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How to Make Your Agents Work from Home Ready?

COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world hard. Whether it be individuals, businesses, economy – everything has been impacted. And truth be told, the world will take some time to recover from the aftermath of the Coronavirus. However, there is no need to be disheartened. Problem gives birth to a solution.

We recently conducted a webinar (check out the webinar here) addressing remote working challenges faced by the contact centers today while offering solutions to overcome them.

Challenge 1: Infrastructural Readiness

When the call center agents are working in the purview of an IT environment where all the systems like laptops, stable internet connection, and other software and hardware infrastructure are in place, things are much simpler and it’s easier. However, once the agents are outside their workplace and working from home, they might not have all the infrastructure available to them. This is particularly true in the emerging geographies where stable high-speed internet and laptops for all the call center agents might be a challenge.

Challenge 2: Speed of Deployment

Businesses today are looking for solutions that can be deployed fast – within hours as companies already have their strategic business continuity plans in place. They do not want complex and slow to implement solutions. So, it is important for the remote call center software providers to package their solutions in such a way that they offer maximum capabilities with the fastest implementation cycle.

Challenge 3: Remote Monitoring of KPIs

Monitoring the KPIs and agent performance is as it is a critical function for any contact center. However, this becomes even more critical when you are working remotely and not having your usual meetings and daily sync-ups. Thus, remote monitoring is a critical function in the WFH setup.

Challenge 4: User or Agent Onboarding on New Methodologies

When the agents and supervisors are working remotely it becomes important to have solutions that are simple to understand and train your workforce. You do not want a complex call center software that only makes it that much more difficult to onboard the agents.

Also Read: How to Build a Cost-Effective Remote Contact Center

We Got You Covered – Ameyo’s Immediate WFH Solutions

Keeping in mind the current situation and the needs of the businesses, Ameyo has come up with immediate WFH solutions to help businesses do remote faster. These solutions are primarily categorized based on the infrastructure available to the agents.

When Your Agents Have Laptops + Stable Internet

Well, this is the best case scenario – the agents have a laptop and great internet connection. They can just set up a corporate VPN and all the customer communications can be done via the VPN itself using WebRTC. Even in case of the organization not providing the VPN, Ameyo can provide it and integrate into your corporate network or any CGI application. Since all the data is saved on the server and the solution is browser-based, you do not have to worry about data security or the same being stored on the agent’s system.

When Your Agents Have Laptops but No Stable Internet

This is a situation when your agents have access to a laptop but do not have a reliable internet connection. That is a VPN or enterprise level bandwidth is not available so you cannot route calls to the remote agents over WebRTC. With Ameyo’s solution, you can actually route the calls on the PSTN network to the agent’s mobile while having the CTI being displayed on the laptop. Thus, when the agent receives a call on their GSM handphone a CTI pop-up will appear on the laptop screen and the agent can continue the conversation while enjoying all the telephony features. At the same time, the supervisor can remotely monitor the operations in real-time with live monitoring tools and dashboards.

When Your Agents Have only Smartphone

Ameyo has launched Industry’s first Mobile Agent App which requires zero agent infrastructure while providing complete call center capabilities like predictive dialer, progressive dialer, CTI, WebRTC, telephony features and remote monitoring to name a few. With this call center on mobile solution, the agents can monitor their pending tasks, scheduled callbacks, and receive calls on the GSM network in addition to a CTI popup in the application itself. You can also get critical information to be shown in the CRM or your back-end systems while allowing the agents to take notes and dispose calls. Call recordings are again happening on the cloud. There is nothing getting stored on the agent’s mobile phone. You don’t even need to expose the customer’s phone numbers to the agent’s mobile.

When Your Agents have a Feature Phone Only

This brings us to a situation when the agents do not have laptops, don’t have a smartphone and neither do they have internet connection. Ameyo has come up with a specific solution wherein the agents can login to the call center using an IVR. How this essentially works is that the agents are assigned individual login credentials and an IVR number which they can call and punch in their credentials. Once they have logged in, they will be receiving inbound calls based on their availability and skill. That’s not all – the agents can even make outbound calls via the IVR. They simply have to call the IVR number, dial in the customer number and an outbound call will be dialed out. The call recordings will still be saved on the server and nothing is stored on the agent’s phone.

Looking to setup your remote contact center? Get in touch with us today

Webinar: Industry’s First Enterprise Call Center On A Mobile

The world is changing and the COVID-19 hit world is still trying to evaluate the work from home business model.

From a start-up to a large enterprise, businesses are in search of a solution that does not affect the business continuity with a pandemic at hand. For a seamless shift to the WFH model, without compromising on business continuity you need a contingency plan.

The world needs an immediate solution to combat the existing challenges and bring a BCP that stands out. You may not have the solution to this pandemic but you can ensure a healthy and safe work environment for employees while delivering exceptional customer service in this hour of need.

