Briefing for New CCaaS Partners

Building a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution is easy with the Sytel platform.

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) allows you as a partner to tailor SCC as you wish and provide the service that best suits your customers. You can get started with minimal outlays and be offering services to new customers within days rather than weeks.

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Why Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

  • Benefits for Partners
    CCaaS has many advantages. Delivering software from a centralized, managed system is more reliable and easier, than having to cope with multiple on-premise installations.
  • Benefits for Customers
    SaaS eliminates big upfront investment in software, hardware and people. And with SCC, your customers can go live in days rather than weeks and months. Yet, there’s no reduction in the richness and flexibility that your customers can derive from SCC.

The Sytel Solution

Uniquely, in the market (see CCaaS Evolution on this page), Sytel provides a feature-rich CCaaS platform that is highly optimised for the cloud. This means:

  • Pure software solution –
    There are no hardware components and the whole solution can be installed on virtual machines into a cloud environment such as AWS.
  • Multi-media –
    The Sytel solution manages and blends all media channels including voice, chat, email, SMS and any other social media or chat-type applications seamlessly
  • Highly flexible integration –
    With a comprehensive API set, the solution can easily be integrated with any external systems.
  • Customisable –
    The whole solution can be white-labelled and easily accommodates the demands of any particular market or business sector.

And most important of all:

  • Completely separate tenant management –
    The solution provides for complete separation of different organisations or ‘tenants’ within a single installation.
    Consider: you have 15 tenants on your hosted service and suddenly, one insists upon a major upgrade to some features, to support a new vertical application they want to market.You can deliver any upgrade without this impacting the other tenants on the system. This means that all tenants can move at their own pace.
    This is a major USP and essential for building up a hosted service and keeping all your customers happy.

CCaaS Evolution

Although different regions of the world and different business sectors vary somewhat, the contact center software space is currently occupied by two types of technology vendors:

1. ‘Out-of-the-box’ standard CCaaS offerings that lack flexibility
These solutions are offered directly from the vendor as a service, usually over the internet. They are a one-size-fits-all solution and while they can often provide the basics quite well, they fall down when it comes to offering flexibility for specific industries.

2. Traditional contact center vendors with legacy solutions that are complex, expensive, and not optimised for cloud
These solutions are long-standing contact center products that may have built a large user base over many years for their on-premise products. They have evolved to incorporate many different components, integrations and are sold into many different markets and business sectors. As customers seek to move to a ‘as-a-service’ model for all their software, these solutions struggle to adapt and are usually just single tenant. And they often have a reliance on physical hardware components.

How Does a Partner Make Money From SCC?

There are four ways:

  1. Sale/ rental –
    Partners can purchase or rent licenses from Sytel at a price point that will allow them to make an attractive margin when they on-sell their hosted service to customers.
  2. Professional services within the Sytel solution –
    Sytel’s own products such as Softdial Scripter™ lend themselves to creating highly customised solutions for an individual tenant. Examples of this are:
  3. Professional services integrated with the Sytel solution –
    Sytel’s open API and flexible architecture allows a partner to build and add their own custom components. Equally it allows customers to integrate with and offer third party contact center modules.
  4. Third party product –
    And there’s huge scope to deliver a range of other products such as CRM, data networking and voice services.

 

How Do We Get You Started?

We will…

  • show you the live product and develop some initial understanding. We can do this at very short notice. Come prepared to ask questions and learn.
  • discuss typical service deliveries of agents interacting with customers in whatever target market you have in mind
  • show you how easily the product can be deployed
  • discuss what staffing needs you will need for your target market
  • (and most importantly) show you how you can make money with SCC.

We’ve got your attention? So, what comes next?

Down to Business

We will…

1. sign a mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to show that we are serious

2. review our joint business directions to ensure we have a match.

Subject to that, we will…

3. make SCC available in a data center of your choosing, or give access to ours

4. give you two hours of hands-on training, to be sure you can explore it in depth.

Like what you see?

Then in order that you can get real value from the system we will host some of your key people on a technical training course for around five days, almost certainly online. Come prepared to work hard and enjoy!

Then you are set to go looking for customers and do Proofs of Concept (POCs).

And let’s not forget that you can also deploy the same SCC as an on-premise solution. It’s the same code base as for cloud. And if you want, you can always transit between the two states – going either way!

Welcome to the Team

We will…

  1. assign you a sales manager and a technical sales specialist whose job is to guide you through the whole process of getting started, with the aim of making you effective as soon as possible
  2. introduce you to our support team. They are there to answer any detailed questions not dealt with by your sales team, especially those ‘how to’ questions that you weren’t quite sure about on the training course, or that are bound to come up as you begin to experience the richness of the product
  3. agree commercial terms with you and get you signed up.

