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Conversations'19 Tour Reaches Zambia and Zimbabwe

We have been on a world tour with our Global Event Series – “Conversation’19 – The Ultimate Customer Engagement Event.” After our earlier success in Kenya and Ghana during the first leg of the event in the African continent, we were back at Zambia and Zimbabwe to extend this ‘conversation’ further while opening up new geographies to the modern contact center and customer experience technologies.

Our Day at Zimbabwe CCAZ

The Contact Center Association of Zimbabwe (CCAZ) organized the event to provide a platform for contact center and business leaders to discuss the BPO industry in Zimbabwe and the future of the country as probably becoming the go-to destination for the BPO sector.

In attendance we stalwarts like Mr. Kazembe Kazembe, Minister of Information Communication Technology and Courier Services who addressed the while highlighting the great potential of BPOs to contribute to the economic growth and employment creation to many Zimbabwean youths. In continuation, Mr. Rinos Mautsa, Director of Tech24 Pvt Ltd and our Zimbabwe partner said reiterated this by saying he expects the government to play a critical role in attracting global investors.

Keeping with the theme of the event, Rahul Zutshi, Director of Marketing & Strategy at Ameyo shared his insights into the contact center industry saying “I have observed 3 things that are common to countries that are leading the BPO revolution – right talent, which is abundant in Zimbabwe, seamless telecom process and infrastructure and ease of doing business through reduced number of legal hurdles.”

Our Date with Zambia

Conversations’19 in Zambia was all about discussing how Zambia can leverage the advanced contact center technologies to grow their economy and have an overall positive impact. Our panelists discussed at lengths about the various challenges that they see in terms of building a modern contact center and also shared the initiatives that they took in their organizations to ensure great customer service experience.

The Challenges

Davies Kabange of BancABC, Zambia started the panel discussion by talking about the need to maintain a balance between your revenue goals and/or KPIs while ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction.

As Valerie Mpuku, Senior Specialist at Zambia National Commercial Bank (Zanaco) PLC mentioned, customer experience in Zambia is an ongoing process and the contact center business is not very old in the region, it will require the support of both the government as well as the established brands who make the customer experience their priority.

The Initiatives

While discussing what all initiatives the businesses can take to build a modern contact center, Valerie shared how Zanaco as a service provider made ease and accessibility its priority by deploying Ameyo IVR. This helps with resolving the customer query in the first contact as FCR is very important for the business.

Rahul Zutshi, Director – Marketing & Strategy at Ameyo also highlighted the importance of having a unified agent desktop which allows the agents to interact with the customers, like/comment on a facebook post or tweet/retweet from a single screen itself.

“Deploy many self-service options for customers to serve themselves without having to speak to an agent. This will lead to having minimum staff in the call center and higher customer satisfaction” added Mr. Kabange.

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Key Take-Aways

“Building a modern contact center requires you to look ar your acceptable or desired call abandonment rate, the SLAs as well as the average call waiting time. It is important for a business to try to reduce staff cost” reiterated Mr. Kabange

Adding to that, Akhilesh Vybhav, MD at Zaktech Solutions Limited highlighted the importance of honing the soft skills of the agents and going for a call center solution that has a simple UI and is easy to learn for the agents.

Lastly, talking about what more steps the organizations can take for the betterment of their contact center, both Valerie Mpuku and Davies Kabange focused on an important piece – call center agents and the need to motivate them. Ms. Mpuku noted, “ The environment of a contact center is quite unique as compared to other office settings. So, it should cater to agents’ relaxation. Providing them an area to relax, spend some break time or having a cheer room might be a good start.

In addition to that, “We can set up modern call centers with smart systems and applications that are now available to make the lives of our agents easier and motivating them to want to come to work.” said Mr. Kabange

Choosing The Right Call Center Dialer For Your Business Is No More Hassle Now!

For every 18 calls, only 1 call is connected to a potential buyer. Picture this in a call center where all your agents’ productivity is at stake against the numbers dialed each day. Moreover, for a business that depends on customer interactions, each call is important and adds to its success rate!

How about automation with a call center dialer that is able to predict, analyze, and innovate your dialing process with its intelligence? Sounds interesting, right? Well, a call center dialer software is an absolute solution that helps you get improved connect rates and you cannot wish for more when your agents’ productivity increases from 120% to 300%!

Businesses use call center dialer solutions to be able to dial multiple numbers simultaneously.  The preset intelligent algorithms allow call center auto dialer systems to connect calls with available agents only when the customer’s leg gets connected. This saves your agents’ time and adds to their productivity.

Call center dialers not only limit the increase in call connect rates, but also brings tremendous intelligence and analytics to make call center managers’ life easy.

To make my point clearer here, I would like to highlight some sure-shot virtues of call center dialer systems that businesses actually witness.

  • Reduced Call Drops
  • Increased Agent’s Productivity
  • Maximized Call Connect Rate
  • DNC Management
  • Improved Conversion Rate
  • Adjustable Pacing Algorithm

Amazed? Not only these, but when you have the right With call center dialer software that reflects the features that suit your exact business requirements, you ensure a great customer as well as agent experience. Call center dialers help you strategize your outbound calling process with meaningful insights and business-specific analytics and reports.

