Strengths of Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) in Debt Collection

Focus on business benefits

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) brings four major business benefits to the collections marketplace:

1. Zero or mimimal-cost integration with any collections platform

Sytel’s Campaign Manager and Scripter provide a route to a no-code integration with SCC. If your collections platform offers a relational database interface to application data and a web-based client interface, it is likely that integration between your collections platform and our product can be made without any R&D effort.

2. Everything in one platform

All the facilities you need are available on a single platform. No need to integrate third party product to get a working system. And since all our components work together seamlessly, you can just load and go, no matter how sophisticated and demanding your collections operation.

3. Extending the life of your legacy system

Replacing and updating your collections software as it reaches end of life or struggles to cope with new requirements can be an expensive exercise. Using our scripting, campaign management and reporting tools, you may be able to stretch your software life by a number of years, save on replacement costs and keep your energies focused on navigating through tough times.

4. Inventory management to get the best out of your investment

The debt you are collecting is valuable inventory. Our tools, especially our campaign manager can help you get maximum value from it using techniques such as skills-based routing to divert low value inventory to IVR, whilst saving the high value accounts for live agents – all on the same campaign.

Focus on features

• • Hosted, scalable and multi-tenant

    All of our software is not just site deployable, but also hosted-ready and is designed to support multi-tenancy from the ground up. A key part of Sytel’s business is providing our carrier partners with technology to enable them to deliver hosted call center services. This allows a collections software house to easily partner with the carrier or telco of their choice, for delivering hosted services to their client base.

    The ability to provision resources dynamically is key to meeting this demand. SCC can deal with provisioning of trunk resources, tenants, routes, queues, campaigns in real time without outage.

    We have many partners delivering hosted contact center services using our software in the US, UK and around the world. A number of our customers also use our platform to centralise their own multi-site operations to gain economies of scale. This can be done by either concentrating trunk access for cost savings in one country, or for multinational topologies deliver local trunk access regardless of where the call originates from.

• • Intelligent blending and agent turrets

    Although Sytel is best-known for its world leading outbound predictive engine, our software also includes a well-proven ACD engine. The inbound and outbound control is managed within a single process and so automated call and media blending can be done with a degree of precision that other dialers cannot match.

    Business intelligence can be built into inbound and blending. For example it is possible to script routing of calls based on criteria such as balance, age of debt and relationship with a particular collector or group.

    The agent turret can be configured for either a single call appearance or multiple appearances. Similarly, support for multiple agent devices (including cellphones and SIP devices) is extensive, with a rich architecture for managing presence and device preferences.

• • Skills based routing

    We provide this for both inbound and outbound calls. In collections, for example, it allows a number of small outbound campaigns to be aggregated into a larger campaign. This helps to meet the increasing regulatory burden placed on debt collectors whilst maintaining productivity.

• • Integrated IVR

    SCC deals with human and IVR agents as being functionally equivalent in most respects. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for optimising collections activity.

    As legislation allows, real and virtual agents can populate the same campaign. This allows low value calls to be handled by the IVR – it also improves agent productivity, down to single digit wait times between calls.

• • Support for desktop applications

    As well as supplying a rich toolkit and APIs to making integration with collections application clients easy, we also offer a very powerful web-based scripting platform that can be leveraged in several ways to add value to a collections application:

    • A wrapper to add support for access to call control and scripting of command sequences for clients delivered via a web browser. This gives a zero code integration.
    • A means to re-present legacy UI in a browser and add access to dialer functionality.
    • A means to extend and customise existing applications to take advantage of dialer functionality.
    • A scripting platform that enables rapid front-end development. N.B. Some Sytel VAR partners are using this as a basis for redeveloping their desktop interface.

• • Integrated call recording

    Recordings can be tagged with user-specified data, for example the debtor’s name and account number. An indexing and archiving service provides the means for supervisors and customers to do real-time search and retrieval of recordings via a secure web-based interface.

• • Proven realtime reporting

    Our realtime publishing mechanism allows call cycle and customer data to be made available in real time. Not all collections agencies want their reporting data to be available to their own customers in real time, but the means is there to easily do it, if required.

• • Campaign management

    The Campaign Manager product offers a rich range of facilities for outbound that is probably second to none in the industry. Together with the power of the dialer, this is especially relevant in collections where getting hold of the right party can be very difficult.

    Key to our approach is the ability of Campaign Manager to interrogate a third party database to extract dialing information and write result data back. This means the collections platform can be integrated with the dialer without the need for extract files. If the collections application schema is suitable, campaign manager can also be used as a database proxy to manage database update based on activity.

    Campaign Manager provides a framework for users to specify the business rules for managing dialing inventory. Functions such as retry management, right-time-to-call, time zone management, filtering data, DNC screening, multiple lists per campaign are all built in to Campaign Manager and are well proven.

• No specialised hardware

  In a VoIP world, no specialised hardware is required. A complete call center solution can be delivered to customers as software only.