So, are you prepared for delivering exceptional customer service while your agents are moving to a remote working environment?

We certainly are. Let’s hear it from Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder and Global Sales & Marketing Head, Ameyo in conversation with our Solutions Expert, Anubhuti Kushwaha.

Here’s the script of the webinar:

The last four weeks have been perhaps the most dynamic and exciting in the industry. And when I say exciting it is because when there are challenges being thrown in the industry, it has to come out with quick Solutions.

The last webinar that we guys did, we presented the three models of solutions that Ameyo has quickly brought in and we categorize them into the Phone Only, Smartphone, and Laptop-based Solutions, depending on what infrastructure can the organization provide to its agents and the thought and the goal has always been that you provide full contact center, let it be on whatever device available to the agent, but today our focus is on the smartphone.

I also wanted to share how we have treated and learned about this problem over the past few weeks. You know, everybody’s talking about work from home as a model and I think everybody understands that the immediate problem in front of the industry is that the lockdowns are causing work from home to happen, right? We are forced into it. And then IT folks are analyzing that agents sometimes have enough infrastructure at home. We are realizing that sometimes a pretty high percentage of the agents don’t have Laptops or Broadband available at their houses and since the customer’s queries have surged in the call volume, we need an immediate solution.

We are trying to solve this problem with our Mobile Call Center Solution.

Become A Mobile Ready Contact Center

So, because of the unprecedented challenges that we have at hand, we need to know where lies our ‘The Solution’ to enforce a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in the hour of need. It’s time to convert your smartphone into a Mobile Contact Center and become the choicest brand for your customers.

Let’s try to understand what problems the Mobile Based Call Center solution will solve:

Zero Agent Infrastructure Needed

Smartphone and internet connection is all you need to start with call center operations. Within the internet connectivity, we have both options,

you could route calls on the internet using the WebRTC
you could use the GSM network for normal incoming calls

This eliminates the need for any other infrastructure requirement for the agents. Of course, this requires the deployment of the cloud software.

Enterprise-Grade Call Center Features

This app has full-scale enterprise contact center features including

High Call Quality
100% Call Activity Log
Disposition and Notes
KPI Monitoring
Supports VPN, IMEI, Device ID Authentication

All the capabilities are available as you have in your desktops. Snoop, Barge, and Whisper are all available on the supervisor interface. So, its business as usual in terms of what a call center requires without involving any infrastructure.

This is a highly secure application, ensuring no data theft. You can also ensure application-level security using dedicated Username and Password.

Comprehensive Remote Monitoring Solution

It’s not just a cloud telephony solution, it’s a complete contact center application that has CTI application enabled, so if you have CRM data or back end customer data that you want to show to the agent while he’s on a call, you can now do that using CTI applications.

Mobile Agent Application Features

The call center mobile agent app is designed with the thought to simplify the existing problems of working remotely. This app has the following features:

Fast Deployment: The mobile agent app is available on Android today and we are working on an iPhone version also. You could actually ask your agents to just go to Google PlayStore link and download the app and your agents are ready with a Mini Contact Center on their Smartphones.
Enterprise-Ready: Since it’s an enterprise-ready application, we can set up a VPN with the help of your IT team or we have VPN on our cloud which will ensure that any enterprise data is accessed only on a VPN.
Enhanced Voice WebRTC: WebRTC available on the mobile app makes it unique. To have CTI and WebRTC in a single application is relevant because if you have a mobile phone and decent quality 4G or broadband connection, you could actually make a voice call on WebRTC.
Full Call Center capabilities : This application has a predictive dialer that allows you to run an updated dialer at the back end and the agents will get calls as business as usual. Agents can dispose the call, add comments & notes, and map it to the CRM. The call recordings are available directly on the server. No calls are recorded in the mobile phone which makes it a secure application.

Enterprise Ready Contact Center In Your Palms

Keeping the user experience very simple for the agents, the mobile call center solution has all the features that you’d need. This allows agents to get activated on the platform very very quickly.

Agents get Convenience to Converse

Logging into campaigns, extension selection, and presence management is very easy for the agents. It allows the agent to:

Log into pre-configured campaigns/processes like Telesales or Service Process.
Take business calls 24*7
Manage their availability just like in any other contact center

Easy Management of Inbound/Outbound Calls

There’s a similar telephony toolbar of Mute, Hold, Transfer, Confer, Disposition capabilities.

Have seamless connectivity and deliver a quality conversation with Enhanced Mobile Webrtc or PSTN Calls
Have a smart outreach strategy with Automated Dialers
Easily confer and transfer the calls to a specific queue, another agent, or supervisor with ease.
Dispositions and Callback Scheduling are available
Connect with customers in a single click using the click-to-call option

Secured Call Activity Logs

Both agents and supervisors can access the activity logs including disposition, notes, call recording for analyzing the performance of each agent.