Let’s see different types of call center auto dialer systems to help you choose the right one for your business.

Types of Call Center Dialer- Which One Suits Your Business?

Preview Dialer for HNI Customers

In preview dialing mode, agents are empowered with the flexibility to get customers’ information before a call is connected. This allows them to be pre-informed and prepared to resolve a customer’s query efficiently.

Customers like it when they are valued for their time and agents can deliver meaningful and contextual conversations when they know about customer’s expectations. This dialer also allows agents to select which contact to call with an option to skip contacts.

Predictive Dialer for Better Connect Rates

With its smart functionalities, a call center predictive dialer software dials the numbers using historical statistics and intelligence to calculate agent availability. Thus, based on past trends, the solution will know exactly how many dialing attempts and how much time is required to reach a live contact.

Answering Machine Detection (AMD) detects the busy tone, call waiting, call answered and the call is connected to an agent only when the call is answered by a live human. This reduces the agent’s idle time and increases their productivity.

Progressive Dialer for Productive Interactions

The progressive dialer only makes calls when the agents are available to handle the interactions, eliminating the possibility of abandoned calls. This dialer is ideal to be used to dial existing customers, for instance, renewal of a subscription or up-sell a product.

Progressive dialer does not make as many calls as predictive dialer but it ensures that customers are not dialed when the agent is not available.

Before you choose a call center dialer software, you need to know this!

Make a checklist for your business before investing your money and settling up for a contact center dialer. Since every business has a unique process, evaluating the right dialer could be difficult if you do not consider the following factors.

Call Center Process

Now that you know you need to automate your dialing process, you need to define your call center process before setting up a dialer.

Preview dialer is the right option for businesses with low call volume but high-quality leads, allowing agents to know the customer before the call gets connected. A pop-up display on the agent’s screen with the customer’s information before the call is initiated, making the agent pre-informed for the call.

If your business has a high call volume trend, queuing up the next call in the time the previous call is wrapped up increases the chances of better connect rates and improved conversion to land you a high range of customers.

Customers or Prospects

Of course, you do not want to lose on your potential customers with the wrong call center dialer systems. For a high-value prospect, it is important for agents to be prepared for customer’s requirements and cold calling would not solve the purpose here. A preview dialer that lets agents be prepared with a customized solution for each customer works wonders for such businesses.

For B2B businesses, each lead counts and a higher call abandoned ratio would take a toll on your business losing important customers. For such businesses, the first interaction with the customers has to be sophisticated to move the leads into the sales funnel. Progressive dialers eliminate the possibility of call abandonment and agents can focus on their pitch to qualify such leads.

Lead Data

What kind of calls are you making? Do agents need to know the customer’s history before a call is initiated?

If you are using a new list for cold leads, predictive dialer works the best because your agents would not need the prior history of the customers and predictive dialer, with its capabilities, connects with agents when the customer is there on the live call.

But in case, if you have a list of HNI customers, you’d like your agents to drive contextual conversation and a preview dialer is an answer for you. Agents will already know the customer’s history and can customize their service or pitch so that no lead goes wasted.

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With a powerful call center dialer, your agents’ talk time increases from 15-20 minutes to 45-50 minutes in an hour, thus producing better customer engagement and improved ROI.

Now that you know which call center dialer system fits the best to your business-specific needs, you may also evaluate additional features like CRM integration, IVR capabilities for smooth scaling of your business.

How BPOs are Improving Customer Journey in the Philippines?

The outsourcing industry is picking heights and more so in the Philippines where the companies are dedicating their most valuable assets to optimize the customer journey. From cost optimization to maximizing the productivity of any business, BPOs in the Philippines has become the call center hub for Southeast Asian companies.

Moving from a world of cold calling to a customer-centric world, BPOs have started to show significant growth for businesses as it promises a customer engagement suite enabling businesses to cater to customers needs 24*7.

Why the Philippines has become a Business Destination for the World?

Language Proficiency: Filipinos, with a rising English-speaking culture, are the go-to for customers across the world. Not only do they have western-accented English, but they also have problem-solving capabilities that set them apart from their similarly skilled workforce.

Cost-Effective: The Philippines is known for its substantially lower cost of living as compared to other countries and undeniably gives business benefit to organizations outsourcing their operations to the Philippines. Not only labor costs, but the infrastructure cost is also cheaper opening up gates for the world at minimum expenditure.

Government Support: The Philippines government has enabled the outsourcing industry for its extensive growth. The BPO industry in the Philipppines has become the major revenue driver for the country which is why the government has planned to encourage investment through fiscal and non-fiscal incentives, allowing businesses to outsource their operations to the Philippines generating more revenue.

Data Privacy: BPOs have the ever-growing problem of the data breach and is one of the most vulnerable risk sectors for cybersecurity threats. Under Philippine Data Security Act, the government has put stringent international quality data privacy standards, ensuring sensitive data handled with security compliance to protect their data.

