Contact centre vendors face competing challenges around building customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing costs. The difficulties these companies face is in finding strategies to modernise contact centres while avoiding the expense and disruption of total cloud replacement. However, it is possible to add cloud capabilities to existing on-premise contact centres such as click-to-call, work from home agents, WebRTC and voice-enabled chatbots.
In an exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes Peter Broeckx, Sales Manager Contact Center EMEA at AudioCodes, to walk us through the various ways on-premise contact centres can be modernised.
“Most contact centre vendors like customers to fully migrate to new platforms, away from on-prem deployments to full-cloud solutions,” says Broeckx. “But the good news is that even with an existing platform, you can still add new technologies on top of your existing platforms that will allow you to leverage some of the newest technologies in the world of UC and CC. That’s what we at AudioCodes have been working on enabling – allowing existing solutions to leverage all the newest technologies such as conversational AI or integrations with Microsoft Team and Zooms.”
Integrations with Existing Platforms
AudioCodes is dedicated to enabling such solutions to be added on top of existing solutions, with the ultimate aim of improving customer service – with new UC platforms, for instance. “Look at Microsoft Teams, which now has 145 million active daily users. Next to that, you’ve got Zoom Phone, and then all the others are way behind. A lot of those of the questions we get asked are: ‘having already decided to move to Teams, can we integrate teams with our existing platform?’ And the answer is yes, you can.”
The same is true for adding resilient work from home capabilities, as Broeckx explains. “Say you previously one office with 500 people working there. All of a sudden, thanks to COVID-19, it was as if you had 500 offices with one person working from each. How do you manage? By adding a WebRTC softphone as a voice endpoint for the agent on top of your existing platform, you make it easy. By adding that functionality for your agent, you don’t have to rip and replace.”
Voice-Enabled Chatbots
Automation can seem an intimidating prospect to integrate into a technology stack, but Broeckx is clear that here too it isn’t necessary to do away with what you already have – and that it needn’t come at the expense of voice. “There’s some really great chatbots out there, but they’re focused on digital chat channels. If you look into contact centre interactions, a lot are still over voice, so customers often ask us: ‘can we use that automation to help voice interactions as well?’”
The answer is yes, with AudioCodes having developed a solution allowing the integration of a chatbot with an existing contact centre. “There’s no need to rip and replace. Our solution fits over the top of your existing platform and existing chatbot – we just voice-enable it. It’s actually vendor-agnostic too, in the sense that we can connect any chatbots with any contact centre and allow them to use any kind of cognitive services, such as speech to text or text to speech, that’s applicable to your vertical and your customers. We allow you to mix and match in order to create the best possible personalised service for your customer.”
Leveraging Customer Metadata
Something as simple as a click-to-call button on a website can have huge ramifications for the customer experience. “IVR doesn’t usually lead to a good outcome for the customer. If you use WebRTC, you can include a click-to-call button on a website or mobile application. So instead of having to dial the number, you just click the button. And because I’m already authenticated, the bank knows that it’s Peter Broeckx. They know my mother tongue is Dutch. They know that I’m looking at the webpage where gives all the information about car loans. We can take all that metadata, send it with the call, and then that context can be used to route the call to the best possible agent.”
Broeckx is clear that AudioCodes’ capabilities are informed by its experience in the space. “It goes back to our DNA. We’ve got 27 years experience in getting all these different technologies and streams to talk to each other. That’s what we are great at.” The company is also seeing significant demand for its capabilities in line with a rising trend for automation. “We’re working with a number of our leading enterprise customers on this, and many have great ambitions to automate 80% of the interactions that are coming into the contact centre. That’s where they’re headed over the coming years, and that’s what we are helping them to achieve by voice-enabling the bots that they already have in place.”
To find out more about modernising contact centres, read the AudioCodes whitepaper, and go here to see the full video interview on this topic.