Secure call recording on the server
Agents can listen to their calls for analyzing their own performance
Supervisors can mark the agents’ and campaigns’ performance with these call recordings
Access the previous call activity to understand the context

After Call Work Activity

Agents can add the notes for future reference after attending the call with the customers. The call activities are mapped in CRM and the supervisors can understand and monitor the calls for each campaign with ease.

They can add two levels of dispositions to set the context and outcome of the call
Streamline callbacks as per the customers’ requests
Attach short notes like call summary or output

Refined Callbacks

Agents can schedule the callbacks by date, time, and different campaigns and they can also receive notification prior to the call.

All customer callbacks are added in agent dashboard
Agents are notified prior to the call, ensuring no call is missed
Scheduled callbacks can be filtered from the data and agents can plan their activities based on this comprehensive data

Agent Self-Monitoring Capabilities

Agents can keep track of their performance and enhance their productivity with the call monitoring metrics. This is a performance-centric process that can be mapped against the business-specific metrics.

Agents can track the following metrics:

-Average handling time
-Average talk time
-Average wrap time
-Agent login time duration
-Breaks duration and breaks bifurcation
-Calls handled (connected/attempted)

Enhanced Remote Monitoring for Supervisors

Full-fledged monitoring capabilities are available on the laptop version, and some supervision capabilities on the mobile app as well. Supervisors can perform functions like Snoop, Barge, Whisper, and more.

Supervisors can do the following:

Monitor assigned campaigns
Track configured SLAs
Access to customized monitoring dashboards
Get a statistical view of the entire data
Get push notifications for parameters like SLA breach

Omnichannel Vs Multichannel Contact Center: What’s best for your Business?

Customer support can make or break a brand’s relationship with their customers. With such stiff competition the companies cannot afford to be lousy about the their customer service experience as the market has evolved with the advancement in technology

What is a Multi-channel Contact Center?

When a contact center offers more than two channels for the customer interaction, it is known as a multi-channel contact center.

What is an Omnichannel Contact Center?

Just like its counterpart, an omnichannel contact center also supports more than two communication channels for customer support. The difference being that the omnichannel contact center offers a holistic view of the customer’s journey across these channels. Thus, helping in maintaining the context of the conversation.
Phone, social media (Facebook, Twitter, VIBER, etc), email, chat, WhatsApp – all are there in an omnichannel contact center. And the best part is, irrespective of the channel through which the customer/prospect tries to contact the business, they will have a consistent experience. Also, since the context is preserved, which essentially means the agents have access to all the information pertaining to the customer’s journey and previous conversations, they are in a better position to have contextual qualified conversations.

Making the Choice

Many might assume that omni-channel is the way to go. But honestly, making this decision is tough. Many factors come into play while deciding on the best contact center solution for your business. Some of them being:

Scale of Business

If you are a startup with limited capital and lesser customer base then you would probably go for a multi-channel call center setup. As opposed to an enterprise with deep pockets, for whom omnichannel setup will make more sense.

Need to Self-serve

When self-service is important for your customers then omni channel customer solutions are a better choice. The customers can get their queries resolved via a self-service IVR or use a knowledge base to browse through the FAQs or interact with a voicebot or a chatbot. In such a situation, having an omnichannel solution allows you to seamlessly integrate with other CRMs or third-party systems to ensure the conversation is easily transferred to a live agent in case the bot is stuck somewhere.

There is always an option of starting with a multichannel setup and then moving onto an omnichannel cloud contact center solution as your business grows and you have sufficient resources.

If you do decide to go for omnichannel customer support, Ameyo has got you covered.

Customer support executives can view details of all the channels like phone call, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Email, WhatsApp, Chat, etc on a single screen
The executives an also sort the interactions (tickets) based on how critical they are
Since Ameyo integrates with all the major CRM and third-party systems check out the list of integrations), you can seamlessly integrate to have better conversations

Want to explore Ameyo? Request a personalized demo!

Fundamentals of Managing Remote Call Center Agents

There has been a shift towards the remote working model in the past couple of years. This change has been possible due to advancements in digital technology and to some extent due to the cultural shift as well. Thanks to the cloud contact center technology, the agents who were earlier tied to their desks attending calls have gained flexibility and work-life balance.

Managing a remote contact center can be tricky if you have not thought through the idea. Below is everything that you want to know to manage virtual call center agents.

Benefits of Remote Call Center Agents

1. Hiring the Best Talent

Hiring someone from a different country is difficult and expensive, to say the least. But with remote contact center agents, your talent pool increases significantly. You can hire the most skilled agents without having to incur an additional cost. However, if the job demands frequent meetings, training, or collaborative work then having them onsite will make more sense. But just the thought of not having to go through the daily struggles of traveling and reaching the office will be a motivational boost in itself.