What are the challenges for the BPO Industry?

Poor Call Connect Rate: Due to high call abandonment and poor connectivity in a call center software, the number of calls handled in a day reduces, resulting in low agent productivity against high call volume. It directly impacts the business ROI because the cost per call is really high.

Limited Monitoring: A supervisor, while manually analyzing the productivity of a queue or a campaign has to compromise on productivity. Managing call quality for 10 agents in an hour becomes a tedious task and the supervisors fail to manage the call volume in the peak hours due to lack of automation.

Broken Customer Journey: Due to the widespread of multiple channels, customers’ expectations have drastically changed over the years. Businesses may lose their valuable customers due to the lack of omnichannel support and optimization of customer journeys.

Complex Agents’ User Interface: Turn-around-time is a value proposition for any business to retain its existing customers. When agents put customers on hold while searching for the relevant information, the customers lose interest in your business and you lose your customer to your competitors.

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How Ameyo helps businesses achieve CX?

Dashboards for Statistical Information: The supervisors get superpowers with the comprehensive reports. How? Supervisors could easily analyze the peak hours and strategize resource allocation to increase the productivity of different campaigns.

What if the supervisors could keep a check on agents’ real-time activities? With the call functionalities like Snoop, Barge, Conference, and Transfer, supervisors can monitor each call closely and assist the agents to resolve customer queries with ease.

Omnichannel Support: It’s important for businesses to be present where the customers are. Let your agents get a complete view of the customer’s journey across multiple channels in one interface. With Ameyo’s contact center solution, supervisors can get channel-specific reports to analyze the effectiveness of each channel individually.

Call Routing Algorithm: Businesses work extensively to improve customer satisfaction. Smart call routing logic can do wonder for them if they route each customer to the best-suited agent. Make it easy for customers to find answers to their queries by routing them to IVR selection, business hours configuration, interaction history, preferred agent, and customer persona.

Having qualified conversations while personalizing each interaction improves customer satisfaction. Provide immediate response to customers without keeping them on hold and let them feel valued when agents deliver to their expectations.

Resolve query with CRM Integration: Do you ever hear “how many times do I have to repeat myself” from your customers. Yes, that’s where you lost a valuable customer. Integrating your call center software with CRM application allows your agents to get the preview of customer’s calling history and the agents can deliver a more personalized answer to the customers.

Your customer might call in to know the status of their previous ticket. Once the customer is routed to the right agent, the caller’s information displays on the agents’ dashboard allowing them to deliver personalized service. Agents will not have to waste their time in switching between multiple tabs. This significantly reduces Average Handling Time for each interaction.

Explore BPO Call Center Software.

Ameyo’s Conversations’19: Now in Zambia and Zimbabwe!

 

Now in
Zambia & Zimbabwe!


Register for Zambia


Register for Zimbabwe

After a massive response in Ghana and Kenya, Ameyo is all set to encourage modern contact centers in Zambia and Zimbabwe! Bringing together the industry experts and businesses looking out for improvement in their existing call center setup, Conversations’19 aims to spread proven customer engagement strategies, trends, and technologies across the geographies. 

With years of experience in the call center industry, Ameyo understands the significant areas that your business needs to work on to achieve the desired revenue. The key to success is satisfied customers; we build solutions that empower you to create improved customer journeys for more satisfied customers. 

What’s in for you?

Conversations’19 is for you if you would like to:

  • Transform your call center from only Voice to Omni-channel interactions
  • Improve your existing voice-based call center with enhanced call handling rate and efficient dialing capabilities

While voice is still a predominant channel for customer service and telesales, young and dynamic customers are now inclining more towards other interaction channels- Email, Social Media, Web Chat, and SMS through platforms such as WhatsApp. To provide seamless customer service through all these channels, you need to understand your customers’ expectations. 

Also, for voice-only call centers, we’ve got some major touch points around modern and competitive dialers, such as Predictive Dialers, Progressive Dialers, and Preview Dialers which are built to provide high-end proficiency with automated call handling and smart dialing capabilities in inbound as well as outbound call center operations. 

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Major takeaways from the panel discussion

  • Understanding customers and their changing expectations
  • Modernized and technology-driven contact center, from idea to action
  • The challenge of improved customer engagement in the evolving call center industry
  • Proven strategies to opt for the right contact center solution for your business
  • Advanced reporting and analytics to keep a stringent check on business productivity
  • Moving to unconventional chat channels like WhatsApp

Hear from our Speakers

Thought leaders Daniel Mpolokoso- Technical Director at Zaktech Solutions Ltd, Akhilesh Vybhav- Managing Director, Zaktech Solutions Ltd, and Rinos Mautsa- Director- Tech24 Group will be in discussion with Rahul Zutshi, Director – Marketing & Strategy at Ameyo, Shobhit Gupta, AVP – International Sales at Ameyo, Saumya Tripathi, Regional Manager – East Africa, at Ameyo, and Vishal Miglani, Regional Manager – International Sales – Africa, at Ameyo.

