JRNI Extends Its Dynamic Scheduling Platform with Amazon Alexa Integration

JRNI, formerly BookingBug, the enterprise SaaS scheduling platform for optimizing the customer journey, today announced that it has further extended its dynamic scheduling platform to support an integration with Amazon Alexa. As the number of households with smart speakers is expected to increase from 29.3 million in 2018 to 70.8 million in 2023¹, JRNI's new open-source Alexa skills deliver seamless customer and brand experiences by providing retailers and banks with an additional engagement channel.

Voice is increasingly becoming an integral component of the omnichannel experience and commerce, empowering brands to connect with customers on whatever devices they prefer. JRNI's open-source Alexa skills provide retailers and banks with arrangements of templated skills to incorporate into their existing Alexa skills, so they can offer universal brand experiences that build stronger customer relationships.

The templated Alexa skills enable businesses to allow their customers to schedule, reschedule, and cancel appointments and events directly within their existing Alexa skills. Further capabilities include checking availability for upcoming appointments and events and calculating travel time to locations.

"Voice is a critical engagement channel for retailers and bankers," said John Federman, JRNI's CEO. "As consumers are increasingly mobile, and looking to technology to make their lives easier, there's a growing need for conversational commerce. Retailers and banks can create exceptional brand experiences for their customers by giving them another channel to reach them and another opportunity to achieve loyalty."

In addition to customers, JRNI's Alexa offering brings capabilities to staff associates at retailers and banks. Staff can schedule, reschedule, and cancel appointments. They can also ask Alexa to read their calendars, start meetings, block times, and add notes and outcomes to appointments and events.

"Our Alexa integration demonstrates our platform extensibility and creates even more value in our ever-expanding ecosystem," said Simon Copsey, JRNI's CTO. "This integration is exactly what consumers demand to enhance their overall experiences with retailers and banks. Our decision to make the Alexa skills open-source showcases our desire to enable our customers and partners to build on top of our platform using our extensibility framework."

JRNI's Alexa integration follows the launch of its Marketplace, which helps customers drive greater conversions. Marketplace offers customers various prebuilt apps and scalable integrations from technology partners, systems integrators, and developers worldwide, so they can bridge the digital-to-physical divide.

About JRNI
JRNI is designed to facilitate powerful human-to-human experiences that increase conversion and revenue, customer loyalty, and lifetime value. Forward-thinking executives from companies like U.S. Bank, ANZ, John Lewis & Partners, and LEGO rely on JRNI's AI-driven scheduling engine to deliver predictive actions across touchpoints ? appointments, events, concierge, queuing ? and optimize resources to deliver superior quality of experience. To learn more, visit www.jrni.com.

¹"Smart Speakers Lead The Smart Home Revolution," Forrester Research, Inc., May 21, 2019