Contact centre platforms have previously been seen as the preserve of large corporations that can afford substantial upfront investment in infrastructure, handle lengthy and complex deployment projects and attract the attention of large, global service providers to ensure good customer service. However, as familiarity and comfort with cloud solutions have increased, many of these barriers have been reduced or removed. Smaller businesses are now using cloud-based contact- centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms and this is empowering them with large enterprise-grade contact centre functionality.
One example of a CCaaS platform that is bringing traditional contact centre capabilities to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is Enreach’s Contact Center product portfolio which brings high-end features such as automatic call distribution (ACD), analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to the SMB market. The omni-channel, cloud-based solution aims to level the playing field, enabling SMBs to buy the Enreach Contact Center as a Service solution either directly from Enreach or through its network of resellers in 25 countries.
“We’re bringing our cloud communication contact centre solution to the SMB market because in the past, contact centre solutions that offered ACD were only affordable to large companies and they required big investment and long implementation projects,”
Alfred Nesweda
explains Alfred Nesweda, the CEO of Masvoz, the Spanish cloud communications provider that is one of Enreach’s portfolio of UC and collaboration technology companies. “We’ve been doing this since 2005 and cloud is the key to being able to provide high-end contact centre functionality at the right price for the SMB market.”
“The onboarding of clients and agents is simple and fast and you only pay for the agents you are using,” adds Nesweda. “If you have three-to-five agents, that’s all you pay for and you can rapidly add new clients as required. Cloud technology allows us to bring complex systems to organisations of any size.”
Martin Classen, the Chief Product Officer of Enreach, thinks that attitudes to the cloud have matured and the technology is now trusted and relied upon. However, the next step is to make solutions available to businesses of all sizes that also incorporate all the functionality of traditional solutions for large corporates.
“When you look at typical large cloud contact centre players they usually provide dedicated systems for dedicated agents,” says Classen. “In SMBs you often see part-time contact centre agents who have other jobs to do so you need full integration into your PBX which we also enable. Attitudes have really changed in the last three years or so and even more conservative companies, like banks, have changed their contact centres to cloud.”
Martin Classen
Inevitably the pandemic has accelerated the need for flexibility but as the situation stabilises, the focus has turned to the features and functionality that can be provided to SMBs. Enreach had been early to enable this but also wanted to bring leading-edge capabilities such as conversational AI to a truly omni-channel contact centre offering both in-bound and out-bound activities.
“Companies right now are struggling to put the customer in the middle of the experience and to do so you need to provide them with all the channels – some people like voice, some like chat,” says Nesweda. “If you want to provide a full contact centre solution you need to provide an omni-channel solution and it’s also key to connect the contact centre with existing systems so the agent can gather information on the end client from Salesforce or Dynamics, for example. Having the capability to handle call flow is also included in our solutions, along with inbound and outbound solutions. We’re bringing together high-quality customer experiences with affordable cost and empowering SMBs with the latest contact centre innovations.”
