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Redefining BPOs: Digital Transformation in Contact Centers

Until a few years ago, several companies and BPOs treated their contact center division as an entity that managed superior customer service and nothing more or less. The work of contact centers would be to resolve customer queries and offer solutions to the customers for their problems, for instance, troubleshooting of product-related problems, resolving disputes, etc. In short, the objective was limited to resolving the query.

However, with advancements and the rapid automation of call centers, the entire system has been revamped and transformed to offer much more than just customer call service. According to Microsoft’s State of global customer service report, more than half (58%) of customers choose a brand based on their customer service.

An almost similar number of customers (59%) have grown their expectations from customer support over the last year. The message is loud and clear – ‘your contact center is key to win customers’.

Digital Transformation in Contact Centers

With contact centers and brands recognizing that service channels can work as a prospective source of revenue with the ‘sales through service’ model, the working models have changed. There are custom contact center solutions for BPOs. With advanced applications in technology today contact centers add much more value to all three functions including sales, service, and collections.

While utilizing the technology, you need to ensure a humane touch. With Covid-19 hitting the world, brands and processes moved into remote working and in this rapid transformation, brands would not like to loosen their human aspect of the relationship with customers.

Contact Centers: Automation and Transformation

Let’s discuss how contact center automation has helped the brands in numerous ways-

1) Work from Home Shift

With the lockdown being imposed and offices closed, brands asked their contact center agents to WFH. The contact centers had to put in tremendous efforts to enable customers to go remote. It was with the application of new technologies such as Video KYC that the centers were able to bring new customers onboard even in a remote situation.

Video contact centers have now been developed to humanize customer interactions, and collections bot to increase customer coverage for loan collections Some major transformations by contact centers to move towards a stable Work-from-Home environment include-

  • Cloud-based contact center solution for remote operations
  • Mobile App with full-stack Contact Center capabilities
  • Omnichannel solution for multichannel chat/email in one place
  • Customer Analytics Tools

2) Modern Analytical Metrics Tools

Contact centers have understood the importance of data-driven metrics for a long and they have been using various KPIs to measure the effectiveness of operations. However, the changing dynamics require the change in metrics as well. Businesses are moving towards agent KPIs that are closer to the overall business goals.

Currently, contact centers are largely working in a work-from-home environment, with many of them planning a structured hybrid model in the future for optimum performance. Framing a hybrid model would need a clear understanding of agent performance in different environments. This is where 360 Application Infrastructure Monitoring helps.

While there is no need to ignore the traditional metrics, such as the number of inbound calls handled, average wait time, average call duration, and others, you need to understand how these numbers change in different scenarios (work-from-home vs work-from-office). Moreover, another critical metric would be understanding the metrics across channels. Based on such assessments, you can make informed decisions on learning from one platform and probably try them on another.

3) Agent Monitoring System in Remote Setup

Remote contact centers present an interesting challenge in the agent monitoring process. It begins right from the training process, where traditional classroom and on-desk training methods are not applicable. The challenge is even intense with experienced agents. While working in a remote setup, keeping agents motivated and trusting them with the network/device issue is a concern. There are interesting solutions as well, such as Ameyo’s Mobile Call Center app.

The Android-based app enables agents to work remotely using a smartphone and enables managers to monitor their performance in the realtime. The app also maintains the record of network strength and device status to give a transparent view of the agent’s availability.

Digital Transformation in Contact Centers

4) Interactive Voice Response and Robotic Process Automation

With the dynamically changing digital world, today several people from all age groups and socio-economic classes, engage with messaging apps. Hence, contact centers are adopting new methods to reach their customers that are more responsive when coupled with IVR (Interactive Voice Response). The growing user base is leading to the increasing importance of customer engagement.

Companies have Omnichannel needs with social media compatibility, remote accessibility, Field agents, and voice bot. The ticket management system at contact centers lets the brand create automatic helpdesk tickets for all the queries coming in through email, webchat, social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube), voice calls, SMS, and other messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp.

The integration of workforce management systems, CRM software, and other legacy systems has also levelled up the entire customer service process. The contact center’s ticketing system integrates with popular business tools and has Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for custom integrations.

The contact centers are combining Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to automate the routine tasks for agents. In contact centers, RPAs provide customers with immediate responses to their queries and agents do not need to be involved in every menial task, they can manage their work more efficiently.

Today, contact centers operate not just on the model of receiving calls and providing customer solutions. Rather they have become a knowledge dissemination analytical service for the growth of brands.

Live Chat Improves Customer Satisfaction: How You Can Leverage

Of all the customer service channels, live chat channels have proven to be the most preferred by both businesses and consumers. Consumers find it easy to communicate with brands on their preferred chat channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google’s Business Messages, Twitter DM, Web chat, In-app chat, etc.

A report by Statista suggests that as of January 2021, two billion users were accessing the WhatsApp messenger on a monthly basis. These numbers are only increasing in the world that is taken over by the pandemic. Most businesses have chosen a remote solution to handle their customer service operations and chat remains the channel most loved by the consumers.

Organisations are rolling up their sleeves to meet the expectations of delivering a personalized experience that the consumers will remember for good. Brands are thriving on creating a market value that helps the consumer recall and to win at this game, their best bet has become the adoption of chat channels.

So, if live chat channels are already being used by each brand, how do we deliver a differentiated customer experience?

