Contact Centre Solutions

What is a contact centre solution?
A contact centre solution is a platform or collection of technologies that facilitate the management of several channels, people, and procedures that significantly improve customer interaction to provide a near-perfect consumer experience.

In most cases, it consolidates many communication technologies. These technologies range from social media, SMS, live chat, chatbots, omnichannel solutions and emerging customer contact tools such as natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT).

How do contact centres work?
Contact centre operatives often provide assistance across many communication channels for customers. Contact centres are very similar to call centres, but they extend beyond phone conversations to communicate with clients in various ways, including calls, email, chat, voice over IP (VoIP) and website support.

A digital assistant can undertake the frontend ‘heavy-lifting’, responding to FAQs without needing agent interaction. Additionally, the AI can verify the customer to offer more in-depth responses or hand them over to an agent already pre-validated. The purpose is to streamline communications, expedite resolutions and give customers a 24/7 self-serve support function, improving the customer journey and experience.

The customer can communicate 24/7 via their preferred channel, switching between them during their interaction without needing to re-validate their ID.

What is the difference between a contact centre and a call centre?
The difference between a contact centre and a call centre is the channels and technology they use. While call centres utilise traditional phone systems, contact centres adopt the latest communication channels to communicate with businesses and customers.

What’s new in the call centre industry?
More and more companies are investing in predictive analytics, using AI software to improve consumers’ and employees’ contact centre experience. Since early adopters are already refining AI solutions for call routing, we should expect to see widespread adoption of AI in the not-too-distant future.

It is predicted that by 2025, 85% of all customer service interactions will exist without person-to-person involvement.

How is AI used in call centres?
Predictive behavioural routing is an example of how AI has built upon this idea in recent years. Contact centres using AI and analytics are used in predictive behavioural routing to allow callers to be routed to agents most suited to handle the callers’ specific needs.

What are the business benefits of a digital contact centre?

By switching from a traditional, locally managed contact centre to a cloud-based digital contact centre, an organisation can vastly improve the customer experience.

• Improving contact centre efficiency to speed up responses to customers’ inquiries.
• Setting up an omnichannel contact centre requires just a few mouse clicks, making it ideal for quick and easy contact centre setup.
• Combining innovative digital technologies, like sophisticated analytics, AI, and chatbots, with state-of-the-art call centre software.
• Quickly adding or removing agents to accommodate fluctuating demand in a safe and scalable manner.
• Maximising efficiency in the contact centre workforce is one way to reduce overhead.
• Maintaining an advanced level of service to customers with little to no increase in IT spending

Here’s the Solution

Over the last 18 years, Saascoms has grown its business organically through vertical market sales and developing solutions for its customers with its in-house development team.

Saascoms ‘Omnireach’ centralises all non-voice communication to a single agent platform, including webchat, email, SMS and social media (e.g., Messenger/WhatsApp).

Our clients, who focus on collections and arrears, report an increase in their collections of over 10% and a lower cost base than traditional telephony engagement by allowing customers to communicate via their preferred route.

Omnireach has an API integration function compatible with leading dialler technology, meaning agents can blend between voice and digital conversations, allowing contact centre management flexible resource planning.

The AI can understand customer requests by analysing conversations using sentiment, key phrases, and natural language processing (NLP). The chatbot detects nuances in a customer’s message, and by machine learning, it becomes progressively smarter with each conversation to resolve up to 42% of all requests without human involvement.

Omnireach provides agents with a single view of all digital Omni channels, giving them a clear and straightforward window to all outstanding enquiries, making it easy for them to self-assign conversations and assist customers promptly. To further assist the agents, they have access to customer profiles, spelling and grammar support, previous conversational history, foreign language translation, customer interaction history and library responses.

Omnireach Chatbot has been trained over hundreds of thousands of client interactions. Saascoms’ collections’ AI engine has monitored and analysed over 100 million conversations and agent responses over the last four years to ensure conversational intent matching is exceptionally accurate. It is fully scalable from 1 agent to 1000+ agents.

Sentiment and request analysis allows the AI to tag conversations processed by the tag action programming or workflow pattern. This conversation analysis means that when the bot functionality is exhausted, the AI routes the message to a dedicated queue such as the ‘Vulnerability Queue’. This identification ensures that if a customer conversation is vulnerable, it is routed to a dedicated queue and a team of agents. For example, other queue routing can be actioned based on sentiment, request, account number, or location.

This advanced, analytics-driven intelligence defines a collections strategy and customer journey. This offers a single point of resolution via self-service and creates a more personal response.

Results
Q1 2022 stats show that 72.4% of conversations utilising Saascoms Collection and Arrears Chatbot are resolved on the first contact.

Two-way messaging has resulted in a ‘right party contact’ increase across energy and telecoms clients of 64% (compared to traditional voice and non-conversational messaging).

From April 2021 to April 2022, 38 million+ conversations were activated across Omnireach via 24 organisations.