We spoke to Nour Addine Ayyoub, founder of ZaiLab, to find out more about their unique proposition and his founding fundamentals.
Yesterday in the US, ZaiLab launched their Cloud-Based Contact Centre Technology. CEO and founder Nour Addine Ayyoub spoke to us to explain why he left a successful career within software in the financial sector to found a software based contact centre platform.
“The biggest challenge I found when looking at contact centres, firstly it was extremely expensive and also extremely difficult to implement”
ZaiLab aim to remedy that problem. Nour, together with his team, began to write contact centre software from the ground up, designed to be based fully within the cloud.
“The vision was very simple, lets create a contact centre that’s available for everyone”
ZaiLab is a next-generation software company focusing initially on omnichannel cloud-based contact centre software. Nour’s philosophy was based on his experience that the traditional contact centre solutions are focused only at the enterprise market. The technology was not viable for SMEs as it was too expensive and complicated to implement. So the gap in the Market ZaiLab are focused on is to develop the first ‘contact centre-as-a-service’ technology that provides contact centres of any size and requirement.
The ZaiLab platform has several features which together make it a unique proposition within the industry. Firstly the solution was designed from inception to be 100% cloud-based. Utilising the existing AWS cloud platform ZaiLab is able to offer functionality within minutes of setting up an account, enabling great flexibility for customers.
The second key goal for Nour was to enable a cost effective solution for those who didn’t feel the existing CC solutions were viable due to the potentially large costs involved. ZaiLab has ensured that there are no upfront setup or installation costs. They achieve this with their ‘interactive flow designer’ which allows customers to customise the routing through a ZaiLab contact centre with a simple easy to use editor.
As well as reducing upfront costs, ZaiLab’s unique pricing model ensures that customers only pay for exactly what they use – a fully consumption based payment model.
“If you use our software for one hour a day you pay for one hour, if you don’t use it at all you don’t pay us. We wanted to be bold with it because we believe people should stay with us because they love our product not because we tied them in to a long term contract”
Nour and ZaiLab are also keen to utilise emerging technologies like AI to their full extent. Currently the software is using machine-learning to enable customers to be matched to the best call handler to meet their needs. This is managed by the ‘Single Waiting Room’ feature. All interactions, whatever their channel, are placed in a single waiting room and considered together before being routed to the agent most likely to provide the best outcome. The agent’s call outcomes, customer satisfaction scores and interaction data are fed back to ZaiLab’s machine-learning algorithm to make sure customers are matched to the right agents at the right time. They are continuing to develop their use of AI and have voice analytics currently in the pipeline for future releases.
Based in South Africa, ZaiLab appear to have targeted a distinct gap in the market and Nour has ambitious plans to follow the US launch which took place yesterday. They intend to focus on the UK in September 2018 but with the AWS platform widely available globally, the options in terms of expansion are not limited. ZaiLab will be demonstrating their new software at Enterprise Connect 2018 next month and we’ll be there to how the solutions shapes up.