Industry verticals like healthcare, travel & hospitality, banking, government, and e-commerce are evaluating their CSAT score to find an answer to the question stated above.

The average wait time for a consumer to get connected with an agent on chat is less than 30 seconds and if this escalates, you are sure to create a bad customer experience and lose the customer to your competitor.

We do not want you to struggle with it. With our enhanced features for live chat customer interactions, we are aspiring to create an experience that you want while you wait for your pizza delivery and it reaches you in time.

Sell An Experience That Your Customers Will Love

1. Rich Media Support

If your customer is waiting for a confirmation on their order, you can quickly engage with them on WhatsApp and send them an invoice confirming the order. Who is not using WhatsApp in 2021? Let your customers find answers in the most unexpected ways to walk a step ahead. In addition to the invoice PDF, you can attach certain videos that are related to your product, images, GIFs, etc.

2. Converse with Bot & Human Agent

Did you know that you can resolve about 80% of first-level queries without involving your chat agents? A chatbot does the job for you when your agents are busy handling critical cases that require more attention.

Let the bot:

  • Initiate interaction with the customer
  • Transfer it to live human agent for complex queries

With a seamless bot to agent deflection, you can direct all your complex queries to chat experts and the bot will take off a load of routine queries automatically.

3. Automated Message Templates

Create personalized templates for different use cases that are specific to your business. You can resolve most of your queries with automated templates as the likes of sending booking confirmation, ticket status, and delivery alerts.

Let your chat agents have the flexibility to choose from predefined templates that saves their time. While your chat agents will be able to focus on consumer’s query, it will simultaneously increase your turnaround time, customer satisfaction score, and first contact resolution rate. Create templates in text, video, and image format to simplify the customer engagement process.

4. Never Lose Track of Chat History

When your agents have been communicating with the customer for an unresolved issue, they can retrieve the context from the chat history and address the grievances more efficiently. The chat history is also available for customers to pick up the conversation where they left off. Especially on chat channels like WhatsApp and Google Business Messages, agents can handle chats asynchronously.

If your customer has requested to repair the refrigerator and the process will take more than 3 visits, the agents will be able to respond to the chat after a short duration as well. The agents do not have to be present in real-time, they can kick start the conversation after a short interval.

5. Clear Chat Disposition Indicators

Agents can dispose of the chat with desired disposition and add chat notes that can be used for future references. This enhances agents’ productivity as they can clearly segment chats on the basis of disposition and reopen a chat that requires further assistance. While dealing with a repeat customer, it becomes imperative for agents to retrieve the outcome of the previous interactions. Dispositions can be configured at the business level and the agents can choose a disposition with an easy dropdown option.

For instance, if a customer has requested for refund, the disposition can be selected as “refund” and the CRM will show this trigger if the customer calls back again to verify the refund status.

6. Chat-based Ticketing

Automatically create support tickets with Omnichannel Ticketing whenever a customer reaches you through different chat channels. These tickets are auto-routed to the agents along with the customer details like interaction history, unresolved queries, past grievances, purchase behavior, etc. Agents can easily access these tickets in their unified agent interface without having to toggle between multiple tabs.

A new ticket is created when the customer initiates a conversation through Google’s Business Messages. This ticket can be further handled by a bot or agent and if the query is resolved instantly, it will be closed as a Lite Ticket. If the customer query remains unresolved, the automatically generated ticket will be routed to the right department or agent according to the predefined routing algorithm.

What is CTI? How Does it Work with Salesforce?

CRMs have proven to be an integral part of businesses. Organizations across the globe have realized that CTI (Computer Technology Integration) offers a plethora of functions and capabilities to companies compared to simple onsite CRMs.

With the addition of CTI integration with Salesforce, businesses that encounter a high volume of incoming calls and whose sales teams make a lot of outbound calls witness a dramatic efficiency leading to better sales and revenues.

Although many businesses have hopped on the omnichannel solution bandwagon in recent years, voice or phone calls still remain the most preferred communication channel. 

A study conducted by North Ridge Group found that 56% of the respondents still prefer the phone to reach out to the customer service desks because it’s effortless.

 This inference from the study suggests two possibilities:

  • Businesses still need to strengthen their presence across non-traditional touch-points
  • The phone is the best medium to articulate one’s concern or pain-point even when alternative communication channels like text, chat, or social media are becoming popular.

This brings us to our discussion about CTI, a technology that connects rugged phones to a computer system to deliver a smooth experience for all types of voice communication. 

Keep reading to learn more about a CTI integration in Salesforce and how to leverage it to get the maximum potential from your support and sales teams.

What Is CTI & Its Application

CTI or Computer Telephony Interaction is a call center technology widely used by customer service teams to improve the interaction with customers. The technology essentially unifies the computer with the telephone system and can be configured at two levels –

  • Desktop:  CTI integration with desktop helps showcase rich data in the form of a screen pop-up. This allows agents to view complete customer information even before the call is connected with the customer.
  • Call Routing: Helps in identifying the caller and routes it to the correct department or agent. Additionally, agents can also transfer the call to relevant agents/departments, put the call on hold and even dispose of the call.

Why Is CTI Relevant for Call Center Interaction?

Revenue and efficiency are two primary concerns for businesses today. Both these entities are tied down to call center interaction for an excellent reason. 

If a customer gets a satisfactory answer or resolution to a query in the first call, it becomes the critical driver of customer satisfaction, ensuring loyalty and trust.  