There is a lot of supporting documentation and we will make sure you get what is appropriate to your needs.

And, if you want, we will help you white label our product.

Keeping Startup Costs Down

There are several ways in which we will assist you:

We will…

  • not charge you as much as a penny until you are earning money from your first customer. Training is of course chargeable in due course, but if you choose not to proceed, then there is no charge
  • show you how to install SCC so that, especially if you are in the public cloud, you can keep your footprint to a minimum
  • work closely with you on your first customer engagements, so that you can focus on delivering the core capabilities and get some happy customers quickly.

 

Keeping Running Costs Down

  • All server functions will be managed by you as a partner and enable you to minimise footprint and keep costs under control
  • The costs of equipping agents can be kept to a minimum. No need for full spec PCs. Thin clients and/or Raspberry Pi are appropriate
  • And for telephony: yes, your customer can retain their existing PBX if it has an IP connector, otherwise softphones cost next to nothing. We prefer WebRTC, because of its all-round capabilities.

You’ve Made Your First Sale. What Next?

SCC is so rich and flexible that you can tackle any part of the market, on any scale. So here’s where we can dig deeper into the product for you and help you determine the right match for whichever market segments you want to tackle.

This is a good point to:

  • reflect back upon your training, that was very comprehensive. Not everything stuck in your mind, and don’t be scared to ask if you are not sure about something.
  • work through the wealth of information on our website – and don’t forget to dip into our blogs. Sure they are marketing but they are primarily written to educate.

OK, now let’s get a bit technical and get you thinking about some of the directions you can go in.

Creating Value for Customers; Keeping Agents Happy

Your customers will want to know how you are going to create value with their customers (let’s call them consumers, so as not to get confused) so that they can have a great CX experience.

All of the functions and tools within SCC are aimed at doing just that. We will come to them in a moment.

But it’s not just about consumers. It’s about agents too.

Call centers are well-known the world over for their high agent turnover, no career path and siloed applications that offer no challenge for the agent. But with the multisession desktop that Sytel provides within Softdial One™, agents are free to use their skills across all media channels, and SCC load balances so that they are always kept busy and challenged. This is a great USP; make sure you use it.

Now let’s have a quick look at some of the software modules in SSC and get an idea of their benefits.

Managing Workflow for Customers

All interactions with consumers need to be customised to meet particular needs and that’s where Sytel’s all-purpose workflow tool, Softdial Scripter™, just makes things easy. For example:

No multiple tools and learning experiences; just one tool for everything.

Focus on Inbound

Consumers want two things:

  1. a great service that gives them all the right responses, no matter the media channel
  2. empathetic agents who ideally understand their contact history.

The multimedia functions available in the Softdial One™ desktop, integrated with history and other data, allows the agent to respond immediately to a consumer in any way the consumer chooses.

And the sophisticated routing software in SCC – Softdial Pathfinder™ – means that consumers can easily be connected to the agent most suited to dealing with them, especially if there has been prior contact.

Focus on Outbound

Contact center markets have moved more to supporting inbound operations in recent years, but Sytel has world-leading product for outbound service, including:

 

Third Party Apps

Think of SCC as a hosted platform that provides all the basic engineering to manage multiple tenants, together with a range of key generic applications. There will always be third party apps that your customers will want to add value to their particular version of SCC.

In many cases Sytel will be at hand to provide details of integrations such as:

  • CRMs including Salesforce
  • WFM including Verint Monet
  • raw databases such as Oracle and SQL Server
  • speech products
  • increasingly, a variety of conversational AI products

Sometimes you may want to use the strong API set that Sytel provides, to connect in some other third party product. Sytel may agree to do this work for you, or you may wish to do it yourselves. The good news is that the API set used for integration is the same API set that Sytel itself uses in product development. Well proven; just works.

Reporting and Analytics

SCC includes a very sophisticated reporting tool – Softdial Reporter™ 5 – that provides a range of reports and dashboards but which can also easily be used by customers to create their own reports.

Customers can monitor their own progress online or can schedule printed reports to be sent to them.

Integration of business data is a must and can be done in several ways.

For those companies who just insist on doing their own reporting, then SCC offers historical as well as real time feeds of literally all event data in the system.

SCC keeps histories of all media sessions and we provide both voice and digital analytics.

If you like what you are reading…

To begin your journey to becoming a partner and running a profitable hosted contact center business: