The Odigo Extended Contact Center is now generally available.
With this offering, Odigo gives contact centers the option to purchase seats with a limited number of interactions but at a lower price point.
The aim is to support “extended contact centers”, where employees in the back office chip in occasionally and support front-office teams in handling customer contacts.
Ordinarily, contact centers have to purchase additional fully priced seats for this, even though these employees spend much of their time on tasks like data entry, record keeping, and document management.
Yet, with the Odigo Extended Contact Center, service teams can buy these extra seats at a lower rate and – ultimately – reduce their expenditures.
In regards to those rates, the Extended Contact Center introduces different pay plans based on the number of interactions an agent handles.
The first pay plan will start with 100 voice interactions per month per agent.
Sharing more on the motivation behind the offering, David Mason, UK Service and Operations Director at Odigo, said:
The aim is to provide a ‘simple’ solution. Contact centers don’t need to change how they work.
“Through secure access to the same unified platform, anyone with a license can benefit from and contribute to a customer’s history. It creates an unbroken line of support that delivers the level of care everyone is seeking.”
That same unified platform ensures that users of the Extended Contact Center can access all of the same options and modules as front-office agents.
Indeed, this isn’t a “lite” version of the Odigo contact center; it’s the complete platform.
Beyond the Back-Office and Across the Business
While the Extended Contact Center may ensure greater cost-efficiency within service operations, it also allows Odigo customers to expand their contact handling strategy beyond the confines of the contact center.
Mason hinted at this possibility, stating:
[We want to] expand customer relationships by including expertise from across businesses to help answer queries with greater speed and accuracy.
That trend is gaining momentum, with contact centers increasingly relying on store associates, sales personnel, the marketing team, and others when demand peaks.
Yet, as Mason suggests, contact centers can also offer “extended” seats to subject matter experts (SMEs) from across the organization, who can address complex issues related to their specialties.
Moreover, the contact center can set up a routing system whereby SMEs receive only contacts of a particular intent – with full customer context – for faster, more accurate contact handling.
According to Odigo, those that leverage its Extended Contact Center to run such a strategy can:
- Increase first contact resolution (FCR) rates by as much as 100 percent
- Decrease call transfers between employees by up to 15 percent
Meanwhile, the vendor also offers a Microsoft Teams connector for businesses that wish to extend their contact center propositions via the UC platform and benefit from cross-function expertise.
Yet, the “Extended Contact Center” offers contact centers an alternative that includes the complete power of Odigo’s CCaaS platform.
Elsewhere, Odigo recently launched an AI orchestrator to ensure unified AI management throughout the customer journey.