2. Reduced Operational Costs

Setting up work from a home call center is much more cost-effective than an on-premise call center. As in the latter, you need to invest in getting a site or office space, hardware, and overall maintenance cost as well. Whereas, with cloud-based call center software, you can just get going with a laptop and internet connection. The WFH model is particularly common with startups who are bootstrapping their business.

Be Prepared with Right Technology

Now, that you have made the decision to have a remote support team, you need to setup a remote contact center which powers your operations smoothly. Below, I have listed some of the features that will make working from home a lot easier and productive

Live Monitoring & Dashboards

When you are not working on-site, having the monitoring tools become even more important. A call center software with live monitoring lets you do just that – real-time monitoring of operations. Moreover, with the dashboards in place, the supervisors can get a peek into the agent’s activities while identifying any emerging trends. Since you are not having a face to face interaction where the agents submit their reports at the end of the day, you can also get these reports or schedule them with a remote contact center software.

Gamification

It refers to the application of game-design elements to the call center operations. For example, having a competition among the agents to see who has the best FCR score with the least handling time. These rules, regulations and a sense of competition is a great motivator for the agents to strive to be the best. Rewarding and incentivizing the most productive and efficient agents, drives other agents to do the same. Most of the contact center solutions come with a pre-build gamification option. However, in the absence of it, you can always make use of wallboards.

Knowledge Base for Training

Your agents are dispersed, they are not having any face to face interactions – how to onboard and train the call center agents? Well, but obvious – remotely. You can build an online knowledge base and training modules to help the new recruits. At the same time, you can also start a forum where agents can interact and get answers to their questions.

Build a Sehttps://www.ameyo.com/community/setting-up-remote-contact-centernse of Community

Working from home can be lonely at times. It’s important to encourage team activities and collaboration. There are plenty of tools available in the market to enable that such as Facebook for the Workplace. It’s a great medium for employees to interact, share information while having some fun. Also, if some of your employees are working from the office, you can have some team activities in-house while WFH agents join remotely. That way they won’t feel disconnected.

Want to learn more about how to Set up Your Work From Home ready Contact Center in an hour? Click here

COVID-19 and Ameyo’s Business Continuity Plan

Hello Valued Customers and Partners

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) has created disruptions globally. We at Ameyo are striving our best to ensure that your day-to-day business operations run flawlessly while our employees are safe.

We have planned that the situation has minimal impact on your teams and business. We would like to apprise you of Ameyo’s readiness for this epidemic and our Business Continuity Plan.

Ameyo has implemented a Work from Home policy from 18th March and most of our functions would continue to function remotely. This was a planned activity with readiness for infrastructure and SOPs. We continue to learn this new method and are confident of little or no impact in our Business as Usual services.
We have put hygiene and safety measures in place for the workplace. We have placed multiple hand-sanitizing stations across our offices and have disabled fingerprint based biometric scanning devices to minimize contact through surfaces. This continues to be done until all teams completely move to remote models.
Until situations go back to normal, we have limited the number of visitors to our office. Our recruitment team has also replaced in-person interviews with video interviews.
We have evacuated all our employees from all international locations in the light of continuously evolving travel restrictions until a predictable order is in place. The returning employees are working from home.
We have also set up protocols to deal with any location-specific measures. We have ensured that even if one or more of our offices (including our HQ) faces work disruption our other offices will be able to provide critical support
In regards to meetings with account managers are concerned, our Sales team will be working from home. We have made a conscious decision to restrict travel and face-to-face meetings, but they will be available to help you over call/Hangouts/Zoom meetings or any other virtual channel of your convenience.
Delivery and Support functions continue to operate normally however physical travel is restricted. All necessary remote tools are available with the team to coordinate with local teams at Customers’ partners’ end.
We have observed a lot of requests from our customers to move their infrastructure to enable work from home. Our Solutions team and Support team is working round the clock to facilitate this for our customers. If you have such a need please get in touch with your Account managers and we would take this up. We are prioritizing these requests over non-critical support requests as of now. We will be organizing a series of Webinars on this topic.

If you are not an existing customer and need a Contact Center solution for your BCP fast, we have launched a fast-track program and details could be found here.

We are in this together! For any questions or any area where Ameyo can help you please do get in touch with us through your account managers. We look forward to serving you and wish you good luck in the times to come.

Combating Pandemic with Remote Contact Center

COVID-19 virus has left countries and their economies incapacitated with people having to be self-quarantined and taking all the necessary precautions to stop the spread of this disease. This led to many businesses asking their employees to work remotely. A situation which was perceived as short-term initially but gaining popularity as organizations are starting to recognize its benefits.

Remote Working: The New Normal

As organizations get accustomed to the new normal of working from home, having the right remote contact center solution for customer service and support is proving to be the game-changer. A technology partner who aligns with your business ideologies and helps you achieve your growth targets is what the businesses are looking for. And rightly so – as looking at the way the world is changing, remote working is here to stay.

