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The Virtual Call Center Starter Kit: Tools You Need to Run an At-home Call Center

Virtual call center solution is quickly transforming the face of customer service, and the global pandemic has given acceleration to it. Many businesses are pushed a decade ahead of the technology and fortunately, the call center agents can now get the flexibility to work from their preferred locations.

As ‘work from anywhere’ has become a norm, it’s time that the businesses start embracing this reality with this quick checklist to run an at-home call center.

Infrastructure Readiness

While the virtual call center solution eliminates the need for setting up infrastructure and hardware installations, it requires businesses to be equipped with tools like a virtual call center app, VPN access, strong internet connection, desktop/laptop/smartphones to start with.

At-home or virtual agents will need infrastructural support to ensure that they provide uninterrupted customer service to the customers.

Application Infrastructure Management (AIM)

Let the truth be told, working remotely can be tedious for managers to track agents’ activities and identify the reason/issue for low productivity. In a remote work environment, it often is difficult for the IT department to find the root cause of call failure. If an agent is reporting continuous network failure, what would you trust, the network, the agent, or the device?

With application infrastructure management, managers can do away with such challenges and identify the root cause of low productivity with 15+ monitoring parameters such as network drop, blank call, abrupt disconnection, call failure, low internet bandwidth, and other network-related issues.

Mobile Agent Application

Why do you need a virtual call center app for your business? If your agents are struggling with limited infrastructure, a mobile app comes in handy, all you need is a smartphone with a strong internet connection and you have your own mini contact center in your hands.

Ameyo’s highly flexible mobile application allows agents to work with a low internet bandwidth of 100-150 KBPS ensuring that they deliver a superior customer experience. Additionally, with a floating widget, let the call center agents do app-plexing which further saves time by 20-25% on each call.

Comprehensive Remote Monitoring

Virtual contact center software that allows for systematic and standardized call monitoring practices is a must-have capability for managing a virtual call center. With remote call monitoring, supervisors can keep track of agents’ activities, analyze the call trends, and make well-informed data-driven decisions.

With enhanced features like real-time monitoring, let the supervisors gain full control of the call activities by snooping, barging, and whispering in a live call.

Reporting & Dashboards

Get a virtual call center software that allows you to keep a close eye on key performance metrics. In a physical office world, the managers could easily tap on the agents’ shoulder to get insights into the metrics but this becomes imperative to analyze the KPIs while working remotely.

Get a customizable dashboard with detailed reports and analytics into SLAs, CSAT rate, FCR rate, allowing the managers to prevent the SLA breaches in time and help increase customer satisfaction rate, making down tracking easy.

Onboarding & Collaboration

Your virtual agents need a tool to communicate with their peers and managers virtually. An internal chat option will make the team collaboration easy, ensuring that the at-home or remote agents can reach out to each other, especially when they are on a live call.

Create a high trust environment with shared collaboration tools and let the agents have access to all the information in a single dashboard.

To maintain the efficiency of your at-home call center agents, you need to equip your team with the tools that help them increase their productivity and at the same time provide the comfort of working from their preferred location. With a progressive virtual call center solution, let your agents translate each call into a meaningful experience. I hope the aforementioned checklist will help you choose the best virtual contact center software for your business.

FinTech Adoption Remains on the Rise this Holiday Season

It’s that time of the year again. The holiday season is upon us, and this year the celebration is going to be different. As the world has moved towards contactless interactions, bidding adieu to in-person visits, the world of FinTech is also changing. Today, more than ever, fintech is seeing an uplift in adopting financial services across the globe.

What was once considered a complex way of managing the transactions have now become the choicest platform for consumers due to digital platforms’ rise. COVID-19 has led the consumers to engage with FinTech propositions, driving the FinTech space forward.

The shift in payment habits amidst the pandemic will be reasonably visible in the post-pandemic world. Most consumers are looking for digital payment applications like Paytm, Freecharge, BHIM, and PayPal to minimize the risk of exchanging currency notes.

According to the Economic Times, money transfer and payments are the major drivers for fintech adoption at 94%.

Key Reasons that will Drive the Growth for FinTech Brands

Festive season entices positive spending among consumers, which is likely to boost investments
As consumers are still reluctant to go to physical stores for shopping, more online shopping is expected for gifting, shopping, etc. The rise in online shopping will support the growth of digital payments, helping the FinTech brands further.
As most economies are not on the pink side of health, it is expected there will be growth in the loan requirements.

With money transfer and payments becoming the primary driver for FinTechs, the industry must prepare for the holiday rush this holiday season.

How do you prepare for the holiday rush?

Now that we know the consumers are heavily relying on the FinTech industry for transactions and payments, it’s time to deliver high-quality customer service and prepare your agents for the surge in call volume.

Provide a Safe Banking Environment

Customer’s data safety remains a prime concern for financial service providers. Customers provide their critical information and invest their money for loan requirements only if they trust the brand. Customer acquisition and retaining are a challenge for the financial service provider because traditional banks have an edge on their information security. With PCI-DSS Compliance, ensure that your customers’ data is secured and their investment is taken care of at every business step.