Our speakers will be discussing about the evolving challenges with current call center setups. They will also be talking about Ameyo’s advanced capabilities in handling the changing industry standards to help organizations choose the best technology and solutions.

Right from the drastic deviations in technology trends in Zambia nd Zimbabwe to how Ameyo can assist buisnesses from different verticals to understand and apprehend customer service challenges, the discussion will be wider in all aspects.  The speakers will be covering all touchpoints that can deliver a smooth and consistent customer journey via omnichannel support.

 

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Kenya – The New Call Center Capital?

With Harambee (“Let us all pull together”) as its motto, Kenya has seen significant changes in the past decade or so which has been the driving force for its economic, social development and sustained growth. The African enterprises have not been left untouched from these reforms. Digitization and digital initiatives have become a priority of the businesses.

Extending this thought to the call center industry, Kenya has tremendous potential of being the go-to destination for business process outsourcing (BPO). Since the time KenCall, Kenya’s first call center was founded by Nik Nesbitt in 2005, a lot has changed and improved for this East African country. Now, it is deemed to beat the earlier global regions such as India and the Philippines.

What Makes Kenya a Lucrative Destination for Call Centers?

Kenya offers various advantages compared to its competitors when it comes to setting up a call centre in the region. Let us look at some of these factors in some detail.

1. Geographical Advantage

Being one of the largest economies in East Africa, Kenya is considered the financial, transportation and communication hub. With close proximity to ports and being surrounded by the Indian Ocean, it is apt for easy transportation – which is a big perk for new businesses. Additionally, Nairobi having East Africa’s biggest airport also enables easy air travel along with cargo management. Thus, Nairobi with its ideal location, climate and other factors has seen some major organizations and foundations such as Google, Microsoft, Rockefeller, Gates, and Ford have set up their base here.

2. The Resource Pool

Kenya offers an abundance of human resources. The majority of its population (approx 52 %)  is between the age group of 15 to 54 years. The 2006 ICT Strategy Paper identified secondary school system as the “entry level threshold for call centre workers” and noted that around 700,000 students graduate at that level. These students have good communication skills which can be the stepping stone to work in the BPO sector. The competitive pool of workforce with basic computer skills and backed by good spoken English, Kenyan natives are a good choice to be hired as call center agents. Moreover, its strong travel and tourism industry has exposed the people to western culture and thus, leading to a cleaner and easy to understand English accent.

3. Vision 2030

The Kenya Vision 2030, which was launched in 2008 aims to transform Kenya into a newly industrializing, middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by 2030 in a clean and secure environment. The vision has identified Business Process Offshoring and IT-Enabled Services as one of the pillars to increase the GDP under this vision. The government has planned to focus on the following to boost the BPO sector.

  • Skill Development: Targeted training programs with special focus on primary processes and industry specific skills to create a qualified talent pool.
  • Marketing Campaigns: Launching and developing focused marketing programmes in targeted geographies to promote Kenya as the BPO destination.
  • Establishing a BPO Park: Construction for Konza Technology City will commence soon with the aim is to provide superior telecommunications infrastructure, easy access to international transport facilities.

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4. Infrastructural Development

The advent of submarine fibre-optic cables in Kenya opened the gates for Kenya to easily connect with the outside world at a much lower cost. At the same time it made communication within the country more affordable and convenient. The arrival of these fibre optic cables gave a boost to internet penetration which in turn encouraged the business players to setup their operations in the country and has driven the environment for ICT-led economic development.

5. Other Factors

Kenya ranks on 61st position as compared to its competitors, India (77) and the Philippines (124) in terms of the ease of doing business. The picture is similar in case of other factors such as access to credit, getting construction payments or just the overall ease of starting a new business. All these factors coupled with the already mentioned advantages, Kenya is in a great position to achieve high growth rates provided it gets a handle on certain issues like corruption and even better infrastructure.

Closing Thoughts

There is no doubt that Kenya has the potential to be the next big destination for the call center. But, the story does not just end there rather it starts from here. Once the businesses are established, the call centers are up and running, you just need one thing – a call center software to take care of all your call management needs. Typically there are two ways to set up a call center, namely, on-premise or on-cloud. Keeping the phase of development that Kenya is in currently, enterprises need to make a conscious call of whether they want to opt for an on-premise call center solution or a cloud contact center. Either way, Kenya is all set to take its competitors head on and be the most favorable destination for BPO and ICT industry.

Never Miss on a Customer with Call Center Dashboards and Monitoring Tools

Businesses need a straightforward metrics-driven framework to run effectively. Clarity on what is happening on the floor and what actionable are pending to be taken helps create a productive plan of action. Operation heads need a quantitative structure that helps them stay proactive and plan a step ahead of demands. They need regular notifications/alerts, customizable dashboards, automated indicators for SLAs and dashboards clearly stating what matters to the business, to stay ahead of what next is to come there way.