Overcoming the Challenges of Remote Working

Augmenting Existing Setup for Remote Working

Having a pre-existing on-premise setup can understandably make one doubtful of movement to a different model. But with VPN access you can easily re-route all your customer interactions to serve them as before.

Scale your Operations

Enterprises with large scale operations have to deal with a huge workforce and customer base as well. A cloud call center software provides the perfect opportunity for large businesses to scale their operations using multiple cloud deployment options such as private, public, or a hybrid setup. For a large scale business, a hybrid model might make more sense. Having said that, with the right solution vendor, you can opt for any of the cloud services as well.

Consistent Customer Service

As a business, one of the most bugging issues can be losing out on customers because your remote agents are unavailable or not prepared to handle incoming customer requests due to a lack of proper infrastructure. But that does not have to be the case. With the best cloud call center software, you can tackle that issue easily by configuring the agents’ extension on their mobile phone. Thus, ensuring all the calls land to your executives and you do not miss out on any.

Be on Top of your Call Center Metrics

Keep track of your SLAs and monitor agents’ performance even if you are working remotely. With the right remote work model for the call center, you get to remotely monitor call quality, campaign-wise data, and lead quality from a mobile app itself. Additionally, you always have access to the usual live monitoring and dashboards to help you be on top of your operations

Build a Cost-effective Contact Center

One of the major concerns for any business whether a contact center or otherwise is ROI. Increasing your bottom line becomes even more important when faced with a global crisis. Thus, having a cost-effective remote contact center which helps you save on huge infrastructure costs while allowing your remote call center agents to spend quality time with their families, and thus, reducing attrition rate is a win-win situation for both the business and the employees.

It’s true that we are facing a global crisis today but. crisis presents an opportunity. So, you might as well make the best of the situation especially when work from home culture is not going anywhere anytime soon. Even the government is supporting the work from home model wherein the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) issued a notice exempting the requirement of authorized Service Providers Provisioned secured VPN.

Are you also looking to setup a remote contact center? Talk to our Experts to get the right guidance and get started in no time.

Must-have features in Call Center Phone Systems

The world is moving towards technology in gyres and call center phone systems are hard-pressed to adopt the new features to meet the standards beyond dialing and calling in traditional ways.
There’s no denial of the fact that it takes months to find a customer and minutes to lose one. And when customers are expecting instant gratification, it becomes difficult for businesses to deliver an outperforming experience in time. Building a great customer experience does not happen overnight, it happens with a design. To become a choicest brand and earn customer’s advocacy, you need to start with defining customer needs and understand their challenges.
Running a call center could be tedious if you’re operating most of your tasks manually. To deal with large volumes of calls, you need a call center phone system that has the ability to use your data effectively and help you automate most of your call center operations.

How do we achieve that?

Now that you’ve understood the customers’ challenges, you need the right customer support system in place to overcome these challenges and increase your ROI exponentially. Here’s the list of features that you cannot miss on:

Omnichannel Customer Support

So, your customers are proactively using social media for their daily communication and they expect businesses to be available on the channels that they use to communicate with their friends and family. A good call center phone system should support omnichannel communication and ensure synchronization among these channels to preserve the context of the conversation across the interaction history. With preserved context, the customers won’t have to repeat themselves and they could interact with the agents with ease.

Unified Agent Desktop

Are your phone support agents empowered with the right tools to effectively manage the incoming call? With multiple channels involved, the agent needs to have a complete picture of the customer’s interaction history in a unified agent desktop. With complete history, agents can understand the customer’s challenges better and offer a better and personalized service.

Comprehensive Ticketing System

When your customers are given the flexibility to create or raise support tickets and a ticket is routed to the best-suited agent with the ticket management system, it provides an ease to both your agents and customers. With omnichannel support, tickets can be created through multiple channels like chat, email, social media and your agents can get a holistic view of these tickets in their interface. This helps them resolve most of the queries faster, thus increasing the CSAT score.

Customer Sentiment Analysis

How your customer is feeling today? Your customers are expecting you to understand their sentiments when they are interacting with your brand. Sentiment analysis facilitates businesses to know their customers and identify their emotions better than before. This helps agents understand customer’s state and prioritize tickets to meet customers’ expectations.

Internal Chat Optimization

Yes, agents can use this feature to best of results and deliver a faster query resolution with minimum turn around time with an internal chat option.
For instance, when your agent is stuck with a query, she/he can initiate an internal chat with other agents or the supervisor to get the query resolved quickly. This assistance from subject matter experts can prove out to be very helpful when the customer is looking for an answer in urgency and you can avoid any escalation.