Ensure Contactless Customer Onboarding

Let the customers complete their identity verification process from the comfort of their home. With Video KYC Solution, onboard customers without the need for in-person visits and ensure zero fraudulence with an AI-driven face recognition technology. An advanced video-based KYC solution allows the FinTech industry to fasten the onboarding process and onboard a customer in less than 3 minutes with maximum accuracy. This helps reduce the drop-offs, ensuring that the customers do not escalate or switch to competitors.

Define Business Rules for Holiday Season

Most customers like to be self-served, and if you are not doing this right, someone else will. When the customers reach you after office hours, you can let the chatbot or voice bot answer the first-level query, ensuring that no interaction is missed. For complex queries, you can define routing rules and automatically assign those interactions to the next available agent.

Additionally, inform your customers of the exciting offers using voice prompts and voice blasts, and guide them through the terms & conditions.

Communicate Through Customer’s Preferred Channels

It’s time to address the roadblocks to omnichannel communication. Customers prefer to communicate with their brands on their preferred channels. Your customer sees an ad on Instagram about an exciting offer on Paytm, they use the app, place the order, check their email, and seek a confirmation message in their journey. And this happens even before reaching out via a voice call.

Customers do expect consistency. You can excel at it by sending WhatsApp triggers of payment confirmation, reminders, alerts, etc. or can send an automated text message to inform the customer before making a call.

A Milestone in OSP Guidelines – DOT relaxes Compliance norms for BPOs & IT services

5th November 2020 will be a historic day for Indian telecom. With the onset of Covid 19, the Department of Telecommunication had to temporarily relax OSP norms so businesses could continue their Customer Service, KPO’s, and Telesales process when more than half of their workforce had to shift to their Homes. Today after 10 months of Working From Home,

The Department of Telecommunications has officially floated some modern, liberal guidelines that come as a massive boost to BPO’s and IT-enabled service sector

This is a historic day for BPO’s & Contact Centers as this charter marks the end of a huge compliance burden for the Business Process Management industry. With the economy in doldrums, the new guidelines will significantly boost IT Services and the Offshoring & Outsourcing industry.

Few Highlights from DOT’s latest OSP Guidelines

Ease of Starting a Business with reduced barriers of entry

- No registration certificate is required for OSP’s to start their services
- No more hefty Bank Guarantee barrier to set-up an OSP Center( Call center, BPO, KPO etc.)

Interconnection between OSP centers

Interconnection between two differently owned OSP centers is now permissible over a Virtual private network ( via Leased lines / MPLS) – This is a massive development for Organizations that have outsourced customer service to multiple BPO’s. It will make call data overflow amongst BPO’s easier and at lower costs
OSP’s can now communicate with their distributed servers/OSP centers using leased lines/MPLS based VPN connectivity using the internet. – Multi site contact centers can now utilize VPN without the need of switching to PSTN networks when communicating with their site-specific servers

Easy Infrastructure sharing between Domestic & International OSP’s

- EAPBX at foreign locations of International OSP will be allowed. However, all the data and call records pertaining to the OSP should be made available to the Department of telecom.
- Sharing of Infrastructure of Domestic OSP & International OSP’s will be permitted going forward – Earlier OSP’s needed separate Infrastructure requirements for DOmestic and international OSP or one had to pay hefty bank guarantees for infrastructure sharing. Going forward infrastructure sharing between Domestic & international OSP’s will be allowed. But one has to ensure that no Toll bypass takes place.

Permanent Work From Home Ready

Agents Working from Home will be treated as Remote Agents of the OSP center & interconnection with OSP center is allowed
Agents can work from anywhere in India

You can also go through the complete guidelines here.

We at Ameyo serve many OSP’s and successfully transitioned more than 50000+ Agents to Work from Home. In our experience, the most challenging aspect of Work From Home contact centers has been establishing remote IT & Ops governance and enabling virtual collaboration and onboarding amongst call center agents and supervisors.

With this regulation, the Work From Home scenario is likely to go upwards, This is a step in the right direction and opens up new opportunities and possibilities for the contact center and BPO domain.

Impact of COVID 19 on the BPO Industry

Stay tuned for more information on DOT regulations and what it means for companies.

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Are you prepared for the upcoming holiday logistics rush

Holiday seasons are the busiest time of the year for the logistics Industry. And, does that change because of the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19? Yes, we are sure to see a surge in demand for making contactless deliveries. The in-store visits have reduced significantly, kicking off online selling. With e-commerce taking over this year, retailers will have to be prepared with the inventory well in advance to emerge out as the winner of this holiday season.

So, does your logistics company have the capacity to make all the deliveries and handle the call center operations effectively? With most brands shooting out the message of delayed expected delivery, it sure will be a spike in inbound call volume. So, how are you preparing for the holiday logistics rush?

Creating an easy and effortless customer experience is easier said than done. There are certain challenges like agents will have more repetitive tasks on their plate, the contact centers will be bombarded with inbound queries, brands will have to hire additional staff, management of reverse logistics, etc. You will have to hire additional seasonal staff to cater to the needs of the customers. So, you can provide a high level of customer support this holiday season by using an effective remote contact center solution.

How does a Remote Contact Center Solution solve these challenges?

With a remote contact center solution, the logistics industry can bridge the gap between vendors and customers by delivering a seamless customer journey across touchpoints.

Deliver Omnichannel Customer Experience

Integrate your remote contact center with all the channels like call, email, chat, social media, messaging platforms, in-app chat, etc. Let the customers connect with the vendors through their preferred channels, making it easy for them to reach and find related information.

With a surge in inbound queries, you can automate the workflow and inform the customers about delayed deliveries even before they reach out. Walking a step ahead of the customers can turn out to be a game-changer. Sending timely notifications via WhatsApp, reminders through email, voice blast about the shipment, or emergency alerts helps customers stay abreast of all the information.

Scale as the Business Grows

Are you thinking of scaling your business this holiday season? Are you worried about huge capital investments like infrastructure cost and operational overheads? A remote contact center solution is the answer for your business.

With its pay as you go model, it allows you to seamlessly scale up or down your business operations without worrying about operational costs. Working from anywhere, any device, and any browser gives you a navigation card through a vast talent pool across geographies. With the flexibility to grow your business, you can easily manage the surge in inbound call volume by hiring additional customer support specialists.

Priority-based Routing

A customer whose product is due for delivery in the next 4 hours would become a priority customer. But, how would you ensure that the customer is routed to the relevant agent when they call? With a smart routing strategy, backed by an intelligent customer identification process, you can now easily filter the customers to be routed on priority.

A customer with a general query automatically gets routed to the agent handling general or first-level queries, clearing up the queue for elite customers.

Integrating your Inventory with CRM Application

A remote contact center ensures easy integration of the logistics applications with in-house or third-party CRM that helps track and maintain customer information. This establishes sync between the order management system and CRM, allowing the agents to retrieve important information and resolve customer issues faster.

If a customer has an unresolved issue from the past, the agent can quickly refer to the notes mapped in the CRM and drive the contextual conversation to address the customer’s grievances.

Managing Reverse Logistics

It often becomes a challenge for the vendors to manage reverse logistics, further escalating if not addressed immediately.

If the customer chooses COD and refuses to accept the product at the time of delivery, with a remote contact center. In that case, the delivery agent can input this information in the order management system which is mapped in the CRM automatically. The customer receives a call from the business to confirm the same, and after the confirmation, the product status changes to reverse logistics.

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E-commerce Strategies to Prepare for the Holiday Rush

There is just something about the holiday season that inherently makes us happy. Be it the Halloween costume shopping, celebrating Eid, or getting ready to welcome our good old friend Santa while setting the table for the Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a happy and cheerful vibe all around.

While the celebration is in the air, this is one of the busiest times for many businesses especially the e-commerce sector. The online orders increase and so does the need for customer support. The first-time buyers, your regular customers, vendors, and all stakeholders need to have a seamless experience.

Buyer Behaviour is Changing… Recent Trends in the E-commerce Sector

The year 2020 has been a rollercoaster would not be an understatement. There were and still are so many uncertainties. However, among all this, there is still a ray of hope – the festivities. The pandemic sure changed a lot of things and the e-commerce industry is no exception. Some of the common trends that have emerged or are expected to affect online shopping or e-retailers are:

Travel restrictions leading to online gifting
More online shopping due to seasonal sales and discounts
Limited physical store visits to redirect customer traffic to e-commerce websites
More online shopping means more customer queries and requests

With the knowledge of emerging trends, hopefully, the contact centers will be in a better position to manage the holiday rush.

Strategies to Drive the Best Customer Experience

Knowing about the e-commerce trends is only the beginning, it is important to convert the learnings into actionable insights. Let us look at some of the ways to boost the E-commerce customer service experience.

Utilizing the Right Customer Engagement Channels

It’s no secret that your customers prefer some communication channels over others. However, with omnichannel integration, you can ensure that irrespective of the channel through which the customer reaches you, their issue resolved. With social media owning our lives, we are seeing people choosing digital channels over the more traditional channels like phone or email. Customers would rather engage over WhatsApp or have a chat than bear long wait time on a call. Business heads and managers need to study the engagement pattern and identify the most effective communication channels and then create a customer engagement strategy that yields the best results.

Setting Customer Expectations

With the pandemic affecting the shopping schedule along with the travel restrictions, many are pre-ordering stuff to be delivered on time. However, contact center executives are as it is swamped and juggling multiple tasks. So, informing your customers about possible delays in response time due to high demand is a responsible thing to do.