With effective CTI integration in place, when a customer calls in, the agent does not waste time hunting customer information; everything is visible in a single view. Typically, the agent may view the following field of information about a customer:

  • Personal information about the caller
  • Account status
  • Status of the ticket-open, closed, reopened
  • Previous call logs
  • Complete chat history

With instant access to the above information, not only does the agent productivity increase, and the first call resolution (FCR) rate of the call center is also high. 

It is estimated that a 15% increase in FCR results in a 57% reduction in repeat calls. This is good news since handling a query within the first call may increase customer retention by 96%.

To summarize our discussion, the relevance of CTI in terms of call center productivity can help businesses:

  • Saves Cost & Resources: CTI also leads to a significant reduction in cost and improvement in resource-saving for organizations in various ways. This may include reducing CSR churn, a drop in the price of customer database errors, reduction of telephone network toll expenses, reduction in liability cost, etc.
  • Reduce In-Call Handling Time: The CTI display offers all the relevant information even before the call is connected so that the agent can provide a quick resolution. The agent can wrap the call quickly and will be able to take more calls in a short amount of time.
  • Reduce Aggravated Session: The customer no longer needs to repeat their query to an agent in subsequent calls; therefore,  instances of aggravated call sessions are relatively lower.
  • Facilitate a Positive Agent Experience: Since the agent can accommodate several customer requests in a short duration of time that too with minimal instances of irate, the agent experience is better. They feel empowered and do optimal justice to their jobs.

What Is a CTI Integration for Salesforce? – How Does It Work?

Salesforce, as we know it, is a leading CRM!

A Salesforce Open CTI is a framework developed by Salesforce that enables other third-party solutions like Ameyo, to easily integrate with Salesforce, without putting a strain on the API count. 

A salesforce telephony integration provides an essential link between computer systems and modern telephone systems. It is a highly valuable tool and is known to help sales and support teams make and receive calls across devices.

Customer support teams are the front troopers of any organization. To deliver exceptional service on call, they need to be in sync with all the information that is being updated in the CRM. 

With Salesforce CTI integration, agents can get a 360-degree view of the customer in real-time. This is necessary for building a rapport with the customer as well as improving a positive customer experience.

The following illustration aptly depicts how Salesforce CTI Integration works –

salesforce-cti-integration

Transforming Salesforce Into an Integrated Sales Engine

  • Agent Efficiency Gets a Whole New Meaning: Agents no longer have to switch between applications with a single username and password authentication. Everything is visible on a single screen.
  • Automated two-way synchronization:  All the information is synced in real-time; this ensures that the agent has access to updated information. This is no lag, and agents can service the customers better.
  • Integrated Dashboard Fosters Sales: With Salesforce integration, tracking sales activity is a breeze. Supervisors can also instantly manage agent performance in real-time. They can procure information related to call source, ongoing calls, and call duration.
  • Eliminates  Human Errors: The click to dial feature allows agents to call a customer directly from the CRM. There is no need to punch the number manually, thus eliminating any instances of human error.

Ameyo’s CTI integration in Salesforce empowers your business to convert phone conversations into data instantaneously. Here’s what you get with Ameyo’s CTI integration in Salesforce:

  • Click To Call
  • Case Association
  • Smart Automations
  • Live and Historical Reporting
  • Call Recording
  • Quality Monitoring
  • CTI Pop-up
  • Automated Dialers
  • Inbound Call Management
  • Call Telephony Options
  • Call Scheduling
  • Call Dispositions & Notes
  • Mobile App Support

Wrapping Up

In a nutshell, enterprises that have high customer traction rely on CRM solutions.  Integrating the platform with call center software will be incremental in improving contact center efficiency.  

Salesforce is one of the most popular cloud CRM platforms that is used worldwide. It is an integral part of customer experience solutions.

Therefore a telephony software that can be integrated with Salesforce can improve customer experience by manifolds.

Remote Working: How a Short-term Solution Turned into a Long-term Ally

If you were someone who thought it’s time to say a much-needed goodbye to the dreadful COVID19 virus then let me tell you – you were not the only one. Truth be told, many believed that we will get a handle on the situation with global vaccination drives. However, the second and in some countries the third wave of the pandemic put everything for a toss.

Businesses that were looking at remote working for the short term are now facing a shake-down. And organizations that set up their technology and infrastructure looking at work from home as a temporary solution are now re-thinking the situation as the pandemic is still not over.

The Second Wave of COVID-19: Re-thinking your Customer Experience Strategy

With the pandemic extending longer than expected, it is time for the contact centers to re-look at their customer engagement strategy and invest in the right technology to ensure great results.

Some of the contact center trends that we observed were:

  • Accelerated adoption of cloud-based call center software
  • Closing down of physical offices with workforce moving to a work from home model
  • Increase in digital channel traffic
  • Need for remote monitoring of virtual agents

How Remote Contact Center Software can benefit your Business?

Having the right technology partner by your side makes all the difference – especially in difficult times like the pandemic. A remote contact center or a cloud contact center vendor that understands your business requirements while ensuring business continuity.

#1. Agent Empowerment with the right technology

During the first wave of the pandemic, many contact center owners looked for short-term solutions to overcome the challenges of remote working, especially those faced by remote agents. One of the biggest issues being the availability of a system/computer. Unlike in the office, where agents have access to an individual laptop desktop they might not have one at home too.