To guide the behavior of Contact Centers, Ameyo Call Center Software has augmented its Product offerings with some new features in its latest product release. To prevent our users from getting overwhelmed in the time of high traffic and to help them strategize their approach to handle the call spikes, Ameyo has come up with the following features:

Put the Maximum Agent Potential to your Benefit

Why

Operational managers demand control on agents call-related activities and the time taken by them in handling calls, wrapping calls and after call work activities like filling up the CRM or taking some notes. ACW is more important when the agent is having a conversation with the customer and filling the CRM/forms. In case of not connected calls, the agent will be only capturing the outcome of the call which can be RNR(Ringing No Response), call notes, etc. This is the minimalistic work which agents will be performing in case of Not Connected calls. The track of these aspects and a way to manage and configure timelines for each activity can help supervisors save time and costs.

Usecase

Michael heads the sales operations of Mark Life Insurance. He often finds it difficult to track the productivity of agents working on the floor. In the peak traffic hours, it gets all the more problematic as to restrain the agents from sitting idle and to drive maximum potential from the agents. This is taking a toll as he wants to increase his profits and he is not able to cut on the operational costs.

How

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To aid Supervisors like Michael in keeping control of the amount of time agents spent completing after-call work. i.e. keying disposition codes, updating customer databases, filling out forms, etc, there are configurations in Ameyo Call center Software to set an optimal ACW timeout for the connected and not connected calls to ensure that the agents are continuously getting the calls and they are able to perform ACW within the provided time.

Stay Updated, Stay Informed

Why

Staying on top of everything in real-time needs automated alerts and notifications for agents and supervisors. Automated updates help in keeping a track of activities and lets you prioritize the tasks in hand. Moreover, businesses need configurable thresholds for the various KPIs past which the supervisor or agent should get notified as the same values can’t fit in all the situations.

Usecase

Ron is working with the Customer Support Team of an E-commerce Company. He is finding it difficult to keep a check on the time he spends on the various activities he does while handling a call. At times he takes too long to find information while the customer is on hold, the other time he is not aware of how long he has been on a call and the other customers waiting in the queue are turned back. His operation manager is not able to control the things as in absence of the configurations to identify the breach of hold time or call duration time in real-time, he is clueless on the real-time updates.

How

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To ensure agents like Ron stay on alert, with Ameyo they would get notifications for the threshold breaches for critical metrics like ACW time, Hold time and Call Duration on their workbench. This would help them prioritize their to-do list and take timely actions. Adding on to that, the threshold would be configurable from the supervisor panel along with visually segregated color themes for easy identification of the levels exceeding the thresholds.

Follow-up Calls are no more a burden

Why

Agents need the flexibility to reschedule/delete the callbacks at their will as at times the follow-up response to customer conversation is handled through other media channels or the agent is himself/herself unavailable to take calls. In such scenarios, supervisors also need real-time updates on such agent activities.

Usecase

Mary works as a customer service personnel with a healthcare organization. She has lined up a few callbacks for the next day but has come up with an unplanned leave for the next day. Now she is finding it difficult to close her pending callbacks and conversations even if she replies through emails, she has to delete the scheduled callback or reschedule it. Her boss Joan also needs updates on the callbacks canceled by her to check the status of her work.

How

Mary can get benefitted from rescheduling/delete option for Callbacks available in Ameyo Agent Workbench. Agents can fetch the Callbacks in the Call Details section for a particular period and can go ahead at altering the same according to their will with a reason to justify their action and it would be updated to their supervisors via notifications.

Quality Analysis Made Easier

Why

With numerous calls at the hand, Operational heads or Quality Analysts in contact centers look for easy call center quality monitoring identifications and filters to discern scored/unscored calls.

Usecase

Henna is a Quality Analyst working with a BPO handling the support process for a Consumer Tech Company. On a daily basis, she has hundreds of calls to monitor, analyze and score to maintain standards for quality assurance. On every other day, she gets overwhelmed with her work while identifying the unscored calls out of the list and then analyzing them was tedious in absence of proper filters.

How

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Supervisors/Analysts on the Ameyo platform would now be able to filter and view scored/unscored calls using the Color-Coded Quality Assessment Views. This would enrich the Quality assessment process as VoiceLog Archiver and Call details page both would display the name of the last user who has scored a particular call along with color-coding for easier identification.

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The Supervisors find it hard to manage and monitor things in real-time in the absence of powerful call center dashboards and flexible agent management solution. They need call center management software to analyze their traffic at hand along with intelligent visual dashboards to quickly identify the alarming SLAs and KPIs. Ameyo’s effective Call Center Software gives all that is needed to manage and monitor the traffic in real-time along with an arsenal to proactively handle the call traffic in real-time.

How To Choose The Right Cloud Contact Center For Your Business

Selecting the right Cloud Call Center technology is a tricky business because of the quality of service that you offer would depend upon the software you are using in your organization. And with multiple vendors available in the market, it becomes a laborious task to decide on the right vendor that fits all your needs.

For instance, consider this – You are a small business planning to expand in 6 months’ time. You opt for a cloud call center solution that is perceived as inexpensive for limited users and offers great cloud telephony services but as you grow your business, the cost implications may multiply to a number that you don’t imagine initially. Then, how to analyze which solution your business will be compatible with? Here’s a list of questions that you should not miss to ask while evaluating a cloud call center software for your business.