Setting pre-recorded IVR prompts or provisioning scheduling callback at a convenient time can not only help the agents be more productive but also keep the customers informed. While doing all of this, publishing your return, exchange or refund related policy on the website can also help to reduce mundane requests. Keeping your customers informed about your business timings, expected wait time or any change in the order status are some of the ways to effectively reduce the shopper’s anxiety.

Make the Best of AI-enabled Bots

It is important to categorize customer queries to identify which of them can be automated. For instance, a simple where is my order kind of a question can be answered by a chatbot and does not need an agent to resolve it. However, the payment-related issues might require an agent’s assistance. So, knowing what is critical and requires human intervention significantly reduces the agents’ workload.

The good news is that now we have artificially intelligent bots – chatbot and voicebots to make the customer support executives’ lives much much easier. Imagine you searching for a branded handbag on Google. While getting the search results you get an option to “message” the brand directly, without even visiting their website and get details of the product there and then – thus, converting the customer even before they visit the website using Google’s business messaging. Here you can integrate a chatbot to handle routine queries while having the option to seamlessly transfer the conversation to a live agent when required.

Gearing Up for the Holiday Rush During the Pandemic

We are living in uncertain times. COVID-19 sure has bummed all of us. However, it has also opened new possibilities. For instance, with contactless interactions became the new norm, we saw video chat emerging as a popular channel to resolve customer support requests. People who used to visit the brick and mortar store to browse clothes and other things and return or exchange in person are now doing it over a video call using video contact center technology – all the while adhering to social distancing norms. The year might have been a tough one but let’s end it with a bang and on a positive note. Enjoy the festivities and gear up for the New Year, with new possibilities. Happy Holidays!

Deliver Happiness on a Plate: Ways to Ace Holiday Season Food Delivery Experience

It’s that time of the year again – time for good food and celebrating with your friends and family. The spooky season is officially over and it’s time to be Thankful and welcome Santa and his elves. However, this year, things are interesting, to say the least with the whole Coronavirus situation. But keeping that aside, it’s time for online food delivery companies to gear up for increased business and customer query volume.

Unless you possess Santa’s elves and sleigh it’s better to prepare your call center for the holiday season rush. Be it high order volume, managing restaurants, or ensuring timely delivery of food – it all comes down to exceptional customer service experience.

Serving Yummylicious Customer Experience in the Pandemic Era

Since COVID-19, restaurant owners have seen a steady increase in online food ordering and delivery. People who earlier used to visit the restaurant were now opting for home delivery. This steady yet dramatic increase during and post lockdowns gave rise to some new and interesting holiday food delivery trends such as:

Preference to eat at home over restaurants
Revenge buying after limited to no outside food
Increase in orders of sweets and chocolate delivery

With so many food deliveries and orders, food aggregators and restaurants see an increase in customer queries. Customers are curious about their food order, they want to know when their gift boxes will be delivered or some even have complaints about the quality of food/item delivered.

Remote Call Center – Your Delivery Partner this Holiday Season

Are you feeling the holiday rush? Is a high influx of customer queries overwhelming your customer care reps? Is COVID-19 dampening your holiday food delivery experience? Well, you need a remote call center solution to manage the holiday traffic. But how exactly can you make the most of the remote call center software? Let’s discuss it!

Drive Omnichannel Communication

Even though most food aggregators have mobile apps for customers to place orders, it is important to integrate these applications with customer support options like – click to call, in-app chat, send an email, or WhatsApp the brand to resolve the issue. Additionally, live chat has emerged as a winner when it comes to immediate gratification. Customers can chat with your bots or live agents to get answers to their questions quickly and effectively.

Apart from managing omnichannel customer support, using various platforms to engage with your target audience can also be an effective marketing strategy. For instance, Zomato’s new campaign, #ZomatoLoot is an awesome example of handling negative reviews and turning them around into something positive.

Offer Customer Self-Service Options

Simplify your customer journey and more importantly your customer experience. Not making your customer wait is a great place to start. But how can you manage that? Self-service options are a great way to do that – and there are multiple ways to achieve that.

Using Chatbot: Let the artificially intelligent bots to automate common queries
Publishing FAQs: Publish the most frequent queries or issues that the customer face and help them get answers there and then rather than wait for an agent
Self-service IVR: Design your IVRs with personalized prompts and advanced routing to ensure FCR

One of the best use cases of using bots to self-serve has been depicted in the above image where Swiggy is using the chatbot to automate their food order cancellation process. Thus, effectively reducing the whole process from several minutes to mere seconds.

Integrate your Systems for a Holistic Customer Experience

As an online food aggregator, one has to manage multiple stakeholders – customers, delivery people, restaurants, etc. It’s imperative that all these processes are in sync to deliver a delightful customer service experience. With a remote contact center software, you can easily integrate your systems – order management, vendor management, CRM, or other third party systems to allow the customer service reps to have personalized and contextual conversations.

Having a single view of the customer enables the agents to check previous orders or any open ticket and provide a satisfactory response to the customer while being productive and effective.