Having a remote contact center solution that allows your agents to use their smartphones as a full-fledged contact center is the answer. A mobile call center software with advanced features and top-notch security features empowers your agents to manage all the inbound and outbound calls from literally anywhere, anytime using just their smartphone.

#2. Increase Agent Productivity with fewer stressors

It’s no secret that working from home has its own perks over working from an office. Convenience taking the cake at that. Armed with a contact center software powered by advanced customer interaction management features – inbound and outbound calling, CTI integration, unified agent desktop, click-to-call, and more, you can expect your agents to drive first contact resolution.

Additionally, apart from the ease of use of the contact center software solution, another factor that significantly improves agents’ lives is reduced traveling time/staying away from family and friends due to work commitments. This further improves the work-life balance along with the mental health of the agents which will directly or indirectly improve their productivity.

#3. Providing a Secure and Compliant Environment

Contact centers are data sensitive. One has to be careful as to who has access to what and when. This particularly becomes important when the agents are not working from an office. Common concerns are around data security, secure internet connection – you do not want your customer data to be leaked. For that, you need a contact center software vendor that can provide you with enterprise-grade security features.

Being PCI-DSS compliant, having ISO 27001 and ISO/IEC 27018 certification are some of the factors to consider while deciding on your contact center provider. Some other ways to ensure data integrity and security are by following measures like enabling captcha, AES 256 based data encryption, DTMF tone masking, number masking, strict password policies, etc.

#4. Embracing digitization with Omnichannel Customer Engagement

A trend that we saw in the initial days of the pandemic was a spike in customer engagement over digital channels – and this trend is here to stay. For the most part channels like social media, WhatsApp, live chat gained prominence due to lack of physical visits and human interaction. Everything went online and e-commerce saw a boom.

Check out: How Call Center Software can help the E-commerce and retail industry

For any customer-centric business, delivering an exceptional customer experience is the key to success and omnichannel contact center software is the way to go. With this, you can interact with your customers via multiple channels such as voice, email, Facebook, Twitter, live chat, WhatsApp, Google Business Messages, etc while allowing your agents to have a 360-degree view of the customer journey and thus, having contextual customer interactions. 

#5. Establish Remote Governance and Centralized Contact Center Operations

Contact centers are data-driven entities. SLA and metrics are the keys to contact center optimization. But what happens when you cannot physically see the agents sitting on their seats or see their work? You have to rely on technology! But in a virtual setting, the big question remains – who do you trust? The agent, the network, or other factors?

The best way to establish remote governance and manage operations remotely is by getting a 360-degree view of all remote systems, devices, and environments. Having this data and reports with them your IT infrastructure team if and when the issue is with the agent’s system, network, or something else, and fix it accordingly.

#6. Be on top of Contact Center Metrics with Remote Monitoring

Contact centers are data-driven entities. SLA and metrics are the keys to contact center optimization. But what happens when you cannot physically see the agents sitting on their seats or see their work? You need remote monitoring tools that empower your supervisors to track relevant call center metrics.

Live dashboards with numerical and graphical data for agent performance call volume, average wait time, and other metrics allow the managers to analyze the data in real-time and take corrective actions. Additionally, having detailed reports, for eg., missed call report, ACD report, etc further offer insights into identifying the gaps and strategizing accordingly.

remote-call-center-ebook-cta-1024x210

Conclusion

Businesses are going through a tough time as the world is battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Some industries like travel and hospitality saw a decline in demand whereas, e-commerce and Edutech industries saw an increase in demand. Thus, it is important for contact centers to evolve with the changing market dynamics and adopt the best technology, in this case, a remote contact center software that will help them to sail through these times and emerge a winner. As we can say with some certainty that remote working is here to stay and the sooner businesses realize that the better it with be for their future growth and customer experience.

Why Ameyo is First Choice for Cloud Contact Center Solution?

Ameyo, a cloud leader in customer experience and contact center solutions, has been providing cloud solutions to 2,000+ businesses across the globe. Ameyo’s cloud contact center software is agile, flexible, and highly customizable, making it simpler for organizations to tailor the solution according to their business needs.

1. Deployment is Fast and Flexible

  • Ameyo Offers Fast Deployment

Ameyo provides flexible deployment solutions for various business categories, along with custom deployment choice. With a wide range of public, private, and hybrid cloud contact center solutions, your customer engagement can be up and running in less than 48 hours. Ameyo also ensures a smooth transition from on-premise to cloud solution with ease, while preserving existing technology.

The speed and ease regardless of deployment model are guaranteed across all platforms.

2. Security Remains Priority

  • Ameyo is Secure

Ameyo’s robust cloud platform has multi-layered security features and it offers PCI DSS compliant cloud environments that are ISO/IEC 27018 and ISO-27001 certified. Additionally, it provides comprehensive data security and strict access control.

While we understand that data security is a primary concern for any business with data theft becoming sophisticated, we ensure that the data leakage is barred across all departments with our in-built features like number masking.

3. Natural Integrations with Industry-grade CRMs

  • Ameyo Integration

Enterprises using Ameyo’s cloud contact center solution benefit from the ease of integration of the solution with their in-house or third-party CRM applications. Ameyo’s cloud solution can easily be integrated with leading applications like Zendesk, ZOHO, Leadsquared, Freshdesk, Freshsales, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce and many more..

This offers the organization to deliver a differentiated customer experience that is backed by contextual interactions across all platforms.

