A few years ago life was relatively simple for managers procuring new technology for their contact center. “Round up the usual suspects”, issue an RFP, secure funding, select a winner, pilot and roll out. Repeat every 5 years.
Once a contact center supplier reaches a critical size they lose the ability to innovate, owing to the need to maintain their customer base and manage change risk. There have been several disruptive technology changes that compound this issue:
- ISDN->SIP
- phones->multimedia/multisession
- standalone systems->distributed/cloud
- bespoke UI->everything in a browser
This has led to new players with immature products entering the market, and the usual suspects struggling to keep up with the pace of change. We’ve seen one industry behemoth after another bite the dust, leaving contact center managers with a real problem implementing solutions that provide the new functionality that their sponsors require and the reliability and stability of mature product underpinnings.
So how to overcome this challenge and pick winners in the brave new world of the cloud?
In our view the old-school RFP process doesn’t enable contact center managers to make value judgements to pick cloud solutions that deliver, and will support a contact center effectively over a 5 year term or more. Here are a few of our suggestions on things to take a long hard look at when entering a relationship with a cloud contact center provider:
- Whose switching and streamed media fabric is the cloud provider using? How does the cloud provider manage this? Don’t trust the provider that says ‘its ours’ and refuses to elaborate. Developing reliable switching and streamed media fabric is expensive and difficult, and best left to OEMs and large open-source projects. The underlying fabric used, and how the provider manages it to deliver scale, redundancy and media processing functionality is an important yardstick.
- How does the ACD deal with managing different media streams in a unified fashion? Can the agent do both single session blending for multiple media channels, and have multiple session delivery? What rules exist to allow the contact center to manage multisession behaviour? Answers to this will expose whether the cloud supplier has a homogenous offering; ASD® (Automatic Session Distributor) instead of siloed ACD + email + chat + SMS.
- How can the cloud contact center solution integrate with existing CRM and back-office systems? Are the APIs natural and consistent?
- Data integration. Contact centers still need to keep control of their data. Can the cloud provider work directly with contact center data sources leaving you in charge of the data whether hosted in-house or private cloud?
- Is the reporting provided by the service provider configurable, and how well does it perform at scale? Can it deliver all of your real-time and historical needs in an easy-to use form? Lastly and most important, what is the underlying database technology? A service offering based on a big data platform is far more likely to meet your needs over the system lifetime than one based on legacy database technology.
What We Offer
Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.
Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.
All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.
Flexible Contact Center Software
Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
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Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
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Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
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Contact Center Platform – Enterprise
High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid
Blended Media Desktop
Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace
Work Anywhere
Browser-based tools, no software installation required
Customise, Localise, White Label
Design all user interfaces to individual requirements
Integration via APIs
‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps
World Class Development
Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries
Capabilities
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.
All Media Channels
Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended
Agent Multi-Tasking
Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel
Dynamic Workforce Management
Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels
Predictive Dialing
Best-of-breed performance under compliance
Optimised Inbound Routing
Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service
Agent Scripts
Help agents achieve and maintain excellence
Voice and Screen Recording
See and hear exactly how agents are interacting
Analytics and Data Feeds
Measure and evaluate performance at every level
IVR, Bots & Conversational AI
Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers
Customer Journey Tracking
Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations
Modules
Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance
Softdial One™
Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators
Softdial Scripter™
Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications
Sytel AI Dialer™
Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules
Softdial Pathfinder™
Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection
Softdial Media Server™
Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls
Softdial Reporter™ 5
Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels
Softdial Publisher™
Comprehensive data output to build your own reports
Softdial Recording Monitor™
Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards
Softdial Campaign Manager™
Automation to optimise any outreach strategy
Softdial Repository™
Central storage and configuration of common resources
Sytel Global Compliance™
Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer
Solutions
Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications
By Business Type
Enterprise
A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale
Small/ Medium Business
Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves
By Industry
Customer Service
Connect quickly to well equipped agents
Market Research
Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration
Debt Collection
Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app
Sales & Telemarketing
Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing
Healthcare
Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care