50 Most Valuable Brands of The Year 2017
The Silicon Review
‘Create a positive first impression of your brand and improve customer interactions.’
Virtual Hold Technology(VHT), LLC develops virtual queuing and customer engagement solutions for contact centers worldwide. Founded in 1995, the company is headquartered in Akron, Ohio and has offices located all across the globe.
For a long time, the customer journey has been frustrating. Twenty years ago, VHT pioneered a new approach to customer service that helps organizations eliminate customer wait times – creating a positive first impression of the brand and improving customer interactions, operational efficiencies and revenue opportunities.
Out of the need to reduce customer frustration, customer effort and improve the customer journey, VHT built a product and began marketing it to customer-focused enterprises all over the world, who shared these call center challenges. VHT CallbackTM has shaped the contact center industry, and placed VHT as the market leader in customer service technology.
Only VHT Callback with its TruQueue™ virtual placeholder technology saved the caller’s place in line and called them back when it was their turn, and maintained full routing integrity. Thanks to VHT Callback, customers don’t have to wait on hold any more. They can get a call back when it is their turn, or schedule a callback when it is most convenient for them. It has revolutionized customer service, and now it’s becoming the industry standard for call centers worldwide.
In Conversation with the Key Executive
What kind of mixed responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?
There is an interesting dynamic we see during the transition from the sales cycle to the post-implementation support phase of the customer life cycle. The most frequent objection we hear during the sales cycle is, “your product is a nice-to-have, not critical to our business. We’ll have to see where it fits on our project priority list.” Once we have implemented the solution for the customer the dialogue shifts to “the up-time and mission critical requirements” of our software. This had led us invest significantly in building high availability options and real time monitoring capabilities in the products.
What were the grounds on which you have expanded your company and its offerings over the years?
At VHT, we believe that delivering an exceptional customer experience doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, every customer interaction, regardless of channel, should enrich the brand and deepen the customer relationship.
Since our inception in 1995, VHT has been the innovator in enhancing the customer journey. VHT recognized the severity of customer frustration in relation to delivering exceptional customer service. This led to inventing a patented solution, VHT Callback, which eliminated wait time while increasing customer satisfaction.
Today, our innovative approach has evolved and now helps organizations not only eliminate customer wait times but also creates a positive first impression of the brand and improves customer interactions, operational efficiencies and revenue opportunities. Deployed seamlessly within any single or multivendor environment, VHT’s virtual queuing (Callback) and customer engagement solution (Navigator) are designed to empower customers, agents and brands.
What do you feel are the reasons behind your product popularity?
The customer experience that our software provides has come to be expected by consumers. It hasn’t always been that way as there was initially “distrust” that enterprises would truly make that return phone call. Once a few large companies institutionalized this as a fundamental piece of their customer service process, the mantra became “Why doesn’t every company offer this?”
Do you have any new products ready to be/getting ready to be rolled out into the market?
We recently launched our latest product, VHT NavigatorTM.
VHT Navigator captures key customer moments and analyzes real-time and historic events across all channels to provide the interaction and touchpoint data required to effortlessly navigate customers through an experience to a desired outcome.
Brands can set up customized rules to trigger engagement based on customer actions and intent and initiate support to improve the customer experience. No other platform supports this level of data capture, analysis or ease of use.
Meet the CEO
Wes Hayden, CEO: Wes Hayden became CEO of Virtual Hold Technology (VHT) in July of 2012. He has spent over 30 years in the tech industry, focused on establishing successful go-to-market strategies that are backed by strong operational processes. Wes spent the majority of his career at Genesys, where he served as President and CEO. During his time there, Wes grew the company’s revenue significantly, established Genesys as the contact center platform market leader, and successfully engineered several acquisitions, which contributed to the stellar growth of the company.
Today, Wes’ leadership is propelling VHT’s surge to become leaders in delivering innovative solutions focused on providing amazing customer experiences and elevating net promoter scores for customer-centric organizations.