4. Industry Recognises Ameyo’s Cloud Solutions

  • Awards won by Ameyo Cloud Call Center

Ameyo has won many awards to its name for being an agile solution that provides Best Support, Great Experience, and Best Usability. In addition to that, Ameyo has recently been honored with CRM Excellence Awards 2021 and Pandemic Innovation Awards 2021 presented by TMC.

Customers across the globe are benefitting from Ameyo’s Cloud Contact Center and are able to increase their conversion rates manifold.

5. Leaders Vouch for Ameyo’s Cloud Contact Center Solution

Ameyo empowers customer engagement for several leaders across industries including BYJU’S, HDFC Bank, OLA, Swiggy, Swiggy, and more. Our customers are our partner in disguise. We are striving for our customers’ growth and they appreciate our effort.

  • What Customers Say About Ameyo Cloud

Within just 2020, Ameyo empowered customer experience for 250+ enterprises with more than 50,000+ agents in 60+ countries across the globe. Ameyo’s highly scalable and flexible cloud solution with its other benefits has helped us earn many customers to our name.

Want to experience how Ameyo’s cloud solution works? Request a Demo

Busting Myths About Virtual Contact Center Software

Imagine a contact center software that provides flexibility of working from anywhere in the world, offers scalability, and is easy to deploy! 

That future is now. The answer is virtual contact center software. 

While we know virtual contact centers are going to make the cut in the decade ahead, we are ready to bust the myths about virtual contact center software. 

Myth #101

Contact Center Agents Become Less Productive

Recent reports suggest that agents’ productivity increases by 40% when they are provided with flexibility to work from anywhere. Remote contact center agents become more efficient when they are provided with the facility of working from any location, any device, and any browser.

While agents work from the comfort of their homes, they tend to take ownership and become accountable towards their work.

Myth #102

Remote Contact Centers Are Expensive

Setting up remote contact centers can save up to 15% of operational costs, eliminating the need for investing in physical infrastructure. Virtual contact center software is a highly scalable and flexible solution that lets businesses scale up and down according to their business needs.

It comes with a complete contact center features stack that enables your business to operate remotely without compromising on business productivity.

Myth #103

Monitoring & Tracking Can Be Challenging

Most contact center supervisors and managers think that without the constant monitoring of agents’ performance, agents become less productive and less reliable. 

A robust remote contact center software enables the supervisors to monitor agents’ performance irrespective of their choice of work mode and equips them with real-time monitoring tools that allows them to keep track of agents’ productivity. 

Myth #104

Working Remotely Poses Massive Infrastructural Challenges

No, it doesn’t.

Your remote agents need a laptop/smartphone and stable internet connection and you can easily handle contact center operations remotely. With minimum infrastructure needs, you can convert your smartphones into mini contact centers and deliver the kind of customer service like never before.

Mobile agent application supports full-stack enterprise-grade features for inbound and outbound calling operations.

Myth #105

Remote Contact Centers Are Difficult To Set Up

Doing away with infrastructural readiness, you can go up and running in less than 48 hours. With enterprise-grade contact center features, you can easily integrate your CRM applications, ticketing system, and other software. 

With its user-friendly interface, intuitive dashboards, and robust features, you get the best of both worlds. 

What’s new at Ameyo in April 2021

New Product Updates with Enhanced Capabilities 

Ameyo has been into customer engagement and experience space for almost 2 decades now and is preferred by renowned brands worldwide for its advanced product capabilities. In order to ensure easier CX operations and continue to bring advancements in our product line. 

To ensure hassle-free customer interactions, this time too, we have brought in some major updates in our products under our latest product release, 4.11. 


Scroll down to know and understand these enhancements around Ameyo Voice (Call Center Management Software), Ameyo Omni (Omnichannel Customer Support Software), Ameyo Fusion CX (Omnichannel Customer Support Software & Ticketing System), and Remote Call Center Solution. Let’s quickly jump on the updates now!

Feature Updates for Fusion CX

Dashboards augmented with Offline Chat Metrics

Many businesses do not provide 24×7 service but customers may reach out to them at any time. In such situations, business managers may not want to lose a customer and instead would want their representatives to connect with those customers, the time they start their operations.

To ensure that no offline chats are missed, a new metric- ‘Offline Chat’ is added on supervisor’s chat dashboard. This metric would provide the exact count of chats received during non-working hours or holidays in the selected period. This would help operation managers to strategize their operations  such that no customer chats coming outside business working hours gets missed. 

In addition to this, Ameyo agents will be able to view tickets received during non-working hours or holidays. They can view such tickets by applying filters for offline chats on the ticket listing page.

Supervisor can now view average first response time


Supervisor’s dashboard has now been enhanced with new metrics that help them analyse agents’ performance better. They can now check the Average First Response that their agents have taken to revert on an incoming chat. This enhancement in the supervisor’s dashboard will specifically allow them to strategize workforce allocation for chat interactions coming in through various chat channels.

Agent can now preview attachments

Many times customers share attachments to provide more clarity on the issue raised. Downloading attachments every time to view its content increases the number of clicks for an agent and also the consumer’s data is stored in the agent’s machine even when it is not required. 

Previewing the attachments will save a lot of time in scenarios where an agent is bombarded with attachments from customers on tickets and chats.

The agents as well as supervisors will be able to perform various functions while previewing an attachment. They can zoom-in and zoom-out an image, play and pause a video, download only the desired attachment(s) or all attachments by clicking on a single button. 