Self-Service Portal

Customers are seeking the information at their convenience and they like to be least dependent on any of the agents for most of the routine queries. With a self-service portal, you can give control to your customers and reduce the workload of your agents by letting the customers find their own answers.
For instance, when a customer wants to check the delivery status of a product, she/he can track it on the self-service portal without having to depend on an agent.

Concluding Thoughts

Call centers are not limited to traditional features and it becomes imperative for businesses to adopt a technology that multiplies the efficiency manifolds. With real-time insights into your business, you can incorporate a phone system that allows you to solve customers’ challenges and deliver a smooth customer experience.

Level Up Your CX Game With WhatsApp Business API

The world is interacting on different messaging applications and WhatsApp has become the game-changer while becoming the choicest messaging app for 2 billion people across 180 countries. To simplify the customer’s journey, Ameyo announces its integration with WhatsApp Business API, a connector that will allow all the businesses to connect with their customers on the choicest channel of today’s generation.

How does WhatsApp Business API work?

While WhatsApp has become an instant connector between businesses and their customers, there’s a lot more to it that you should not miss.

With Ameyo’s WhatsApp Business API Integration, it allows customers to opt-in to receive notifications from different businesses and be updated with various kinds of information like order status, flight status, purchase receipts, booking confirmation, and more. Once the WhatsApp API integration is enabled, each customer request automatically creates a ticket in Ameyo’s platform. These tickets are routed to best-suited agents, allowing them to respond to these tickets directly through WhatsApp from within the unified agent desktop.

What’s in it for you?

The open rate for WhatsApp is more than 70% and that says it all. WhatsApp Business Platform integration has opened up opportunities for businesses to deliver the kind of customer service that the customers are looking for by reaching 2 billion users via a simple WhatsApp Messaging Application.

In addition to the recently launched Channel Addition Framework, Ameyo will now provide businesses to deliver WhatsApp Based Customer Service and get a 360-degree customer view without having to manage the channel separately.

Ameyo for WhatsApp has twofold benefits for businesses:

Deliver on Customer’s Expectations

Yes, today’s customers expect to connect with you as seamlessly as they do with their friends. Because of the presence of multiple messaging apps, it has become imperative for businesses to be present on the channels that their customers are using.

With the wave of Ameyo for WhatsApp added to the already existing channels like Facebook, Twitter Line, VIBER, and more, Customer Service on WhatsApp will become as easy as adding pizza toppings. The world is getting interconnected on various channels and to gain customer loyalty, being present on all the channels is important to ensure customer satisfaction.

Make Agents Life Easy

Since it’s an addition of a new channel, you need an integrated platform to be able to access all customer interactions coming from different channels like Call, Email, and Chat. Ameyo’s Ticketing Solution will allow the automatic ticket creation for each interaction via WhatsApp which will be reflected in the agent’s unified desktop.

Now that agents do not have to manually create tickets and manage a separate channel, it becomes easy for them to stay connected with their customers on the channels that the customers prefer.

“Ameyo helped us get on board with WhatsApp Business API and guided us in getting our Official Business Account. WhatsApp API has really helped us engage more effectively with our registered users. Our open rates and read rates shot through the roof and have reached greater than 10x in some instances”

Sri Harsha Thota
Growth Head, DocsApp

How to use WhatsApp for Business?

Send Alerts and Notifications: You can create personalized templates for different use cases that are specific to your business and automate the notifications and alerts to ensure that your customers have the latest updates on your product. You can resolve 80% of your queries with automated templates such as the likes of sending booking confirmations, ticket status, delivery alerts, and more.
Make Each Interaction Count: With each query that comes through WhatsApp, you can easily route each interaction to the agents using an omnichannel routing engine. Agents will be able to see and resolve customers’ queries from within the agents’ desktops. Your customers can use multiple channels for a single query, this will allow agents to gather the context from past interactions of the customer.
Analyze Channel-Specific Performance: Data has become a prime concern for any business. With a channel-specific report, you can understand the effectiveness of each template and understand the reason for failures, if any. While agents are working on resolving queries on WhatsApp, supervisors can draw a pattern from repeated queries, outbound notification trends, open rate, response rate, and more.
Get Customer Feedback: Now that around 2 billion people are using WhatsApp for their daily communication, you are just a thought away from collecting the customer’s feedback. You can send them links to surveys or feedback forms and because the statistics are convincing, it increases the chances of getting a clearer picture with more data for you to analyze and gather information on your in-product experience.

Why Does Your Call Center Need a Dialer Software?

Call centers are hard pressed for time with a constant need to improve agent productivity. And since call centers have to manage various processes and campaigns ranging from cold calling to lead generation to nurturing, doing manual dialing does not cut it. It only makes the agent’s job tedious and their efforts wasted while dealing with repetitive queries. Keeping this in mind, businesses deploy automatic dialer software for streamlining their call center operations. These auto dialer software have transformed the outbound operations of businesses.

