MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - Based on its recent analysis of the social customer service applications market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Parature with the 2013 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Enhancement for its social customer service suite. In 2009, the company launched its first social media application integrated with Twitter to monitor tweets. It followed that up with the Parature Facebook Portal in 2010 and the Parature Social Monitor solution in 2013. Both the Parature –Facebook Portal and Parature Social Monitor comprise the Parature Social Customer Service Suite.

Social media in the contact center industry has traditionally not attracted substantial numbers of customers. But Parature, in contrast, has seen its products' sales roster grow from approximately 65 organizations in late 2011 to approximately 300 in 2013. Parature currently supports 100 Facebook pages and receives 25 million customer page views per month.

The Parature Social Monitor prioritizes customer service related posts and tweets by bringing them into a brand's service desk to be managed, responded to and logged. The application has routing and workflow rules to ensure that questions are answered by the product and service experts best equipped to respond.

"While many firms have to follow the end customers to sites where they congregate, Parature's Facebook Portal lets organizations serve end customers from their companies' Facebook pages," said Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Brendan Read. "The software offers end customers a self-service knowledgebase and allows them to chat with live agents. It even has a Facebook wall monitor feature that identifies issues, translates them into trouble tickets, and delivers them to live agents."

Parature Social Monitor enables organizations to compare Facebook and Twitter traffic with other channels; this multi-channel solution provides a complete 360-degree view of all interactions a customer has had with a company. By interacting with consumers, Parature Social Monitor helps companies find "triggers" in social media interactions that indicate whether a consumer interaction should be moved from social media to a private channel.

Parature's core applications are focused on customer service and support. Parature Customer Service Software provides an integrated customer Web portal, self-service knowledgebase, and help desk ticketing application. Further, both Parature Social Customer Service Suite applications allow other departments to monitor and follow-up on social comments. Parature Social Monitor lets any department listen and respond to end-customer comments or issues by creating help desk tickets from any social media activity.

"Parature Social Monitor is a social tab within the existing platform. By keeping all engagement on a single platform, issues can be easily tracked and reported on," noted Read. "Organizations can see and track what end customers are talking about by tagging related posts and viewing threads."

Parature also hosts its solutions in the cloud, which provides flexibility and scalability to handle unanticipated spikes in social media traffic. Importantly, Parature encrypts end-user data and its security standards are similar to those used by the financial industry and US government agencies.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers. The award recognizes the company's focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and, ultimately, customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.

source:Frost & Sullivan