Perdial (UK) – Full Service Hosted CCaaS

The CCaaS requirements

In the late 2000’s, Perdial wanted to leverage the growing capabilities and advantages of the hosted model. They were looking for a contact center as a service (CCaaS) provider who offered all the functionality of a full service contact center platform. They needed a solution which was flexible for their customers both in scalability and cost.

Eugene Goodin, Managing Director of Perdial explained:

“The hosted model has become increasingly attractive to clients for a number of reasons. Unlike a premise-based system, there are no upfront costs; that investment has already been made by the service provider. This means that clients pay as they go, only for what they actually use, and they are free to scale up and down as they need.”

Perdial set about searching for software that would provide the backbone of their business. The chosen solution had to offer:

• True multi-tenancy throughout
• Inbound and outbound call handling, including blending between the two
• IVR – quick and easy to develop, no matter how complex
• Call recording
• Multi-media handling – chat, email, social media, etc
• Agent scripting – with fast implement-ation of complex requirements
• Detailed control over outbound campaign parameters – do not call, retries, end-of-list handling, etc
• Integrated real-time and billing reports

Implementation

After extensive testing, Perdial settled on Sytel’s Softdial Contact Centre™ (SCC).

Eugene Goodin commented

“Sytel offers an all-in-one hosted software package. With Sytel, facilities are either ready integrated, or we write our own wrapper around Sytel’s technology to deliver the customers’ requirements.”

From Perdial’s point of view, Goodwin added that Sytel was ideal for a number of reasons:

1. Flexibility
   SCC allows us the flexibility to meet the diverse needs of our individual clients, from the small collections shop to the large customer service operation. A core aspect of that flexibility is that we can offer TDM or IP connectivity depending on client requirements. Increasingly, customers are migrating to SIP delivery; many do not even have TDM within their premises. Our clients appreciate the flexibility we offer to grow, develop and change. For example, an agent is easy to set up; all they need is a PC, a phone and an Internet connection, opening up the possibility of home-working. We are supporting a growing number of home-workers across a variety of sectors.
2. Multi-tenancy
   Sytel’s SCC allows true, secure multi- tenancy which is crucial to us as a hosted service provider. It allows us to segregate our customers without having to run separate full instances of the software for each customer – which means less hardware and less configuration is required and there are fewer services to monitor. This makes the system overall easier to administer from a landlord’s, or service provider’s, perspective. It would be extremely difficult for us to deliver services without this.
3. Inbound blending
   SCC allows our clients to respond quickly to inbound calls by automatically taking agents directly out of the outbound pool. That way resources are maximised because agents are never sitting idle.
4. Custom scripting
   SCC’s Scripter tool has two powerful functions; firstly, agent scripting. It enables our customers to build incredibly complex branching agent scripts with dozens of pages and hundreds of question options. The functionality within Scripter means that consumers only answer the questions pertinent to them, based on a combination of their age, gender and the answers to previous questions. It is a really flexible tool allowing personalisation of scripts. And being browser based, it is suitable for home workers as well as for the traditional call centre environment.
5. Outbound performance under any international dialler regulation
   This has always been a core strength of Sytel. Their predictive dialler gives the best predictive boost over progressive dialling of any dialler, and we never have to worry about breaching the UK rules laid down by Ofcom.
6. Campaign management
   SCC’s Campaign Manager allows for quick and simple campaign configuration, with options across a range of features. Having the ability to save your preferred options by creating a template means that future campaign creation is quick and easy. So easy that non-technical staff such as call centre managers or team leaders can create and manage campaigns rather than having to employ a dialler manager to do it. In our experience, once shown how to use campaign manager few people need further instruction and most begin to experiment with it to see how they can fine-tune and improve their campaign performance.

The result

“Together with Sytel, Perdial can offer some pretty attractive capabilities:

1. Service
   Perdial offer 1st and 2nd line support, backed up by Sytel’s expertise when necessary.
2. Custom development
   No two clients are alike. All require some measure of bespoke development, which we largely undertake at no cost to our clients. Thanks to Sytel’s Scripter, it’s at minimal cost to us, too!
3. Stability and reliability
   Sytel’s distributed architecture offers facilities such as software autorestart, and full hardware and software redundancy throughout. This has allowed us to build a highly resilient, redundant system using our data centre and dedicated network. Our clients appreciate the assurance that offers.”The bottom line is that from a standing start Perdial has grown to become a significant presence in the UK hosted marketplace. Our services are all delivered using Sytel’s technology and it has been fundamental to our success.”