For instance, consider this – You are a small business planning to expand in 6 months’ time. You opt for cloud solutions that are perceived as inexpensive for limited users but as you grow your business, the cost implications may multiply to a number that you don’t imagine initially. Then, how to analyze which solution your business will be compatible with? Here’s a list of questions that you should not miss to ask while evaluating a cloud call center software for your business.

Telecom Regulations

  • a) How to procure a virtual number? Does your cloud service provider render the virtual number or you will have to procure it from a VoIP service provider?
  • b) Once the number is procured, there are challenges concerning the ownership. More often than not, the ownership lies with the service provider which would result in stickiness and might create a problem when you wish to migrate.
  • c) Did you ask your vendor about ownership migration and the cost implications that it involves? Businesses with no knowledge of ownership transfer end up paying a large amount.

Out of the Box Features

  • Does the software allow you to be present where your target audience is? Customers today are impatient. They want a resolution to their problem, when they want it and where they want it. As a business, you need to be available on such channels – voice, email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, chat, etc
  • Can you monitor your workforce virtually? Supervisors need to have access to real-time data and reports to track call center operations and the agent’s performance.
  • Is the software increasing agent productivity? Some of the compelling features of cloud based call center are the ones which automate mundane tasks, eliminate manual dialing and integrate with artificially intelligent bots to lighten the agents’ burden while giving a boost to their productivity.

Hidden Costs

  • Did you check with your vendor about the various bundled services that they provide? Each business is unique in its own way and you need the services that would cater to your needs.
  • Having a budget framework is always a wise choice for any business. If you opt for a bundled service that only ensures software capabilities and calling will be billed as per the usage, verify with your vendor about the billing cycle and package validity to ensure smooth calling experience.
  • What would happen if the calling package exhausts? Businesses that largely depend upon the outbound and inbound calling process may lose on their business if, with the exhaustion of calling package, the system stops. Get your vendor to share cost implications that would be imposed on recharging the package before the next billing cycle.

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Data Regulations

  • Data security is a major concern irrespective of business size. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a challenge for many cloud service providers and the risk of data theft becomes a common practice because of third-party involvement in processing personal data.
  • A few countries demand from the vendors to have data stored within the country for security purposes. It is safe to be informed about your provider’s data center to ensure a smooth workflow for your business.

Security and Scalability

  • Did you ensure to get the end-to-end security solution? For businesses, security becomes challenging when they share space on the public cloud with other tenants.
  • Short-term and long-term plans may differ in their product offerings and businesses should not compromise on the scalable capabilities of the product.
  • The product should meet continuous business innovation standards while scaling because the software you use will define the level of experience you deliver.
  • Is the customer data stored on agents’ device? To maintain data privacy and security, the vendor must ensure agents are not able to store customer data by disabling screen-recording, call recording and the ability to take screenshots

Integration Capabilities

  • What if the CRM, Help-Desk Technology, and Ticketing system are not integrated with your call center software? This doubles up the agent work as they will have to maintain redundant data into multiple systems.
  • Does your provider have out-of-the-box connectors for integration between CRM and cloud call center technology? If there aren’t any, what are the possibilities of integrating your existing system with a cloud software?
  • Does the integration process require your tech team to be involved? To go up and running in less time, ask your vendors about the complexity of this process and man-days that it would require to integrate.

Usage Restrictions

  • There are limitations on what customers (businesses) can do with their deployed services. Cloud service software comes with restrictions like the number of API hits per second, the number of calls handled per minute, levels of IVR that could be created, etc.
  • Is there a provision to add the number of call dispositions to the default or pre-configured dispositions? If your business requires an addition, would you be dependent on your provider and what would be cost implications for the required addition?
  • What if your business requires the addition of queues and campaigns as you plan a roadmap of team expansion? Identifying the possibilities of queue addition as is required helps businesses choose the right technology with minimal dependence on the provider.

Licensing Limitations

  • Once the cloud contact center is deployed, businesses may require the expansion of the number of user licenses, increase support channels like WhatsApp, require the addition of other applications to satisfy the business needs.
  • The cloud contact center service provider should give access to the latest technologies to businesses ensuring that the expansion of user license is smooth.

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Prioritizing customer experience and driving continuous business innovation could be achieved with the right cloud contact center software. Decision-makers once powered with the right software gain the ability to quickly deploy capabilities like multiple channel support and tailor their contact centers while delivering differentiated customer service. The key is to know where to invest and learn how to go remote in an hour with a work from home ready contact center software to drive customer satisfaction and maximum ROI.

Easing Patient’s Pain with a Healthcare Call Center

Customers have come to expect a benchmark level of customer service. It’s no different when it comes to the healthcare sector. With increasing competition and many players coming into the arena, people have numerous options to choose from. The healthcare service providers need to take some measures to get that edge and enhance the patient experience.

To match and exceed customer service expectations, healthcare players need to ensure that they deliver exceptional customer experience across various channels. This is made possible once you deploy a healthcare call center software for your organization.