Collect Customer Feedback

One of the best ways to prepare for the holiday season in call center is to study the historical data and past customer behavior and you can only do that if you have that information. Thus, collecting customer feedback is not only beneficial for forecasting but more importantly, it offers great insight into gaps that you, as a business can improve upon. Asking the customers to rate the delivery experience, food quality, and even their customer support experience will be a great help in the long run.

One of the most effective ways to collect this feedback is via star rating in the mobile app itself. Some outlets also send a feedback link on SMS or email also. However, the easier you make it for the customer to give their feedback the better it is.

Will the Indian Financial Sector Be More Tech-driven Post The Pandemic?

COVID-19 has changed the way brands & consumers interact, and the BFSI sector is not an exception. And as with other verticals, digital started becoming the preferred channel of interactions. One of the leading public sector banks viz SBI changed its work-from-home policy to work-from-anywhere in response to Covid-19.

Also, the efforts to encourage contactless digital payments over cash as a hygiene measure have led to increased digital payments. While digital payments and transactions recorded remarkable growth, there was also a rise in digital payment frauds.

While there is no going back on digital transformation, here are some of the tech-driven ways the BFSI sector can use to acquire and service customers while addressing the trust issues.

PCI-DSS Certification to Win Customers Trust

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) was created to increase cardholder data controls to reduce credit card fraud. It covers technical and operational practices for system components included in or connected to environments with cardholder data.
Being PCI DSS compliant bring hosts of benefits as follows:

Win customers’ trust by assuring them of secured transactions.
Avoid data breaches and the associated costs and penalties.
Increased protection of customer’s data

Ameyo is PCI DSS compliant with certified public cloud environments across India, APAC, Africa & ME.

Video KYC for Remote Onboarding

Know-Your-Customer (or KYC) is a necessary part of onboarding a new customer for financial institutions. Video KYC follows a Video-based Customer Identification Process (V-CIP) approved by RBI to authenticate the customer’s verification documents. So, the process remains secure, paperless, and saves the customer’s travel to the branch. Many leading banks like HDFC Bank, Kotak Bank have launched Video KYC to onboard customers remotely.

With Video-based KYC, BFSI companies can reduce the operational costs by 90% and the time required to do KYC from 5-7 days in less than 3 minutes.

One example is The Muthoot Group, the largest gold loan provider across the country, which has launched its Loan@Home service that provides gold loans from the comfort of their homes without having the customer visit the branch and maintain a contactless experience.

With Video KYC, Muthoot has reduced the loan executive’s time at the customer’s place by 75%, making it easy for the loan executives to verify the customer’s identity even before they visit the customer.

The old-school offline process of document collection and verification poses a threat of misuse of customer’s data. Video KYC, in adherence to the RBI guidelines, ensures that the BFSI sector addresses the security risk by providing safe and secure data storage. Video KYC provides the flexibility to allow the KYC officers or call center agents to provide virtual assistance to the customers using co-browsing and screensharing features.

Video Personal Discussion for Loan Approval Process

Lenders have personal discussions with borrowers before sanctioning a loan to gauge their creditworthiness and ensure they make the right decision. But with physical distancing, real face to face meetings are not possible.

Ameyo’s Video Personal Discussion enables you to achieve the same face to face meeting remotely in this new normal of physical distancing. It helps you with AI face match detection, document uploading, or transfer documents collected previously, e.g., during the KYC process.

Video Chat to Close More Sales

Many brands have closed sales successfully over video like Tanishq has brought in around Rs 100 crore sales through video calls in the last two months.

Video as a channel makes it possible to have

Real-time face-to-face discussions enable you to pay the highest level of attention to the most critical customer interactions.
Read customers’ non-verbal cues and gestures.
Exchange information and address objections in real-time

Ameyo’s video chat solution also helps brands with recordings for analysis by an AI or human being for continuous improvement.

Video Contact Center

With Video Contact Center, you can provide personalized and expert service remotely. With a face to face discussion, you can gauge the customer’s anxiety and make them comfortable with a smiling face.

In India, IndusInd Bank reports that video banking enabled it to solve 50% more cases in the first call, compared with voice services.

Automated Humanized Collections Bot

RBI’s notice to end the moratorium on Aug 30 with an extension till 28 September 2020 has challenged the loan collection firms to find an alternative solution to speed up the collection process. The final decision on loan moratorium is still pending with Supreme Court adjourning the hearing till Nov 2

A significant number of calls in the collection process are routine queries that can be solved by a humanized debt collection bot that covers customer coverage. Without hiring additional agents for debt collection, the collection bot can maximize customer coverage while increasing collections calls with human-like conversations.

Additionally, the bots capability to personalize the conversation by knowing the context with available data in CRM helps increase the efficiency of Collection Calls. Queries that the bot is unable to understand are transferred to a human agent with an appropriate message, preserving the conversation’s context.

Addition of Newer Channels

One of the significant lessons of the shelter-in-place is digital transformation. The use of social media platforms has grown by 82%, which is an opportunity for FIs. In the post-pandemic world, most banks, insurance companies, and financial services will go online, making business easier for their customers.

