

The key points here are ease of use, being AI powered, and Thrio’s suitability for anywhere from multi-site enterprise customers at scale down to SMB shops.

As we mentioned earlier, Thrio is a CCaaS platform born in the cloud. As the team behind the world’s first cloud-based contact center offering in 1999 (Telephony@ Work’s ContactCenter Anywhere), we are well attuned to the opportunities and challenges of this type of technology. As the market’s needs and cloud infrastructure has matured since our first product, so has our understanding of what it would take to leverage these advancements to create the leading platform in this space. We built that exact platform with Thrio.

Ease of use drives efficiencies at all levels. Provisioning and maintenance with Thrio are seamless, decreasing demands on IT teams thanks to our microservices architecture coupled with containerized deployments. Admins and supervisors can manage agents and assign roles, skills, and permissions both simply and with granular control. Agents empowered for success by Thrio can reduce handle time and increase customer satisfaction, leading to greater customer loyalty and enhanced operational efficiency.

On the artificial intelligence front, the core of the Thrio platform is a seamless, practical AI decisioning engine that orchestrates Thrio microservices to simplify and optimize complex workflows and empowers agents to improve CX.

Taken together, Thrio creates enriched customer experiences, improves agent productivity, and enables enterprises to deploy new capabilities faster while updating seamlessly and without interruption.

Could you please cite a case study on how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes?

Interestingly enough, one of the use cases that comes to mind is with a customer who was still using our first product from 1999. This company is a BPO who built some of their own custom software to run alongside our old product and accomplish their workflows. While the core system still functions, they were still using a local prem install of our old system that hadn’t been updated in years. They were concerned about longevity, stability, and declining capabilities relative to the market. Thrio was able to use our AI workflow to not only replicate their multi-channel, multi-agent, multi-step campaigns that they had cobbled together over years with custom code, but offer substantial improvements in efficiency within those workflows. So essentially we were able to bring their business all the benefits of Thrio’s reliability, redundancy, and features while not disrupting the business processes that have made them successful over decades. Best of all, we did this in less than a week with no code changes to the Thrio platform. This illustrates perfectly how Thrio is able to support enterprises moving from prem to cloud and help them leverage the best of current technology.

What factors led Thrio to stay ahead of its competitors?

There are two key ways Thrio is unique in this space. Both have to do with flexibility. First, Thrio is distinct from the other entrenched vendors in the contact center space in that we’re able to be deployed alongside existing technologies, offering enhancements and efficiencies that those other platforms don’t have. Instead of an all-or-nothing approach, Thrio fills the gaps and holes left by the others. The second domain involves pricing. The market is hungry for usage-based pricing, with offerings like Amazon Lambda bringing new approaches to pricing platform usage. Thrio has multiple usage-based pricing models that offer customers tremendous flexibility in how they use and pay for our system. Again, this is entirely distinct from how many contact center vendors have come to market. We believe that Thrio’s flexibility in these two domains does indeed give us a competitive edge as these two forces can accelerate cloud migration for enterprises.

What does the future hold for your organization?

2019 and 2020 will be very exciting for Thrio. We continue to bring new features to market. One area we’re excited about is real-time agent feedback. With so much focus on CX, Thrio is keenly interested in making sure agents are supported, empowered, and given everything possible to achieve customer satisfaction in record time. Of course, practical, seamless AI is at the center of those initiatives. Stay tuned on that front.

On the footprint side, we continue to cultivate channel relationships and distributor arrangements. This is Thrio’s sweet spot. Our team has decades of experience in negotiating, implementing, and managing successful partnerships with service providers around the world.