Contact centre and communication platforms are the critical facet of most organisations. The primary connection between customers and the business, the systems provide the crucial data for maximising and improving services. Integrating these communication systems with other business applications is of huge importance.
AMC Technology are contact centre and communication CRM integration specialists. Their industry history has developed to incorporate a huge list of telephony providers and CRM systems to create a unique proposition within the industry.
UC Today spoke to the founder and CTO of AMC, Anthony Uliano to understand how their offering has grown beyond software integration to provide a holistic range of customer contact enhancements. Initially developing tools to help customers with specific platforms, such as SAP, AMC quickly enhanced their offering to make it available to as many customers on as many communication platforms as possible.
“Through our partnership with SAP AG back in 1996, we started to build these connectors to SAP from the various telephony platforms. We worked with every major provider that was there. We grew this tremendous base of telephony knowledge, but we didn’t want to build these point to point solutions that everyone else at the time was building. We built an abstraction layer and it allowed us to tie all of the connectors we built into SAP through a single platform. Once we had that platform in place we then expanded that to other CRMs as we could do that very easily.”
AMC now offer integration solutions for all of the major CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and Oracle. Their innovative abstraction layer creates the capacity for integration between almost any two platforms available.
“AMC is provider of a platform that supports many CRM systems and many communication platforms and we just need to configure the connection points to drive all of the functionality that we offer in terms of integration.”
Their development has shifted dramatically from the early days. Their extensive portfolio still provides full integration option for the legacy on premise CRMs to the new age of cloud CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce. On the communication side AMC have mirrored that integration growth, offering full options for Cisco and Avaya’s portfolio’s, as well as options for the new breed of cloud native providers such as RingCentral, Amazon Connect and soon Twilio Flex.
We then spoke to Anthony about some of the emerging technology trends that have shaped AMC’s growth and direction.
Cloud
AMC recognised quickly the shift that was occurring both within the CRM providers but also within the world of communications. More and more of the traditional providers were shifting their focus to cloud platforms and new players were disrupting the market with their cloud native offerings.
“We’ve been partners with Salesforce for over 15 years, being their first contact centre partner. Salesforce paved the way for cloud-based CRMs and they made that a standard in the industry”
Anthony explains that CRM systems moved to the cloud more quickly than the systems for communications and contact centre. The reasons for the delay for cloud uptake on the communication side were mainly down to the fear of system outages.
“There are so many compelling reasons to move to the cloud but companies were reluctant as it’s such a critical business system. As we’re seeing momentum increase for cloud communications, we have extended our platform to address these needs.”
Omnichannel
The next major development in customer contact technology was the onset of multi-channel communication. The ability to communicate with organisations by more methods than just the traditional phone call, radically transformed industry requirements.
“Back in the 90’s, communication platforms were pushing multichannel. So we went back to our lab and developed a multichannel platform that could do more than just telephony. That became the basis of our premise-based platform that we still offer to customers today.”
Over the decades multi-channel has evolved into omnichannel and has become a buzz phrase within the industry. Omnichannel offers platform owners the ability to communicate and manage their transactions via any number of means. Voice calls, SMS, chat applications, social media platforms and others are all now avenues for contacting a business. The real challenge was combining these communication-based work items with other work items such as leads, cases and opportunities, so managers and agents could easily manage and track their work. That is what AMC provided.
“A few years ago, we saw this omni-channel requirement and once again expanded our solution to meet these new requirements. Not only were we the first to support Salesforce Omni-Channel, but we also built native Omni-Channel Support for Dynamics.”
Now AMC offer full integration for the omnichannel communication methods, phone, chat, text, email and social media. This crucial offering enables customers to maximise the efficiency of their customer contact centres in the modern era.
The Future
Next on the horizon is the release, towards the end of this year, of their pure cloud platform which will offer a number of benefits.
“Our new cloud platform, which we’ll be launching later this year, is incredibly robust and interesting, and it really extends our capabilities in the cloud world. Our pure cloud platform will tie all of these cloud providers, both on the CRM side and the communication side together in a really novel and innovative way. ”
Anthony and AMC have also noticed another trend with their customer and partner base, the desire for best of breed. Customers don’t want to sacrifice or compromise one area of communication to enhance another. They want the best product in each area, whether that be voice, chat or text. Currently contact centre operators have to evaluate the best overall option rather than cherry-picking the best aspects. Shortly AMC will have the remedy for that.
“Our cloud platform will allow you to mix channels from different vendors. Effectively apps or plugins from different vendors or CRM providers and combine that into a seamless agent experience. You could have SMS from Twilio, Skype for Business for agent to agent chatting, and Amazon Connect for telephony all through one seamless agent experience from AMC.”
Understanding how AMC have developed enables us to better appreciate how important their future development can be going forward. Stay tuned for further AMC news and releases here at UC Today.