Centralized Database for Patient Data

A customer-centric organization should take advantage of every touchpoint to delight the patients. Being proactive when it comes to their well-being will earn the medical organization brownie points along with gaining the customer’s (patient) trust. You need to start by providing the call center representatives with the right tools to ensure that they have a holistic view of the patient’s journey.

A unified desktop with computer telephony integration (CTI) provides the agents with all the relevant customer data to handle the calls properly. With two-way synch between your call center database and CRM, any patient information (eg., registered mobile number, health insurance number) edited by the agent is updated in the CRM in real-time. With a 360-degree view of the patients, agents have the data at their fingertips to deliver highly-personalized patient experiences

Scheduling Doctor’s Appointment Made Easy

Making a doctor’s appointment is usually the first step. Gone are the days when you used to visit the hospital or the doc’s clinic directly and then wait for your turn. Now, patients expect to make an appointment prior to actually visiting the facility. A call center for healthcare streamlines this process by integrating with your existing appointment booking system. This means the appointment can be booked or canceled over a call itself and the same information is updated for the doctor also.

Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose you call the hospital to book an appointment with a general physician. The call center agent gives you a time slot on a specific date. By integrating with an appointment system, the same information will also be updated with the doctor and her/his calendar will be blocked for the same.

Sending Out Reminders & Confirmation

People like to be assured that what they asked for was actually done. Sending out a confirmation email or an SMS will give them this reassurance. We must also acknowledge that with their busy schedule and having a million things on our mind, it is easy to forget about your appointments. The hospital can use voiceblasters and SMS blasters to send out reminders to the patients and their family members about their upcoming appointment.

Delivering Reports in Time

Pathology reports and getting some medical tests done are a part of the ‘hospital experience’ and getting these reports can quickly become an ordeal. Think about going to get the tests done then, having to visit the hospital again to pick up the reports later. This is a pain area that medical organizations can manage using a field agent app. How about you arrange a delivery guy to deliver these reports at the customer’s doorstep? This will make the customer happy and possibly make them choose your services the next time they have to get any tests done.

We are not going to leave the delivery guy hanging. The field agent mobile application will create a ticket for each patient and will provide easy access for the agent on the go. The field agent aka, the delivery personnel can add notes and so can the customer. For instance, the ETA of the agent is one hour and the customer will not be available at the time, she/he can add a note saying “please visit after three hours”. The agent can also get directions to the location and deliver the reports easily.

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Integrating Omnichannel Patient Journey

Optimize your healthcare call center to be there for your patients and their families on different platforms. The customers should be able to reach you via whichever communication channel they are most comfortable with (call, email, chat, WhatsApp or social media). In addition to that, an omnichannel contact center software for healthcare needs to be able to provide the agents with the details about the patient’s journey across these touchpoints. With all the patient information at their disposal, agents can proactively support the customers and effectively resolve their queries. The integrated view will offer a complete picture of the preferred communication channels and their effectiveness. Based on this, the business heads can devise an effective omnichannel strategy to boost patient engagement and experience.

Contact Center: From Infrastructure to Business Enabler

We have stepped in an era where the face of contact centers have changed and businesses are adopting the technologies to be available for their customers across touchpoints. But, how contact centers impact businesses? Moving from solving 80% queries over calls to analyzing customer journey while working across departments, businesses are working on a large amount of data to resolve TAT issues across channels. Undeniably, customer service is not limited to one department and to solve a customer problem what we need is context-driven engagement.

How to deliver a customer experience that the customers want?

With the changing role of customers in the past few years, businesses are striving to deliver the experience that would leave no stone unturned for customers. Starting from customer service and moving to sales, the one answer is consistency where customers do not even have to raise queries because they get an instant solution to all their answers through automation.

Nafees Ahmed, CIO, Indiabulls, and Sachin Bhatia, Co-Founder, Ameyo have given us the answers to why a Contact Center becomes a Business Enabler when the CIOs focus 70% on understanding the business and 30% on implementing the technology.

Nafees Ahmed has let us in the growth of Indiabulls while reducing the TAT from 3-4 business days to 3 minutes for their customers and that’s where we start calling the contact centers as business enablers. “In the last one year, we have disbursed 2M loans, the goal is to do 10M loans in this Financial Year,” he has noted in our Webinar: Contact Center: From Infrastructure to Business Enabler.

“For a wow experience, I know where my customer is and what are their expectations,” added Nafees as an undeniable fact that context is the savior across departments.

To simplify the customer journey, he has noted that, “Everybody is connected on the same platform and could access customer information through and through,” to ensure that no customer goes back unsatisfied. They should get the answers that they are looking for.

How an enhanced IVR is the answer to most queries?

Nafees Ahmed has explained how agile solutions have become the choice of today’s CIOs and CEOs. Moving from legacy contact center where it took a month’s time to change anything on the IVR to a solution that caters to reducing the process 48 hours for implementing, they are perpetually growing and disbursing loans across India.