This capability will collectively decrease the number of clicks, significantly save agents’ time, and therefore, improve operational efficiency. 

Administrators can now deploy custom node flow from the UI 

Ameyo admin for chat-specific campaigns will now have a separate tab for Advanced Nodeflow Settings within their user interface. This tab will allow administrators to deploy any custom node flow from their UI itself. 

Earlier it was handled from the backend that led to downtime in restarting the application and was more problematic for multi-tenant setups where it resulted in downtime for all the tenants on that app server. This is now completely taken care of by providing the capability of deploying node flows from the UI.

Link the right customer with an ongoing chat 

This new enhancement brings in a Customer Card that lets you link the right customer with an ongoing chat. The agent will be able to view some key differential details of the customer on a customer card to identify and ensure that this is the right customer to be attached to the live chat. By hovering on the customer name in the ticket listing page, customer listing tab, in the chat window, on the ticket history page, as well as on the telephony panel, the agent will be able to view the identifiable details of the customer.

This will ensure faster resolution and boost agents’ productivity. Additionally, there will not be any discrepancy in customer records and wrong linking of customers. 

Keep agents’ notes safe 

Agents can add notes to tickets to keep the context of interactions. Sometimes other agents edit or delete these notes, making it difficult for ticket owners to keep the context intact. It may ultimately ruin the customer experience.

This feature enhancement allows you to restrict agents editing, updating, or deleting other agents’ notes. Only ticket owners can make changes in their notes or delete them, however, supervisors can also perform editing or deletion of these notes. This enhancement will ensure that the context of the notes or tickets is not hampered. 

In case of transferred tickets, once a ticket is transferred from Agent 1 to Agent 2, Agent 1 will no longer be able to make changes to its notes. Only Agent 2 will be able to do so.

Field Agents can create tickets 

In order to ensure that there are no missed tasks by field agents and no hassles in communicating with the backend workforce, Field agent will be able to create a ticket as well to view all tickets closed by him. He’ll be able to enter customer details for a new customer or edit the details of an already existing ticket. Ticket details with queue selection, ticket status, attachments, and ticket priorities can be entered by the field agent.

Feature Updates for Voice

Blacklist Inbound Calls 

If you constantly get inbound calls from the same number, you can block this number by adding it to the blacklist. You can identify and segment customers that are to be blacklisted from the inbound campaigns. The supervisor will be able to blacklist customers by uploading a blacklisted leads CSV or can block a single number from UI. Ameyo Agents will also be able to block a number; but while blacklisting a call, a call note will be mandatory to fill by the agent.

Mask Privilege for Auto Call On/Off

With this enhancement in toolbar integration, the admin can enable/disable masking privilege for Auto Call ON or OFF for agents. This feature can help the administrator to keep a check on the new agents by masking their status update capability. This configuration provides businesses additional flexibility in terms of assigning role privileges.

SIP Trunk Notifications to IT Admins 

Use Case : In a contact center setup, to use the SIP Trunks provided by telcos, the call server must register to the telco SIP server. During use, it may so happen that the trunk may lose registration. There are several reasons for this such as below:

  1. Change in the credentials
  2. An incorrect configuration change
  3. Loss of network connection
  4. Loose network cable
  5. It could just be an error by Telco 

When this registration is lost, the trunk can not be used to do outbound calls or receive inbound calls. Hence, the administrator or supervisor cannot effectively use this trunk in a campaign any longer.

With this new enhancement, a Trunk down notification will be sent to contact center managers, administrators, and all supervisors of the campaign if the trunk is being used in either of the campaigns.

Location Support with Ameyo Apps

Ameyo app framework allows usage of system apps or user-developed apps to be used for various purposes. There can be apps that are required to be used across a contact center, while some should be restricted to be available for use by the users of a certain campaign only. Till now, we used to install an app in a particular slot.This is restrictive and allows a less number of apps. From this GA upgrade, apps can be installed in locations that can support multiple apps. 

Locations can have certain restrictions on the number of apps. e.g. Telephony bar location will also support a fixed number of apps due to UX restrictions. If this limit is exceeded for an agent show an error to contact the Administrator.  While installing and configuring apps via App Manager, an Administrator should be able to define the scope of availability of the app in terms of role and hierarchy.  The administrator will be able to configure one app in multiple locations for a certain role. The app can be available in a contact center or multiple Processes, Campaigns or Queues.

Priority dialing 

Create Customer Segments or Groups for your leads in one go. You can also  automate dialing as per the customer group priority. Prioritise dialing can be done on customer segments as per your sales strategy. This targeted outreach helps improve Sales Conversion Rates.

Disposition Class Inclusion under Call Details

Use case : Important in businesses where two different processes require similar disposition codes but there should be some provision to segment them.

Disposition class, as well as code, can be seen on the ‘Call Details’ screen under the ‘Manage’ tab of the supervisor’s interface. This segmentation is also present for agents while disposing of calls from a toolbar or a chat conversation. Disposition classes are already available, now they have been made available on the below shown screens:

IVR Input Mapping on Agent’s Interface

With this enhancement in toolbar integration, the agent will be able to view the IVR journey of the customer and understand the interaction context before connecting to the customer. This creates a positive impact in reducing call handling time and improving agent efficiency. 

Warm Call Transfer from One Campaign to Another

There can be a scenario when an agent has to transfer a call to another agent in some other campaign to solve a single customer query. With this enhancement, an agent can transfer a call to another agent in some other campaign. This call transfer will be a warm transfer and the agent will be able to search for another available agent for call transfer by his/her username or user Id.

