CCaaS – Using technology to enhance customer engagement
The business world has always been competitive, but never before has the battle for customer loyalty been fiercer.
Organizations are plowing in more money and effort to step up their customer care strategies and with good reason! Reports and surveys reveal the importance of customer engagement in buying decisions – 86% of the consumers are willing to pay more for better customer service and 54% of Millennials say that they stopped doing business because of poor customer service.
In these competitive times, businesses have turned to technology to get the most out of their contact centers and to provide a pleasant customer experience to buyers.
When it comes to using technology to optimize Contact Center functions – CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) instantly springs to mind. It is the perfect example of using cloud-computing platforms to integrate the latest technology with your contact center while keeping costs low.
Contact Center as a Service – Key Technologies
Inbound & Outbound Call Automation
There is a great deal of technology behind every call that comes into a call center. Some of these are automatic call distributors (ACD) – intelligent routing of calls to agents, IVR (Interactive voice response) – automated phone system providing information to callers, voice biometrics, intelligent call back, universal queuing, call recording and now, of course, integration of multiple communication channels to provide customer engagements across all platforms.
For agents making outbound calls, technologies such as predictive dialer – automatically dial from a contact list, campaign management systems and email response management software helps in increasing productivity.
System Integrations
With services like CCaaS, contact centers can access a wider level of integration across the organization. From integrating existing knowledge database (comprising customer profiles, call histories, buying trends, etc.) to business CRM software – access to a plethora of information allows agents to serve customers better and faster. CCaaS also facilitates secure online payments via integration with bank websites and bank mobile applications.
Quality check and Admin Control
Call monitoring and call quality control has now been enhanced by adding new systems such as an administrative control dashboard with a range of web supervisory features from silent monitoring to whisper coaching. Supervisors can now observe and step into help agents and prevent unpleasant experiences.
Analytics
With the explosion in Internet usage, data analytics tools are becoming more and more refined and for predicting customer behavior, contact centers must also utilize analytical tools to better understand customer feedback and needs. While all contact centers use real-time reports & analytics to evaluate and improve agent performances, there is also a move towards incorporating speech, chat, and text analytics to identify customer needs.
Customer experience is all set to overtake product and price as the most vital component of the business strategy by 2020.
There is no doubt that with the rise of social media and increasing use of Internet, more choices have opened up for buyers and they have become more aware and better informed. Organizations are well aware of this and are investing more and more in gaining and retaining customers – along with enhancing the human interactions by providing the right training, integrating technology is the only way organizations can hope to handle the huge volume of multi-channel customer contacts, smartly while being cost-efficient.
Sify Technologies partners with Interxion Marseille to cater to the burgeoning demand in traffic between India and Europe
Chennai, 11 August 2017: Sify Technologies Limited (NASDAQ: SIFY), a leader in Telecom and Data Center centric IT services in India with global delivery capabilities in partnership with INTERXION HOLDING NV (NYSE: INXN), a leading provider of carrier and cloud-neutral colocation Data Center services in Europe, today announced the launch of its 7th network Point of Presence (PoP) at Interxion’s MRS1 Data Center in Marseille, France.
Sify’s network expansion to Marseille enhances its ability to provide very high availability network of mission-critical applications between Europe and its 9000+ Enterprise customers on the Indian sub-continent. In addition, Sify can now enable interconnect for their wholesale partners seeking state-of-the-art solutions to reach India from Marseille, Europe’s gateway to India, the Middle East and Africa. Sify now connects all the major global data-transit locations with these 7 PoPs.
“With four submarine cable systems from India landing directly in Marseille, it was the logical location for us to expand our network presence,” said Mark Ryder, Managing Director Europe, Sify. “The large and growing community of network and content providers available to partner with in Marseille accelerates our ability to cater to the burgeoning demands of our clients.”
“Sify will provide our customers with effective solutions to efficiently handle the large increase in content that is being exchanged between Europe and India,” said Mike Hollands, Director of Market Development and Strategy, Interxion. “Sify’s connectivity to 1500 cities and 45 Data Centers in India over a common data telecom infrastructure provides huge value to the community of interest present in our Marseille facility.”
Interxion Marseille is Europe’s telecommunications gateway to India, Asia, Middle East and Africa. With 13 submarine cable systems form these regions terminating in Marseille, the city has become a fast-growing interconnection hub. There are now 120 international and national network service providers, four Internet Exchanges and leading cloud and content providers using Interxion Marseille to interconnect and exchange Internet traffic and content with one another.
