White Papers

Use cases for generative AI in the contact center are legion. This means that an AI contact center ‘product’ is doomed to obsolescence the minute it is released if it does just one thing, e.g. call summarization. Sytel’s approach for engaging with AI tools is to provide an application framework that delivers a no-code approach, providing a level of abstraction that allows a wide range of generative cases to be addressed.

Over the past 20 years, US regulators have brought in a number of regulations to control and limit nuisance calls made by predictive and automatic dialers. During this time, market circumstances have changed dramatically. This paper considers how existing legislation might evolve, to better serve both customers and the outbound industry, in today’s markets. This analysis also constitutes a predictive dialing 'best practice' strategy for Sytel’s customers in the US.

Anyone running an inbound operation at scale will be familiar with the need to balance two requirements:

1. provide adequate staffing to keep up with demand
2. keep staffing costs under control

In the world of multimedia, this is a complex landscape.

The process of managing the allocation of sessions in real-time is now too difficult to leave to the supervisor and requires automation, working with simple rules such as SLAs.

Therefore, Sytel’s approach is simple, with two fundamental principles for inbound sessions.

Sytel and Afiniti have partnered to produce an integration of Softdial Contact Center (SCC) with Afiniti. This adds Afiniti's AI-based routing capabilities to Sytel's best-of-breed multimedia ACD and dialer engine.

Afiniti's AI-based agent selection is applied to both inbound and outbound campaigns and works for all types of media, bringing AI-based routing to Chat, email and other packet media sources as well as traditional voice.

SCC is both a multimedia and multisession ACD. SCC customers make use of media blending to maximise occupancy and manage service levels across media channels where response timescales vary greatly. Use of SCC's multimedia blending is transparent to the integration with Afiniti.

The overall solution maximises agent occupancy at the same time as pairing the best agent available with a customer, leading to highly profitable operations for the contact center.

The Sytel AI Dialer gives customers unprecedented levels of dialer performance without breaching compliance. This white paper explains the approach that Sytel has taken to develop this first class dialer that includes two new features, which are both world firsts:

• Dialing Protector - achieves excellent performance whilst dialing under compliance at a level of 1% abandoned calls
• Multi-Context Dialing - removes the worry of mixing data with different calling characteristics on the same campaign

In this paper we lift the lid on some practices and ideas that should have been consigned to the history books years ago and we also offer some practical advice on how to select your next (or first) predictive dialer.

When you select a dialer, no reputable vendor would do anything other than claim compliance; quite right too, since compliance is easy to achieve; you simply set a limit for nuisance calls. In order to make the right choice you need to ask the right questions. This paper helps you to do this and also work out the right answers. Some key questions considered are:

• Why is the real issue not whether a dialer can dial under compliance, but whether it can do so effectively?
• Why is excellence in design important and what questions should you ask when selecting the right dialer for your business
• What proven way can you use to determine if a predictive dialer is any good.

The evolution of customer service is very much a function of technology. There is now a range of marketing and customer service techniques, not just voice but digital as well. These techniques are used in a variety of ways, from the proactive to the softer sell which allows customers to engage at their own convenience.

But the bottom line is that it all rests on a common algorithm (explained here). And how reliable is it anyway? This paper debunks the myths and jargon associated with AMD and presents some hard facts for call centers when considering the pros and cons of AMD.

The nature of hosted services is that there is no room for failure. Service providers must guarantee productivity time in the order of 99.999% if they are to provide the quality of service users expect.

This white paper looks at how the components within Softdial Contact Center are designed from the ground up to meet these requirements, including

1. Automatic and seamless failover of system services.
2. Redundancy measures and load-balancing for gateways delivering trunk access.
3. Dynamic provisioning of all system components.
4. Shared, dynamic configuration store for dial plan, queues, routing, security model and other configuration shared by system services.

This paper is an essential read for anyone with an interest in the Hosting Services model. It discusses the critical technology issues that must be addressed when planning a hosted call center services operation and explains how Sytel's hosting solutions have been specifically developed to address the needs of this market.

The Collections industry in the US is currently exempt from the rules governing the use of predictive dialers there. Sytel believes there are strong reasons why a cap on nuisance calls in the US collections market should now be considered.

The paper looks at dialing behavior in the Collections industry in the US, including type of call, e.g. live versus virtual agent and considers current nuisance call levels.

Much of the existing rules now in place in other countries first saw light in the form of advice provided by Sytel. Drawing on this experience, we have now set out a detailed outbound template for other countries to consider when drawing up their own dialer regulations.