Reverse Timer for Agents Wrap Time

With this new enhancement, a reverse Timer will be shown on the toolbar starting from the configured wrap timeout value. This will help the agent to know how much time is left for the call to be auto-disposed.

Feature Updates for Remote Contact Center Solution

Chat Transfer now available in Mobile App

There can be scenarios where agents might need to transfer the chat to a different user or queue so that the chat can be redirected to the best-suited agent. With this new enhancement, the remote Ameyo agents will be able to transfer a chat to the user in the same queue or user in another queue while on chat from the chat window. This feature is already available in Ameyo’s web application and now has been extended to the mobile app.

Alternate Number Dialing Via Manual Preview Dialing

Some customers have more than one contact number and agents would want to dial out their alternate number in case the primary number is not reachable. Ameyo agents will have an option to select which number to dial in case of manual preview dialing. 

This enhancement in the mobile app toolbar helps agents to dial out the alternate numbers of the customer. This cuts down the calls disposed of as ‘Customer Not Reachable’ when an alternate number is already there in the system.This feature already exists in web applications and is now also available with mobile application. 

As we always try to match our steps with our customers’ requirements and consistently bring new features and advancements in our products, stay tuned for more updates and feature enhancements!

Ameyo Celebrates 1 Year Anniversary of Mobile Agent Application

In the wake of COVID-19, we realized that the contact centers became a crucial point of contact between customers and the brands. While adhering to the strict lockdown restrictions, it deemed necessary to be available for the customers 24*7. With the pandemic, human-to-human interactions became more relevant and businesses needed a solution that helped them shift to remote work operations overnight.

Combating the challenge of a remote work environment, Ameyo launched a Mobile Contact Center Solution to provide the businesses with an opportunity to stay connected with the customers across various touchpoints with minimal disruption. 

Pandemic has changed the way contact centers think about work and infrastructure, for good. The pace at which remote work has picked up is unprecedented. I am proud of our team that delivered a fully featured Enterprise contact center on a mobile application and we continue to enhance the app. In many ways, this has become a mobile-first contact center platform for many of our customers.

Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder, Ameyo

With 10,000+ downloads, 50,000+ agents onboarded, and countless memories created, we are celebrating a year of launching Mobile Contact Center.

And Our Customers Love This Solution

Ameyo’s Remote Contact Center Solution has helped iMarque reduce 15% of operational costs. It is a much more flexible solution compared to other larger brands available from competing players. And due to this flexibility, many of our customers have shifted to Ameyo.

Suresh V. Suryamurthy, CEO, iMarque Solutions

How does a Cloud-based Call Center Work?

COVID-19 has pushed the call centers to become digitally-enabled hubs. CIOs and CXOs have started to realize that the shift from on-premise call centers to cloud call centers has to be swift with the many capabilities that only a Cloud CC can ensure. As the uncertainty continues, cloud-hosted call centers provide greater flexibility, reliability, scalability, and disaster recovery. The call center agents, at length, have been agile towards elasticity of work from any location and time.

87% of global IT decision-makers agree that the current COVID-19 pandemic will cause organizations to accelerate their migration to the cloud.

– Logic Monitor

Interestingly, brands that relied solely on real-world experiences are now transitioning towards delivering digital experiences. This trend, coupled with cloud call center solutions, has become the best bet for businesses across the globe.

This brings us to the question of setting up a cloud-based call center.

How does a cloud contact center work?

Setting a cloud-based call center for your business is very simple. There are various modes of deployment that you can choose from to fit your business requirements. While cloud call center software can be deployed within hours, choosing the right cloud partner will ensure your customer journey success.

Public Cloud

In a public cloud, the database and applications are owned and managed by the third-party vendor or cloud service provider where you can use instances shared by many other organizations. The services are managed using a web browser.

It is advantageous because it involves a low cost of operations and it does not require maintenance as it is taken care of by your service provider.

Private Cloud is a great fit for E-commerce, BPOs, Telemarketing, Travel & Hospitality, and various other verticals that deal with a large chunk of incoming calls. Along with cost-effectiveness, it is a highly scalable and reliable solution. If your business is visioning to expand its operations, a public cloud allows you to scale without worrying about infrastructural management.

The public cloud services market as a whole is expected to grow by 18.4 percent in 2021.

– Statista

Private Cloud

Public and private clouds may seem to be different modes of deployment but are very similar. What differentiates a private cloud from a public cloud is that while public cloud instances are shared by many businesses, a private cloud is owned by a single business entity.

A private cloud can be hosted at your on-site data center or it can be hosted by a third-party service provider. In this, the hardware and software are dedicated to your organization and the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.

Private clouds are a right fit for banks, government bodies, and financial institutions that deal with large data. Private cloud ensures maximum data security unlike public clouds and offers a great level of customization for businesses.

Research suggests that the global private cloud server market size was valued at USD 30.24 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.6% from 2019 to 2025.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud gives you the best of both worlds. In this, you can choose to store your data and applications on both private and public clouds alike, as your business demands.

For businesses that deal with high volumes of data with lesser security needs and sensitive customer data together, they can use the combination of a private and public cloud. It offers greater flexibility and it remains cost-effective undeniably.

