With customer engagement having become critical to overall success, South African businesses are set to enjoy all the benefits of professional contact centre engagement with their markets, without needing dedicated contact centre premises, resources or upfront costs.
A new solution to be launched in South Africa on 1 February, O!Connect will offer the full range of advanced contact centre capabilities in a simple, 100% cloud model, from as little as R699 per agent per month.
Brought to market by contact centre specialist Ocular Technologies, O!Connect is based on a white label platform developed specifically for Ocular by global contact centre company Aspect Software.
Customised and enhanced for the local South African market, the core platform has been developed as a turnkey cloud contact centre solution with enterprise-grade capabilities. It has already been successfully deployed by numerous companies in the US and Europe.
Pommie Lutchman, CEO of Ocular Technologies, says O!Connect's model is a first for the continent. "O!Connect is hosted locally by Ocular in conjunction with Internet Solutions, so users need not be concerned about the massive data costs and potential latency issues that can impact cloud-based contact centres hosted internationally. This is particularly important when dealing with hosted VOIP platforms."
Lutchman says O!Connect levels the playing field for smaller contact centres and businesses that would not traditionally have a contact centre. While being supremely simple to initiate and manage, the solution is secure and reliable, and is billed monthly, with no need to be tied in to a contract - although annual- and multi-year discounts are available.
During February, potential customers can take advantage of a 30-day free trial, which they can set up online in minutes. Offering numerous levels of capability, a basic O!Connect package starts at R699 per user per month, with a premium package priced at R1 699 per user per month. This compares favourably with the upfront costs and resources needed to run a traditional contact centre, says Lutchman.
In addition to the cost benefits, O!Connect allows flexible movement between packages and upscaling or downscaling as needed, as well as support from Ocular's team of experts. While the majority of O!Connect customers are expected to be five- to 75-seat contact centres, Lutchman notes that O!Connect can accommodate up to 1 200 users on a single system and systems can be connected in a daisy chain to run even major call centres.
"For the first time in South Africa, it is simple and cost-effective for any business to have its own contact centre," says Lutchman. "This is particularly important for those in the services and retail sectors, and those who traditionally have no IT department or customer engagement tools. Think, for example, of panel beaters. If they don't answer their phone immediately - which they often do not - they quite simply lose a potential customer. Yet a panel beater would traditionally not have a contact centre. With O!Connect, they can enjoy all the enterprise-grade features of a professional contact centre - from IVR to multimedia and social media capabilities - at a low monthly cost. Social media interactions and calls can automatically be routed to a chosen number based anywhere, and the call can be treated as professionally as if the customer were engaging with a large enterprise contact centre."
Register for a free 30-day trial of O!Connect here: www.ocularcloud.com.
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