As every customer is different, so is their preference for the communication channel. Now, channels like WhatsApp can be leveraged for customer service to send out payment reminders to the customers, notify them about the payment success, and send bank statements.

Customers will be able to rely on digital banks to open their accounts with no in-person show required. Without the need to show up at the branch, the banks will get new customers to sign up faster.

Wouldn’t we all be happier if we didn’t have to wait in the queue to pay our debts, open a bank account, and apply for loans?

In a Nutshell

The GDP is struggling, and the financial sector is under pressure to meet customers’ demands. Anxiety among customers is another added challenge in the situation. If that seems bearable, think of the competition in the market. Digital transformation is no more one of the choices for financial institutions, but the only choice.

Technology has transformed the traditional banking system in the past, and in the post-pandemic world is set to see even a better and advanced version of it. The definition of normalcy will be changed forever, and fintech has the stage set. Just use the right click to make the most of the opportunity!

Are Remote Contact Centers the Future?

The 2020 pandemic has led us to anticipate the future of the contact center industry and if anything, it’s going to be remote. For what was a mere dream for contact center leaders before March 2020, has become an imposed reality turning the world of contact centers upside down. If I had to imagine the contact center industry a year ago, the typical image would have been a huge building where agents were sitting next to each other making calls and answering customer queries, while being glued to a headset and a desktop.

However, with the world getting accustomed to the new normal, the contact center industry has seen interesting trends while accommodating to new challenges and newer solutions.

With this thought, we did a survey to understand what leaders think about the future of remote contact centers and the results couldn’t have been more surprising.

Suresh Suryamurthy, CEO, iMarque Solutions, amongst many other contact center leaders, believes that Remote Contact Centers are here to stay and disrupt the major business operations.

The Critical Challenges of Remote Contact Centers

To what we call as much anticipated change, has its own set of challenges. In our survey across APAC, Middle East, Africa, and India, with contact center leaders, we have concluded that the following are the challenges that need to be addressed immediately.

IT Governance & Security

As every coin has two sides, remote contact centers are no exception. For any industry, securing their customer data is the prime concern and while the agents are working remotely, it can become a challenge for many businesses, especially financial institutions, to maintain data privacy, network security, and data security.

When the entire organization logs in through the same network, it is much easier to identify and manage the network security issues, but what would you do when the employees are working from different locations with the constant threat to your data security? This does not limit the data breach, it also leads to compromising on business reputation and customer trust.

How do businesses maintain the same level of data security and device sanity in a remote work environment? The agents, while working remotely, may report issues like poor internet connectivity, unsupportive device, or low network connectivity. What do you trust, the network, the device, or the agent?

Onboarding & Collaboration

In a physical work environment, the contact center agents learned through tribal knowledge. Now, I think the bigger challenge is to collaborate and coordinate with the agents and the supervisors.

While the organizations can now hire a diverse workforce, the virtual onboarding and training will continue to pose a challenge. More so, in a contact center industry where agents need on-call assistance from their managers and supervisors. Staying connected with agents and building a team culture is difficult when you have to seek the mutual availability of peers and managers.

Business Operations

In a contact center environment, the business performance depends on various metrics like average handling time, CSAT rate, SLAs, number of calls handled, conversion rate, etc. But, when the agents are working remotely, it can pose a challenge for the supervisor to keep track of each agent’s performance including break duration, agents’ availability, and hence agents’ productivity.

While the agents work from different devices and locations, it can become a challenge for the supervisors to monitor their performance in real-time and provide insights when required.

Now that we have discussed the challenges of remote contact center software, you should know how to overcome these challenges and make the most of this opportunity.

The Future of Remote Contact Centers

I would start by stating the obvious, remote contact centers are here to stay and are here to disrupt the business operations largely. But, what are the additional benefits of choosing a remote contact center for your business?

While there are many, I will talk about how you can increase your business productivity and ROI effortlessly.

Reduced Cost Pressure

Contact centers are perceived as cost centers but with a remote contact center software, you can turn your cost center into a profit center.

Contact centers invest huge money into building the physical office space, estimating to 20-30% of the cost of the contact centers. More often than not, this function runs on razor-thin margins, especially in BPO companies.

Let’s imagine this cost goes away with contact center agents working remotely. The additional saving of 30% cost on setting up infrastructural facilities in the physical office environment can be invested in alternate channels, tools, and equipment for the remote workforce. This would have long term benefits of getting the best talent from across the geographies while keeping the costs under check.

Hiring a Diverse Workforce

With remote contact centers becoming the reality of the decades to come, hiring a diverse workforce and allowing the employees to navigate through the best opportunities without worrying about the location will also be a part of the new normal.

