Joined-Up Systems, Joined-Up Journeys

March, 2019

Great architecture is key. A solution that can maintain state for all agents and sessions, that can scale easily to handle thousands of agents per tenant and delivers dynamic queue management, blending and session history tracking is fundamental. Everybody needs systems to be joined-up.

Challenges within the contact center continue to grow as technology advances and customer expectations increase.

One of the biggest challenges is the lack of visibility of what is happening across all channels. Your contact solution may be multi-channel, but does this mean that agents and customers have visibility across all channels, or are channel activities siloed?

For example, any time an agent has an active session with a customer, they should be able to view the customer history, no matter what media channel was used, be it voice, email chat etc. And of course, it matters for customers too. There is nothing more annoying for customers than to find as they get switched between agents, or use different media channels to engage with a contact center, that the current agent they are in contact with has no access to their session history.

So the message for contact centers as they go multi-channel is to remember that you can’t just install new systems to manage particular media channels, e.g. email. You need to integrate your new systems into a single contact center platform. And in doing so you need to ensure that agents can dynamically track everything that a customer has been up to. Otherwise your costs are going to soar and your service fall as you are faced with a lack of consistency, inability to report clearly and management inefficiencies.

Servicing customers properly also means deploying your agents in an optimal manner. Workforce planning helps, but the real challenge is to be able to respond in real time to SLA breach, by moving agents with the relevant skills between queues. When the Automatic Session Distributor (ASD) has full visibility of all agent and customer activities, then it can meet this challenge. And it can do so in a much more efficient manner, than the supervisor. Everyone remembers the term “call blending”, where inbound and outbound voice channels got blended. To meet the challenges we are discussing, your ASD needs to do media blending. And that is a big step up from where we used to be. In practice this means you could be blending a chat queue in the UK, with a live voice queue in the US.

Keeping agents’ knowledge up to date can have a major impact on morale and motivation. Get it right and you can enjoy a loyal workforce. Get it wrong and you will be constantly recruiting as agents exit through the revolving door. Having an effective multichannel environment enables agents to handle all media channels, providing them with a varied and refreshing work load. However, if agents work in silos and are unable to move easily between channels then training costs increase as they regularly need to be trained on different systems.

And it is not just a question of joined up systems for agents but devising product and user interfaces that provide the same look and feel, throughout what the agent does, whether he is responding to an email, handling an inbound call, or responding to a chat request.

All these issues come back to great architecture, which is the key. A solution that can maintain state for all agents and sessions, that can scale easily to handle thousands of agents per tenant and delivers dynamic queue management, blending and session history tracking is fundamental. With such a system there is no reason for any customer experience to be dis-jointed. Joined-up systems delivering joined-up journeys – it’s what everybody needs.

If you would like to learn more about how SCC enables the activities described in this brief article just get in touch with us at sales@sytel.com and we will be happy to show you.

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