There are many call center dialer software available – predictive dialers, preview dialers, and progressive dialers and one can choose the best option according to the business and communication needs. However, enterprises need to fully understand the benefits of a dialer software. Below listed are some major ones.

Automate your Calling

Call center agents have to make and receive calls day-in and day-out. Having an auto dialer system for call center means no more manual dialing which translates into increased agent productivity. Manually dialing the numbers have various ill effects like misdialing, fatigue, wastage of time, call drops, etc. By automating this task, you are freeing up the agents to handle more critical queries. At the same time, having a sophisticated dialing mechanism that detects answering machines improves the overall productivity of your call center.

Reduce Idle Time

One of the key benefits of automated dialer software is that it dramatically reduces the idle time of agents. Without a dialer software for outbound call center in place, the agents’ time gets wasted on busy tones, disconnected or unanswered calls. An auto dialer identifies when the caller has been connected and then only will patch the agent to the call. Thus, reducing agent’s wait time and freeing them to utilize the time productively to manage other call center operations.

Smart Lead Management

A sophisticated dialer software filters the leads to eliminate any unproductive contact numbers such as non-existent, answering machines, do not disturb (DND), etc. Additionally, you can also integrate with an existing lead management software to further improve your call connects. Supervisors can further improve lead generation and management by importing the contacts into the system. Integration with the CRM also helps to nurture the leads better and allow the agents to have better, qualified interactions.

Increased Lead Conversion

With advanced automatic dialer software such as Ameyo PACE, know the best time to call, set time zones, and use other intelligence to increase your conversion rate. Using these features your call center agents will call the right customer at the right time. Similarly, a preview dialer software shows the agents customer information prior to dialing the numbers. This empowers the agents to customize their sales pitch and in turn improve their sales conversions.

Lower Operational Cost

Dialer software for outbound call centers can boost sales, but there is an added advantage too- the cost benefits. Now, fewer outbound calls need to be made for better results, while needing fewer agents to manage those calls. Reducing or eliminating agent idle time, customer call abandonment rate, call drops along with having customer intelligence lead to reduction in costs while increasing the profits. A complete call center suite offers an additional benefit of not purchasing a separate CRM or other overhead costs.

Faster you connect, the better the chances of a favourable outcome. With an outbound call center dialer software, businesses can engage with the customers and prospects effectively to deliver a good experience. Post our discussion today, there is no denying the benefits of call center auto dialing systems. But the job does not end here. After identifying the need, the next step is to choose the most suitable solution for your business.

IVR to Voicebot: The Obvious Shift?

Thanks to the millennials era, advanced solutions like live chat & text messages have been leaping a preferred channel for customer service or support. This has been a common concern among the customer experience and service professionals about voice channels fading away from the contact centers.

As per the research done by CFI Group, more than 76% of all consumers prefer the traditional medium of phone calls to reach customer support representatives.

Though, calling or IVRs has always been the most preferred choice for customers regarding quick support. As an undeniable fact, IVR systems have ruled the customer service arena for over a decade.

Customers will prefer using speech interfaces to initiate 70% of self-service interactions by 2023 when compared to 40% in 2019
– Gartner

During the last decade, IVRs have developed and evolved into a significant tool to meet customer needs & solve the challenges of numerous contact centers across the globe. However, being an expensive option to implement and with extensive training to operate, it still proves its leadership with other competitive options.

Now, before we discuss why and how organizations are moving toward voice bots from traditional IVRs, let’s deep dive into what IVR and voice bots are and how they got popular in the past.

What is IVR?

IVR, also known as Interactive voice response, acts as an automated phone system with call diversion capabilities. In simpler terms, a technologically advanced tool enables customers to interact with an automated system before directing it to an executive or a team dedicated to a precise issue.

In a more detailed way, the IVR system works in the following manner.

Customer calls the organization> IVR system responds with few options like Menu, FAQ or Contact the representative > and, if required, connects you with a human.

With its origin back in 90, an organization successfully produced a human voice for the first time in history. This helped technology replicate the human voice and paved the way for IVRs to leverage this for customer support and services.

IVR helps companies collect the right information about the customers and their requests before human intervention. Customers are presented with a pre-recorded human voice as they call, which further navigates the customer to a menu for them to relate to and understand better. As a result, a tailored conversion is much faster and easier for customer care executives to handle and solve further.

IVR solutions have been popular in saving time and money for organizations by trimming calls, requiring less human intervention, and delivering a better user experience. So isn’t this a win-win for both companies and customers?

Here are a few quick benefits of IVR and why it has been companies’ favorite:

Customers are 2.4x more likely to keep doing business with a brand if they receive prompt or quick support with their problems
–Forrester

1. Enhances Brand Image

Maintaining branding has always been a priority for organizations across the world. IVR has always been a first step to enhancing the customer experience with an auto attendant that welcomes and greets you in the most polite way possible. This helps companies improve the brand image before a customer reaches and speaks with an actual customer representative.