Businesses working in different locations can choose from a wide range of talent pool to provide a native experience to the customers
Working remotely also lifts up the age barrier, people that are approaching a retiring age are also looking for opportunities that give them a sense of purpose and income
Parents staying at home will also get opportunities to take care of their families and work remotely

Increased Agent Productivity

An increase in agents’ productivity will contribute to business productivity directly. When given the flexibility to work from anywhere, using any browser, and device, agents feel at ease and reports to be more productive.

In a survey that we conducted with call center agents across multiple geographies, we found that agents were happily willing to work for extended durations if they were not asked to travel and reach back home in time. And in the extra time, the agents have started to pick up on different hobbies like cooking, reading, and gardening, which keeps them motivated to deliver the best results.

Interestingly, a study by SHRM indicates the same that “of those who work remotely at least a few times per month, 77% reported greater productivity while working offsite.”

Staying Ahead of the Curve

Today, there’s an opportunity to pick the battles right and gauge into a huge opportunity of transforming the contact centers into profit centers with the right solution.

“People who can crack this soon will be ahead of the game in the market,” Sachin Bhatia shares his thoughts on the future of remote contact centers and the need to transform contact centers for the contactless world.

Ready to transform your contact center? Find the right remote contact center solution today.

Is Google’s Business Messages Better Than Website Chat?

With the world being hit by COVID-19, businesses are changing the way they advertise about their brands and win new customers. Digital channels have dominated before the pandemic as well, but it has turned out to be a goldmine for some companies.

While businesses are leveraging digital platforms as channels of communication, the consumers are also attracted to the new way of interacting with their favorite brands. Today, more and more customers rely on Google Search and Maps to find a brand. One of the common user journeys hints that after reaching the website, the users initiate the webchat with the brand.

Now that Google has introduced its Business Messages service that allows customers to quickly message the brands right from Google Search and Maps to connect with a live agent. It shortens the customer journey and creates an opportunity for faster conversion. It somehow raises the question of webchat’s potential.

All in the name of happier customers, the brands get to leverage both platforms (Google’s Business Messages and webchat) because of:

Humans and bots working together
Creating an omnichannel customer experience
Providing an instant response to the customers

Though the Live Chat or WebChat works similarly as that of Google’s Business Messages, there are a few observable differences that bifurcate the two.

How can GBM become a game-changer in 2020?

In striving to make the customer experience better, Google processes more than 5 billion searches each day, and most of the traffic is attributed to mobile users. As the customers are getting comfortable messaging the brands with a single click, brands must look for solutions to meet this user behavior.

Moreover, Google’s Business Messages come to rescue as both – brands and consumers – connect faster and share the right information through quickly.

To provide end-to-end customer engagement and create a rich experience for the customers throughout their lifecycle, starting from engagement to acquisition and providing end support, Google’s Business Messages is becoming the choice of both brands and consumers alike.

It is advantageous for you because of:

a) Faster Conversions from Search & Maps:

GBM is a real-time messaging platform that provides a faster and more pleasing customer experience. Consumers require quick, contextual, and hyper-personalized responses in real-time, and brands can build a strong relationship with the customers by leveraging Google Search and Maps to yield better results.

It’s a win-win situation when it comes to messaging channels because it allows the customers to interact or engage with the brand even before visiting the website, thus increasing brand loyalty.

b) Rich Media Support and Richer Experience:

It goes without saying that today’s consumers prefer to be provided with the information seamlessly whenever they want. Supported with rich media solutions, Google’s Business Messages enable you to share elements, like product recommendations in carousels, flight tickets, invoices, brochures, or user manuals. Ensuring that customers are given the required information without delay, get you an improved customer satisfaction score.

c) Seamless Bot to Agent Transfer:

In the decade that follows, the future is dependent on bots and agents working in harmony. While the bot can resolve the first-level or simple queries without human intervention, the agents can focus on more complex queries that need immediate attention.

This, in turn, gives the agents a relaxation from handling repetitive queries, utilizing their time productively.

d) Increased Team Productivity and Efficiency:

Let the truth be told, agents’ average handling time increases when the customers do not respond immediately. With Google’s’ Business Messages, the agents can switch from one conversation to another effortlessly. Agents can wait for Customer A to respond and in the meantime, they can start a conversation with Customer B. Even if the customer responds in days, the agents can pick up from where they left off, while assisting other customers without any drop in their performance.

e) Track Historic Conversations:

Agents get a holistic view of the customer’s previous interactions to preserve the context. This relieves the agents from asking repetitive questions and also increases the first contact resolution rate. Agents can easily track customer behavior from previous interactions, such as the product type that they are interested in, and can send them relevant suggestions to gain customer’s attention.

Webchat

Webchat platforms work in similar ways as Google’s Business Messages, but webchat has its own advantages and limitations.

While the user is on the webpage, they can easily engage with a bot or agent from within the website without having to switch to any other channel, thus increasing the conversion rate. Unlike Google’s Business Messages, webchat can initiate a custom message for the user when they are on your website.

