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Votacall Viper

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Votacall Inc, Norwood, MA
Company Description: Votacall is a leading provider of Cloud- based voice solutions and business communication systems with an expertise in VoIP, Unified Communications (UC) and Call Center design, deployment and support. Votacall is committed to delivering the latest best in class offerings through constant market research and product development.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Hardware - Networking

Nomination Title: Votacall Viper

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date.

Votacall is a leading provider of cloud-based voice solutions and communication systems with an expertise in VoIP, Unified Communications and Call Center design and deployment. As a technology provider, we believe that seeking and embracing change are key ingredients in our secret sauce. In early 2014, a leadership session to review areas of improvement ended up yielding a new playbook which we now call the Votacall Values. The 10 point system was designed to unify the organization by setting a clear course to travel as one team. The first Votacall Value is, “The Customer Experience is the Only Metric". This phrase became the catalyst for new customer-centric development ideas and strategies.

The Case for Votacall Viper

Our Cloud-based voice solution (Hosted VoIP) is a powerful communications tool delivered as managed service. As a managed service provider and a company that takes customer experience seriously, we have to understand our customers’ needs frustrations. One universal VoIP customer concern relates to Quality of Service (QoS). Not all QoS issues are the same, however each instance shares the trait of being illusive. Whether intermittent or consistent, many QoS issues reside outside of the provider’s network. Therefore, there is a lack of visibility into the origin of the problem. This can have an adverse effect on the customer experience because without the origin, the problem cannot be solved. It was clear that to enhance the customer experience we needed to have the tools for deeper real-time and historical visibility past the network edge. Votacall took action and developed Votacall Viper and in doing so created a tremendous customer experience differentiator.

What is Votacall Viper?

Votacall Viper is a cost effective node, no bigger than a deck of cards which resides on the customer network monitoring the voice traffic on the customer VLAN. It got its name because, like a Viper, it lies in wait for long periods before striking its prey. Viper continuously captures, stores and dumps 4 hours of real-time cyclical call data. This provides us with quick access to call data and, if authorized, actual audio streams. This deeper visibility provides insight into QoS problems outside of our network. This proves invaluable with “Bring Your Own Bandwidth” (BYOB) VoIP customers because Viper will provide analytics as if the calls never left our network.

Additionally, we can view call set up and signaling to determine where a call dropped. In our mobile world, this proves invaluable. Votacall can now check the call logs to determine if a “Goodbye Message” was sent from the far end caller. This is significant because we can definitely display where a problem originated which often times is a result of a cellular network and not the customers VoIP solution.

Delivering a Customer Experience “WOW” Moment

At Votacall, our goal is to provide a customer experience unrivaled in the telecommunications industry. Therefore, we need to deliver “WOW” support moments and Viper is a key factor in achieving our goal. Clients want to feel confident that their managed service provider is one step ahead of a problem. This was crucial in the development of Votacall Viper’s proactive alarming capabilities. Viper has built-in notification and alarming functionality, automatically opening critical tickets, sending critical IM alerts to Votacall Tier 3 and triggering audible alarms within our NOC. Thus, allowing for swift and informed action on critical events to be carried out.

The goal of Viper was to create a game-changing customer experience product. To measure this, we developed an innovative Customer Experience survey, aptly named “Happy Cloud vs Sad Cloud”. When a support case is closed, Customers receive two image options via email, a Happy Cloud and a Sad Cloud. The customer makes their selection by clicking an image in the body of the survey email. Since implementing Viper and the new Customer Experience Survey, Votacall has a 96% Happy Cloud rating on a 41% survey response rate.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and benefits of the nominated product or service.

1. On-demand instant support access to onsite client infrastructure
2. System log and traffic harvesting, allowing for deep analysis of client issues.
3. XMPP Chat server registration for quick information gathering from the Viper via IM
4. Local firmware delivery, removing the burden of bandwidth-heavy file transfers from the customer’s circuit
5. Automated ticket creation on Viper alerts, allowing for proactive support
6. Integration with Pushbullet for support team SMS trouble notifications
7. VoIP call playback for voice quality troubleshooting
8. Proxy for easy access to client switching/routing infrastructure and endpoint devices