For Indiabulls, IVR has done magic and you cannot deny looking at the stats below:

  • The call connectivity has risen to 99%
  • Top queries and requests are catered on IVR
  • Call routing is developed through IVR selection
  • Recognizing and prioritizing important clients

Businesses that run on data are striving to solve customer queries through IVR but with a complex solution, it becomes laborious for them to change anything in the IVR technology.

Thought-Provoking Key Takeaways

  1. Data Analytics: How would you decide to cater to the pain points of your customer? Did you collect their feedback to draw meaningful patterns through the data? “Data collection is the real answer to all business problems as it helps in making decisions and identifying the persisting problems”, Sachin Bhatia has reiterated in the webinar.
  2. Personalized Customer Experience: How to reduce customers’ efforts and simplify their journey? In a customer-centric world, as I have explained earlier why the context is the king. It’s not a night’s effort that will land you right in customer’s good books. Delivering a consistent service that has no flaws and that does not demand efforts from the customers should be promised to solve the customer retention problem.

How Nafees Ahmed and his team successfully achieved the TAT of 3 minutes?

They have a 30 seconds lag strategy throughout their business. If a customer spends some time in the mobile application and he/she is stuck somewhere for 30 seconds, they are assisted by real-time agents and their journey is simplified in just 3 minutes’ time. Customers can opt for a live agent and they will be assisted through the process ensuring that the loan money is transferred in their account in those 3 minutes.

To hear meaningful insights from Nafees Ahmed and Sachin Bhatia, download the webinar here.

Businesses’ KPIs have changed over time and now they look for simplifying customer journey with the advanced technologies and they are putting their best foot forward while Ameyo is helping them take control of their business through Contact Center Software.

Conversations’19: First Global Series in Africa Leg

The landscape of contact center technologies has changed over decades and with customers becoming more informed and tech-savvy, the face of customer service demands more than just a query resolution over a call.

Africa is not far behind in the adoption of technological transformation. Ameyo’s Conversations’19 launched in Africa was an exemplary event where industry experts and thought leaders gave insights into ‘Building The Modern Contact Center’ while catering to the needs of modern-day customers.

In the first fold of the continuum, we have discussed what it is that needs to be changed to be a step ahead in the customer service game. Our speakers explained how contact centers have evolved to become customer-centric with companies in Africa investing more in customer service.

Thought-Provoking Key Takeaways from Panel Discussion

With the changing face of customer expectations, customer service reps face many challenges like consistency in query handling, promising to deliver proactive service across channels, analyze customers’ sentiments and more. In discussion with Rahul Zusthi, Director of Marketing & Strategy, Ameyo, our panelists have given us insights into improvising customer service and explained how to communicate effectively with the customer.

How to double your agent productivity?

Having customer information, knowledge base, customer interaction in Unified Desktop makes agents proactive because they will not have to struggle amongst multiple tabs. With Ameyo’s call center software, agents will find all the answers on one screen which ultimately helps in changing the face of customer service in any organization.

Why do we need to capture customer’s feedback?

Customers are the building blocks of any business and what they think of any product/service is a concern for businesses because a negative feedback can ruin your brand reputation.

Draw patterns from customer’s feedback and find what are the problems that most customers are facing and how you can resolve them with your team.

Why personalized customer service is important?

“Today’s customer expects personalized omnichannel conversation across voice, social media, and other channels”, Pauline Warui, Founder EA Customer Care Centre, had explained. Customers expect the agents to know their details and they should be equipped with the right answers to suffice their needs.

“Preserving the context of the conversation across channels is equally important and agents should be aware of customer’s interaction history to resolve their queries”, added Rahul Zutshi.

How to win back the customers into the system?

“85% times when you call a customer to know why they are becoming inactive is usually about bad service”, says Carolynne Wilson. It is a process to win back the customers and the money into the system by providing them the services they expect. “Improvise your customer service and have your agents call back these customers to build a brand in the industry”, she added.

How impactful is ‘word of mouth’?

Kingsley Bennett, CEO at Metro Edge Technologies noted that “If the customer is happy, there is always a repeat purchase, word of mouth is far better and solid than any form of advertisement.” When a customer boasts about your product, the sale and revenue will increase. “Customer service should be seen as an investment to generate a high ROI”, he adds while explaining why the face of customer service has changed over the years.

Why Omnichannel Service is important?

“The biggest challenge we have is that the customers have changed.”, reiterated Joe Jackson, Director of Business Operations at Dalex Finance. To cater to their needs on different channels has become the need of the hour and they demand answers across channels. One example of bad customer service goes viral and the brand loses its reputation.

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“Technology is an enabler and will make Customer Experience better as Customer Touchpoints have increased and will continue to increase”, Vinay Subbramaiah, Director at Techno Brain, has spoken at Conversations’19. To create a customer-centric world, it has become important for businesses to enhance customer service.

Georginah Ndanu, speaker at Conversations’19 has mentioned that “Customer service is not a department, it’s for everyone in the organization.” Departments should work in sync so that no customer goes unsatisfied with your business. Eliminating bad customer service will help organizations create customer winning experiences and with the close of Conversations’19 in Africa’s leg, our speakers have boasted about how good customer service stands exemplary.