About Interxion
Interxion (NYSE: INXN) is a leading provider of carrier and cloud-neutral colocation Data Center services in Europe, serving a wide range of customers through 45 Data Centers in 11 European countries. Interxion’s uniformly designed, energy efficient Data Centers offer customers extensive security and uptime for their mission-critical applications. With over 600 connectivity providers, 21 European Internet exchanges, and most leading cloud and digital media platforms across its footprint, Interxion has created connectivity, cloud, content and finance hubs that foster growing customer communities of interest. For more information, please visit www.interxion.com.
About Sify Technologies
Sify Technologies Limited (NASDAQ NM: SIFY), is an acknowledged ICT leader in the Telecom and Data Center centric IT services space with global delivery capabilities. Among the very few Enterprise class player in India, Sify, today has presence in 1500 cities in India and in North America, United Kingdom and Singapore.
More than 9000 Enterprises access Sify’s IT services that’s focused on the Data Center and Cloud platform and connected through India’s largest MPLS network. As a truly converged ICT solutions and services provider, Sify is the preferred IT Services partner with a full suite of services ranging from Telecom connectivity services to Data Center transformation services along with Application and Security Services delivered on the same infrastructure.
Sify, Sify Technologies and www.sifycorp.com are registered trademarks of Sify Technologies Limited
For further information, please contact:
Mark Ryder
Operations – UK & Europe
(M) +447429169426
mark.ryder@sifycorp.com
Sify Technologies Limited
Praveen Krishna
Investor Relations & Public Relations
+91 44 22540777 (ext.2055)
praveen.krishna@sifycorp.com
20:20 Media
Nikhila Kesavan
+91 9840124036
nikhila.kesavan@2020msl.com
Grayling Investor Relations
Shiwei Yin
+1-646-284-9474
Shiwei.Yin@grayling.com
The trends and technologies shaping the future of Contact Centers
Contact Centers are in a state of constant evolution! With customer engagement rated as one of the most critical factors for the success of a product or service, businesses are striving to perfect the customer care scenario every single day. In this race to keep customer loyalty, companies are turning to technology to deliver exceptional customer service.
In the last couple of years, to keep up with the changing needs and behavior patterns of buyers, Contact Center technology has evolved considerably. We take a closer look at some of the latest trends in the field.
The trends and technologies shaping the future of Contact Centers
Digital Transformation of Customer Services
The digital way of working has now been fully embedded into the business operations of most companies. As newer technologies such as cloud, web based applications, mobility, and data analytics change the business landscape they also have an impact on how contact centers are operated. Adoption of these technologies, especially the move to cloud platforms, has resulted in altering the entire cycle of customer engagement – from dealing with the first client contact occurring across multiple channels to providing intelligent, data analysis backed the resolution to customer issues.
Omni channel Models
From traditional phone calls to social media messages – Customers are using a variety of communication channels to approach businesses. Needless to say, businesses are also turning to a more holistic customer engagement approach that uses unified Omni-channel communication models – bringing text, phone, chat, email, social, video calls, etc. under one umbrella – to provide a more personal and satisfying experience to the customer.
Analytics and Customer Satisfaction
To consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences, businesses need to consider more than the final resolution of the customer requirement; it is imperative to keep a check on the customer experience during the journey towards resolution and overall quality of the calls. This can be achieved by using analytical tools to improve the Contact Center operations. Customer care centers are using real time reports and monitoring solutions to keep a check on engagement quality and are also incorporating cutting edge analytical tools to study behavioral patterns in speech, text or chats to predict customer behavior.
Remote agents
With reliable web based communication tools and access to real time monitoring Contact Centers are now employing more and more remote agents; thereby efficiently managing different time zone requirements while reducing overhead costs.
Artificial Intelligence
AI, the latest buzzword in the IT landscape, is now being tested and incorporated in Call centers as well. AI algorithms are mainly being used to analyze call data and historical records to foretell customer behavior – producing dependable results in minutes, something that would have taken an analyst days to complete. AI technology is also being explored to place virtual call agents to handle some of the more repetitive and simpler customer interactions.
Going ahead, companies and consumers alike will be putting more and more emphasis on customer care as a brand differentiator rather than as a support function. Although recruiting and training agents form a vital part of call center operations; to stand out companies are exploring technology integrations to make their operations more efficient. And while technologies like Artificial Intelligence are still being developed and implemented, sophisticated cloud based offerings such as CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) are proven models, which bring an added level of productivity with enormous cost benefits to traditional Contact Centers.
As India’s leading fully converged ICT Company, Sify is using its decades of experience in network and Data Center services to present the most comprehensive Contact Center as a Service platform in India.
Our extensive expertise has allowed us to craft a service offering, which is highly flexible, scalable and future proof. Sify’s CCaaS provides all Contact Center applications under one umbrella-from branch connectivity and video conferencing to 100 % reliable voice calls. Delivered via the cloud, Sify’s CCaaS is a multi channel platform, which can easily meet the most exacting contact center requirements.
