CATI Interviewers Working from Home

Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration

Global Uptake In CATI Interviewers Working from Home

For market research organisations doing telephone interviewing, the ability to relocate CATI interviewers to work from home is a very welcome benefit that has allowed some of those companies to continue their research work uninhibited by the global lockdown.

Seems like a win-win!

Making the switch with Sytel

Working remotely in a CATI contact center has been a straightforward transition for Sytel’s market research customers. With the technical challenges solved by Sytel, MR organisations have been able to focus on the human factor – remote training, supervising and managing remote users.

What our partners and customers are saying

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We were expecting some challenges as part of the transition but by the end of the second week everything was running pretty much as normal with 100% of our interviewers working from home. We will never need as much physical space as we have in the past – likely a higher percentage of homeworkers is the way of the future.

Lisa Mancini – US – Director of Call Center Operations – Global Data Collection Company (GDCC)

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Sytel built a working solution ahead of schedule and it worked great.  Our interviewers love working from home and we feel more secure in our ability to quickly pivot between in-office interviewing and at-home interviewing as circumstances change in the future, as we now have the infrastructure to do both.

John Lafrance – US – VP Research Methods and Sampling – Escalent

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Roy Morgan was able to implement “work from home” CATI operations quickly and efficiently to maintain its data collection efforts at a business critical time.  Productivity levels have been maintained with CATI operators and supervisors welcoming the convenience of working shifts from home, and conversely of not having to commute to and from the city, often late in the evening.  This win:win and more flexible arrangement will no doubt present a strong case for continuation into the future once COVID-19 operating constraints are removed, so we are pleased to have taken a step in this direction and to have that option.

Stephen Harvy – Australia – Head of Operations – Roy Morgan Research

Everything in a browser – anywhere, any time

Sytel CATI interviewers have the benefit of Sytel’s WebRTC browser-phone which:

  • loads from within a browser
  • requires no software installation or VPN
  • connects the interviewer to the dialer from wherever they are located using an encrypted connection
  • requires that the interviewer has just a computer, headset and internet connection.

And supervisor tools for managing interviewers are available as before: call recordings are available for supervisors to review interviewer performance and live monitoring of interviewer calls is also available.

Future impact

Wider recruitment possibilities

Traditionally ‘contact center’ has meant an office building with banks of desks and computers. Recruitment for that site has been limited to a relatively small radius around the office and some CATI operations have struggled to recruit under those circumstances.

Now with home working a real option for CATI operations that radius has been removed and interviewers can be located anywhere, opening the door for a much wider pool of resources.

Deeper talent pool

Being able to choose interviewers located anywhere also means that CATI organisations can benefit from a deeper talent pool. If specific skills such as languages are required for interviewers, CATI organisations no longer need to look for those within a radius of a few miles.

Scaling-up

MR organisations that find they are facing greater workloads are no longer bound by the number of physical seats in their CATI offices. Sytel’s cloud-ready dialer can easily be adjusted to accommodate more CATI users, even at very large numbers (and of course an interviewer who is home-based doesn’t occupy a seat!)

Conclusion

COVID-19 has caused no end of complications in many industries, but for market research organisations with the ability to work from home life can continue as normal. It has highlighted the need for flexibility and preparedness and given MR and other organisations that make use of Sytel’s work-from-home solution a unique advantage over their competitors.

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