Designing for the Cloud – 6 Major Challenges

October, 2019

Developing a feature-rich contact center platform for the cloud has its challenges! At Sytel, our journey has taught us a lot - from dialer/ ACD vendor through contact center hosting technology supplier to OEM supplier of multimedia cloud contact center platforms.

The challenges of environment, functionality and scale have required us at Sytel, not simply to extend, but rather to look to new designs.

There is an orthodox approach to development for the cloud, which in contact center terms translates to limited functionality. At Sytel we’ve spent years designing our way around this challenge! In the coming months we will discuss how we do this. First, here’s a quick summary of the key challenges to whet your appetite:

  • Extensibility

    Every customer of a cloud platform brings a different set of business intelligence to bear on agent selection, routing, outbound inventory practice, reporting metrics, etc. How do you provide a framework for this that is easy to configure and mitigates the effects of misconfiguration?

    Read the article >>

  • Ease of provisioning

    Activities such as:

    • provisioning a large contact center stack
    • changing carrier interconnects, dial and routing plan across a distributed telephony stack
    • adding new resources to an existing stack
    • adding and configuring a new tenant

    …should be made simpler through the right choice of infrastructure and orchestration framework.

    Read the article >>

  • Ease and speed of troubleshooting

    If you need to use the server console to configure and manage your contact center estate, that’s a problem. It’s easy enough to have a web-based tenant UI, but it is a different scale of challenge to provide a fully web-based landlord UI. But without this, scaling beyond 1000 agents requires costly management processes.

    Read the article >>

  • Footprint cost

    How much of your stack has to be deployed on dedicated computing resources? Streamed media processing is a given, as is legacy SQL storage, but everything else should be architected for elastic computing. If not, those AWS/Azure bills will ravage your profit margins.

    Read the article >>

  • Scale vs. complexity

    Consider this dichotomy:

    • In order to make software components deliver at scale the information dependencies between them must be minimised, or nothing would happen in timely fashion.
    • But this then limits the ability of a platform to solve complex problems of resource allocation, such as load-balancing across ACD queues for service level adherence and blending.

    Solving this problem is the holy grail of cloud contact center design.

    Read the article >>

  • Mitigating Failure

    The universal law of communications is that things go wrong. Every formal signalling protocol has this fact built into its design. But all too often, this doesn’t extend to the rest of the infrastructure that runs the contact center. So… what happens when things break?

Read the article >>

For more information about how our products are designed for the cloud, just talk to us.

What We Offer

Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) - multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.

Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.

All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.

Flexible Contact Center Software

Softdial Contact Center™ - rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
  • Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

    CCaaS for subscribers - global service​, with no upfront costs

  • Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners

    Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software

  • Contact Center Platform – Enterprise

    High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid

Blended Media Desktop

Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace

Work Anywhere

Browser-based tools, no software installation required

Customise, Localise, White Label

Design all user interfaces to individual requirements

Integration via APIs

‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps

World Class Development

Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries

Capabilities

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.

All Media Channels

Voice, chat, email, social, etc - fully integrated and blended

Agent Multi-Tasking

Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel

Dynamic Workforce Management

Automated, ‘best available’ decisions to manage agents and balance work load, across all media channels

Predictive Dialing

Best-of-breed performance under compliance

Optimised Inbound Routing

Smart rules and 'best-available' decisions to drive great customer service

Agent Scripts

Help agents achieve and maintain excellence

Voice and Screen Recording

See and hear exactly how agents are interacting

Analytics and Data Feeds

Measure and evaluate performance at every level

IVR, Bots & Conversational AI

Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers

Customer Journey Tracking

Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations

Modules

Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance

Softdial One™

Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators

Softdial Scripter™

Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications

Sytel AI Dialer™

Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules

Softdial Pathfinder™

Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection

Softdial Media Server™

Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls

Softdial Reporter™ 5

Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels

Softdial Publisher™

Comprehensive data output to build your own reports

Softdial Recording Monitor™

Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards

Softdial Campaign Manager™

Automation to optimise any outreach strategy

Softdial Repository™

Central storage and configuration of common resources

Sytel Global Compliance™

Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer

Solutions

Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications

By Business Type

Enterprise

A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale

Small/ Medium Business

Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves

By Industry

Customer Service

Connect quickly to well equipped agents

Market Research

Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration

Debt Collection

Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app

Sales & Telemarketing

Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing

Healthcare

Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care