This month, a radically different theme, aimed at raising your sights.
If you have investigated using a single provider for the various media services into your home (TV, phone, data), you may have noticed that minimum contract periods are increasing. In many countries, the standard period has moved from 12 to 18 months and may soon be 24 months. Why? Because the cost of delivering an ever wider range of services to domestic customers is constantly escalating. Commissioning costs per new customer can run into hundreds of dollars. And that’s not counting the substantial advertising and cold calling costs associated with attracting that new customer.
And commissioning cost is only one of a number of challenges currently facing network providers.
Hardware is an ever increasing requirement. Homes need set-top boxes, satellite dishes, decoders and adapters; carrier exchanges constantly have to invest in new hardware. With the increasing pace of change, cost of obsolescence is a major factor in carrier finance models.
Limited interop – At present, carriers deliver multiple-play services on separate platforms. Each platform is tailored to a specific way of bridging, multiplexing, processing and encoding/decoding of media for that specific service. This approach was necessary for reliable service delivery but is costly and limits interoperability. Introduction of new codecs is costly and painful for the carrier.
Interoperability with other bearer networks is limited to ‘same media, same codec’. This limits opportunity to recoup capital investment for the carrier and gives rise to another two big issues:
Limited market share – Remember the advantages for certain carriers who had exclusive access to the iPhone in the earlier days of its manufacture, or UK Premier League Football. Consumers will go with the carrier that best meets their needs. Limited interoperability means limited access to customers.
Missed opportunities – Codec lock-down and interop limits prevent communications carriers from creating new markets. One day we’d like to think that it will be possible to have a video-conference between a cellphone user, somebody using Skype and somebody using regular telephony (represented by an avatar), all being watched by a fourth party in high-definition TV. Of course all of this will be delivered through disparate bearer networks that interoperate and manage charging. The technology for all of this exists today but cannot be glued together on a large scale.
Or can it?
We think the solution is both very simple and already proven, but may require a major shift in approach from the traditional large carriers; namely, internet technology as the transport mechanism plus software as the delivery engine.
Let’s look at the requirements for this to work:
- stable, fast, highly available broadband to homes and businesses
- end-to-end management of many simultaneous multimedia sessions (voice, video, email, chat, whatever)
- consistent management of different processing requirements for differing media channels
- super-fast, efficient routing
- many distributed software components
- minimal specialist hardware
- enough processing power to handle the capacity (cheap enough)
- standard servers (cheap enough)
Does this kind of setup sound familiar? It should. All the above requirements are currently being met in call centers across the world, albeit on a smaller scale, by solution providers such as Sytel. It could be that the future of next generation networks is currently being trialed in a call center near you.
Adoption of such a delivery model brings the advantages of reduced cost and wider choice for both the consumer and carrier.
The cost of commissioning new users and maintaining the system as it grows decreases. Less Capex and less Opex means a substantial decrease in the cost of bringing a new customer online.
The ability to easily plug in a variety of codecs and communicate between them means greater choice for the consumer and instant connectivity between carriers, bringing a fully converged network closer to reality. New codecs can be installed with a minimum of effort as standards or new requirements emerge. The whole system becomes much more agile and fast to adapt, which will be necessary if the larger carriers are to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs.
So what is to stop the call center providers of today becoming the network backbone providers of tomorrow? Well, not much actually. It just takes a little forward thinking by the major players. Welcome to the future.
Whoops, sorry if this got a bit long, but hope you enjoyed the ride!
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
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Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
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Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
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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
Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, 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