In healthcare, the customer service, appointment booking, and report generation departments work in sync. While the data shared across the report generation domain can be sensitive and critical, data security becomes a prime concern. To minimize the risk of data breaches, a hybrid solution can be implemented that ensures data security while being potential cost savings on other business operations.

Another research suggests the global hybrid cloud market size was valued at $36,138 million in 2017 and is projected to reach $171,926 million by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 21.7% from 2018 to 2025.

A-Quick-Checklist-To-Decide-on-the-Right-Cloud-Contact-Center-Vendor

Conclusion

Cloud-based call center are going to disrupt the market in the decade ahead. In addition to being the ROI generator for your business, a cloud call center has manifold benefits of scalability, flexibility, reliability, and high data security. While you are choosing cloud call center software for your business, find this quick checklist handy to decide on the right Cloud Call Center provider.

Looking for a Genesys Alternative? We have the best solution for you.

Why Cloud Contact Center is your Best Bet

Cloud adoption for contact centers has been on the rise in the last few years. It was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic when contact centers were forced to work remotely. However, the good news is that many businesses are looking at cloud-based contact centers as a long-term model due to their many benefits.

“61% of businesses say that they’re planning on moving their contact center to the cloud.” 

Dimension Data

According to Dimension Data, 61 percent of businesses say that they’re planning on moving their contact center to the cloud and this number is expected to increase post-COVID. From huge savings on upfront investments in technology and infrastructure to eliminating frequent maintenance expenses, cloud-based contact centers offer numerous business benefits.

Benefits of Migrating to a Cloud Contact Center

1. Cloud Computing is Flexible

One of the biggest reasons why businesses like to opt for cloud contact center software is the flexibility and scalability that it offers. No matter if you are a startup, mid-sized company, or a big enterprise, a cloud-based solution allows you to change with the changing demands. For instance, during the peak season, you might hire seasonal agents and thus, need additional licenses. However, once the season is over, you might need to reduce the agent licenses – which can practically be done with one click. Unlike in an on-premise solution where you might need to jump some hoops to turn it around in time.

Additionally, with a cloud contact center, you can easily add new communication channels – thanks to APIs that help with faster integration and the addition of new communication channels such as live chat, social media, WhatsApp, video, SMS, etc with no fuss. 

2. Faster Deployment and Implementation

With cloud-based contact center software, you need not worry about heavy infrastructure, purchasing/leasing land to put your servers, etc – your agents just need a laptop and stable internet connection and you are good to go. 

With each business having unique requirements, with the right cloud contact center vendor by your side, you can choose the best deployment option (cloud-based or hybrid) depending on your needs and goals.

3. Business Continuity with Disaster Management

If the past year has taught us anything then it is that life is unpredictable – anything can happen anytime. Businesses that never thought of working from home had to quickly make the transition. Cloud contact center solutions take that burden off your shoulders.

You can maintain business continuity in case of extreme weather conditions and natural calamities with no to minimal downtime. This is particularly useful for SMEs that lack the required capital and expertise to manage everything on-site. While you get to ensure a consistent customer experience.

4. Reduce Operational Costs & Improve ROI

Return on investment is one of the main goals of any profit-seeking business. And cloud computing is just up that alley as it allows you to significantly cut down the huge expenditure on hardware and other infrastructural spendings. Also, you only pay for what you use – that’s the beauty of a subscription model.

Compared to a traditional legacy contact center, how cloud contact center works is not only more cost-effective in the short term but also reduces operational costs in the long term. Thus, making it a profitable bet.

5. Faster Implementation of New Features & Updates

The benefit of migrating to the cloud is the updates. Unlike the on-premise system where you have to wait for server updates, in a cloud setup, the moment your cloud vendor comes up with any new features or upgrades, your systems will automatically be updated based on your plan. Besides, in a multi-tenant environment, whenever the hosted vendor upgrades the platform it is applicable to all, usually without any additional costs.

6. Real-time Data Visibility

One of the biggest challenges of agents working from different locations is to track their performance. However, with advanced contact center reporting and analytics tools, your supervisor can monitor the customer interaction quality by snooping, barging, or whispering on a live call to assist the agents and evaluate their performance.

Similarly, the live dashboards allow the supervisors to monitor real-time call center metrics such as the call volume, the number of available agents, customers in the queue, average call duration, etc to draw actionable insights. Combined with live dashboards and contact center reports, the supervisors and managers are armed with all the relevant information to make effective decisions even with virtual agents.

7. Multi-level Data Security

Data security is one of the biggest concerns for any business and that has often been cited as one of the reasons for going with an on-premise solution. However, according to Aberdeen, 70% of cloud contact center users cite security and compliance as a reason to invest in cloud technology, showing that there has been a shift.

“83% of IT leaders say they trust cloud security more than ever.”

Salesforce

A PCI-DSS Compliant cloud vendor with ISO 27001 and ISO/IEC 27018 certifications offers an array of comprehensive security measures such as enabling CAPTCHA, AES 256 based data encryption, DTMF tone masking, number masking, strict password policies, session security configuration, inactivity timeout configuration, etc to maintain data integrity while complying with regulatory requirements.

Conclusion

In this article, I have talked about some of the benefits of moving to a cloud contact center setup and they sure are great incentives to make the move. And there are bound to be many more based on your business needs. However, it is important to evaluate the right cloud contact center provider that will help you set up a reliable, stable, and growth-oriented solution.

Read how cloud contact center works and what should be the key features in any cloud contact center solution.