Next Generation Networks, Brought To You By The Call Center?

June, 2010

Could it be that the future of networking is currently being trialed in call centers across the world?

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

  • 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

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