2. Automates Customer Support

Companies have been leveraging IVR solutions for customized and streamlined customer experience. With this, an automated attendant is essential in assuring customers speak to someone without getting a busy connection. Also, a customer can choose their path based on the issues they are facing, which saves their time and enhances their experience with the organization.

67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative.

3. Enhances Customer Journey

IVRs have enhanced the customer journey in the best possible ways for a decade. IVRs are an around-the-clock (24x7x365) approach to customer service, which (if well crafted) allow companies to reduce customer frustration by switching quickly between IVR and humans. IVRs further provide effective customer support and reflect the organization’s brand value. It also allows for prioritizing callers based on their history with the organization.

What is Voicebot?

A voice bot is an automated conversational system that can speak like a human, understand, interpret and analyze customers’ requests and respond to them like a human with familiar words. Based on AI (artificial intelligence), voice bots can understand and analyze human language based on conversations and intentions.

Some examples of voicebots are home assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.

A few features of voice bots for brands to set them apart from any other option available are:

1. Enhanced Customer Support

Customer support via voice bot is more customer-centric and scalable as it gives users a chance to communicate better and resolve queries faster. In addition, voice bots (numerous times) have been proven to handle complex scenarios in customer support as a replacement for human interaction.

This is why the voice bot has taken the game of customer support to an elevated level. 51% of consumers aged 14-17 said they’ve already interacted with a speech or voice recognition interface or device.

**2. 24*7 Accessibility**

For brands across the globe, voice bots are providing an added advantage in terms of customer support by helping customers prevent typing a request to the brand, interacting with customers in real-time, and with little to no downtime.

As a result, brands now provide extensive customer support at any given point in time. This further reduces the cost of putting up a team of customer service agents to support customers via emails, chat or call 24X7.

3. Personalized Customer Relationship

Voice bots can reply and provide hyper-personalized support to the customers based on previous data like customer experience details, feedback, and requirement. This can lead to a more positive and personalized customer support interaction and can get more accurate and precise answers in a quick time.

How do Voicebots Score Better than IVRs?

“IVR systems are evolving from dumb menu systems into smart ‘voice bots’ capable of handling complex customer queries”
– McKinsey & Company

Brands have been on their toes to improvise customer experience and journey with them, making them think, ‘How can I understand my customer challenges in a few words?’. This new way of thinking led companies to opt for sophisticated technologies like AI (artificial intelligence) and make voice bots to drive their army of customer support. With this, all the challenges and issues brands & contact centers faced with IVT vanished too.

Navigating IVRs is a tedious task for customers while trying to convey and resolve their challenges with a brand. From pressing the wrong key to reaching a dead end or getting confused and disconnecting the call, customers have already suffered a lot while trying their hands on IVR.

So what could be better for brands than a customer enjoying his experience while passing through the customer support center?

By preventing customers from waiting to press an appropriate button on IVR, the voice bot can help them with a more efficient solution by just stating their reason for calling. Voicebot can understand the intent and initiate the process for customers to enjoy a smoother experience by directing them to an appropriate human agent. With IVR, this feasibility was not possible.

Enclosed are a few points wherein Voice bots score better than IVRs:

1. Scaling

AI-powered voice bots can be scaled to complex level use cases with over 90% automation rate for customer support. However, IVRs are not more scalable as compared to IVRs.

2. Customer Intent

Voice Bots can process multiple customer intents simultaneously and enhance customer support or customer experience. Whereas traditional IVRs can process one customer intent at a time.

3. Personalized Touch

Personalization is one of the primary reasons brands switch from IVRs to voice bots. Voice bots can process hyper-personalized responses for a customer based on their previous history or data

The Shift from IVR to Voicebots

IVR still has a lot of preferences from companies around the world, but voice bot adoption has been a trend, and many companies and government organizations are already starting to roll out voicebots while retiring their traditional IVR systems.

With technological advancements, voice bots have been on the verge of ruling the customer support systems. In the near future, when speech will take over as the primary method of communication, i.e., text, expect voice bot technology to capture the complete IVR market too.

With numerous benefits, organizations across the globe are upgrading their contact centers from traditional IVRs to conversational AI bots. This will be a win-win for both organizations and customers as it helps decrease support costs and enhances customer satisfaction rate, which further leads to business growth.

Whereas for customers, it helps reduce wait time and provides quick support and query resolution with an advanced self-service option.

Wrapping Up

With traditional ways of customer support like IVR, customer experience may go for a toss. Nowadays, Companies have started opting for better and more innovative solutions like conversational AI bots. Contact centers are leveraging Voice bots to gain an accurate understanding of what customers want from them. This further help the Customer experience team in driving solutions to critical problems and solving complex customer problems.