Webchat: Advantages and Disadvantages

Webchat is Active Media:

The customers expect a spontaneous response after sending their query and in webchat, the bot can respond immediately to address them. The query can be seamlessly transferred from bot to agent without any escalation thus providing the experience that the customers will enjoy.

The response time can have a major impact on customer satisfaction. With webchat, integrated with bot, you can leverage the opportunity to respond to the customer at earliest without requesting them to wait.

A report by Statista states that the average customer satisfaction rating for live chat globally is 83.1

Webchat for all Devices:

While browsing through a website on desktop or mobile, users seek instant information from the brands. Webchat becomes the go-to option for the users when the brands give them the option to communicate instantly on their preferred device, without having to switch to any other channel or tab. The number one focus for the brands should be making the customer’s life easy.

Collecting Customer Information:

Webchat helps the brands extract customer information effortlessly which can further be used for nurturing the leads and converting them into customers. Having the lead information also helps the contact center agents to preserve the conversation context for future actions which helps them have qualified interactions.

High Conversation Abandonment Rate:

The customers abandon the brands that do not provide a response according to their preference and convenience. While Google’s Business Messages shortens the customer journey by helping the user reach the brand from within the search results, webchat requires the user’s presence on the website to engage with the brand.

While Google can handle multiple brand chants in a single platform at the customer’s end, webchat needs the users to return to the website again to restart the chat. In the purchase process, the customers need quick information and they do not like to be glued to a browser window to make a buying decision.

If the customer comes back to engage with the brand in 10 minutes, they receive a prompt that says “this session has ended” and to seek a resolution, the customer has to start all over again with another agent.

Why do you need both Google’s Business Messaging and Webchat?

Owing to exceptional customer experience, the future of the brands revolve around building an omnichannel experience that helps the customers navigate through different channels seamlessly. While Google’s Business Messages allows the user to find information using Google Search & Maps on mobile devices, the inclusion of a webchat platform gives an edge to provide an end-to-end customer experience.

Private messaging is here to change the game of acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers, and providing support. Let’s be real, according to a report by Google, around 50% of users use mobile devices to locate a store whereas only 38% of people use desktops/laptops to find the same information. Customers are already using Google Search & Maps, it’s your brand that needs a presence there.

Hear from our solution experts on How Google’s Business Messages work.

PFRDA allows intermediaries for Video KYC

After IRDAI gave the nod to insurers for Video KYC, now PFRDA has allowed the intermediaries for Video KYC. In addition to paperless and presence-less KYC in the insurance sector, now PFRDA permits video-based authentication methods to onboard new customers, making it easy to open an NPS account, withdrawals, or processing any other service. To combat the challenge of compulsory presence for both the subscribers and officers, Regulator PFRDA has issued a circular on 6 October 2020, and has permitted intermediaries registered with them to conduct a Video-based Customer Identification Process (VCIP) for on-boarding, exit, or any other request related to NPS.

Why the need for V-KYC?

To follow the social distancing norms and address the NPS subscribers’ grievances, it is only imperative that we adopt digital/online channels, like Video-KYC, to process exit requests, withdrawals, account opening, etc. from the comfort of one’s home.

Using the Video-based Customer Identification Process (V-CIP), PFRDA allows:

The NPS subscribers to adhere to social distancing norms and avail the services of account opening, exiting, etc. without being physically present at the Points of Presence (POPs) for in-person verification.
Significant reduction of turn around time for account opening, execution of exit, and processing other service requests.
To widen NPS and gauge reach in remote areas with a paperless, presence less, and convenient onboarding process.
To reduce the cost of operations such as travel cost, documentation cost, and field visit costs, making it a cost-effective process.

Why do you need Ameyo’s Video KYC Solution?

Reduce Customer Onboarding Drop-offs by 20%

With Video base KYC process, you can onboard your customers in less than 3 minutes with internet bandwidth as low as 60KBPS, thus ensuring that not customers are dropped off because of internet connectivity.

Additionally, if a customer gets dropped off, the KYC official can immediately send a link to rejoin, increasing the KYC completion rate.

Accuracy of Video KYC Completion

The video KYC process backed by AI-based face recognition technology reduces fraudulence chances and becomes a reliable source for NPS subscribers’ verification. The RE officials can do a liveliness check by asking for random gestures to ensure that the session is not pre-recorded. This helps the NPS officials to establish the subscriber’s identity beyond doubt.

100% Adherence to Compliance & Security

Video KYC RBI guidelines require the data to be stored in a safe and secure manner bearing the date and stamp. The REs are subject to bearing customer identification onus, being 100% compliant with video KYC RBI guidelines.

Additionally, the data can be masked to further data security, which helps build brand loyalty.

Data-Driven Dashboards to Track & Monitor

Video KYC data can be monitored to track the RE official and the auditor’s productivity and monitor the accuracy of Video KYC completion. A comprehensive KYC Officer Dashboard gives a quick overview of the KYC completion rate. The number of NPS accounts opened, the average time is taken for each KYC, breaks duration, etc. to determine the KYC official’s productivity.