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Time for contact centre change: making a case for the cloud


Johannesburg, 15 Aug 2017

It was announced earlier in July this year that, following its application for Section 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2017, Avaya's global support for many of its products ends in 2018.

"This announcement leaves numerous companies in a dilemma as they have invested in technology that essentially will have no feature enhancements or support into the future. However, Avaya customers need not feel obligated to stay with on-premises Avaya solutions that will inevitably lead to additional costs, that is, buying new and or additional hardware and software. The current technology options are wide and choices will need to be made carefully to fulfil the unique and complex requirements of each contact centre," comments Ebrahim Dinat, COO of South African customer experience solutions provider Ocular Technologies.

Dinat further says Ocular Technologies is passionate about customer engagement, and Avaya customers are given an excellent and proven path of moving their contact centre fully and seamlessly from an on-premises solution into the cloud.

When cost factor comes into play

"Moving to the cloud becomes viable when legacy on-premises customers need to upgrade and purchase new hardware and software in order to gain new functionality to improve the customer experience," Dinat highlights.

"Customers also have the option of staying on-premises and adding the required functionality in the cloud when needed. We find that customers stay with their on-premises with voice, but that they add e-mail, chat, dialling functionality in the cloud, as this can be done without unnecessary expenditure for hardware/software and lengthy project timelines. On-premises and cloud solutions are both in operation and are suited to different organisations of different sizes and requirements."

Dinat also acknowledges the outlay of funds on current on-premises solutions was without a doubt quite substantial, and it may be an issue to justify spending otherwise scarce budgets on yet another costly solution that requires additional support and expensive resources to maintain.

"This makes a true cloud solution a far better option due to there being no requirement for capital outlay of funds for hardware, while possibly still being able to leverage off economies of scale and other supported infrastructure in place. There is no need to worry about upgrades, system patches or any system administration as this is provided by the vendor, in this case, Ocular Technologies, as part of the subscription. System updates are scheduled and completed with little or no downtime to customers and at zero cost. And finally, new features and functionalities are rolled out as released, with no additional cost to the base subscription."

Legacy systems falls short when it comes to customer experience

In order to fully move into the cloud, Dinat recommends a few pertinent issues that current Avaya customers should keep in mind. He says: "At Ocular Technologies, we would recommend a complete transition into the cloud, as the legacy Avaya systems lack the required system functionality and integration capabilities (without a large-scale, forklift upgrade or platform replacement being implemented first) to provide an improved customer experience while at the same time reducing overall operational costs. When assessing possible alternatives, the top three considerations when choosing a cloud solution would be: the provision of a complete omni-channel customer experience serviced and managed entirely in the cloud; the ability for customers to self-service and to get the required information without the need to chat to a physical, warm-bodied agent; and the importance to have full compliance by ensuring that calls that are recorded are both secure and encrypted - adding a secure layer for authentication to access these calls when required.

"Ocular Technologies has successfully moved a number of clients away from their on-premises solutions into the cloud. And, the moves have been both simple and painless. Due to the drastically shortened implementation times (weeks rather than months), newly on-boarded cloud customers have additionally received enhanced functionality, including the omni-channel and self-service IVR, technologies that are fully integrated to provide a seamless customer interaction. The change has allowed our clients to fully focus on running their business, leaving the technology challenges to us, the specialists. We also provide the necessary business consultants who assess and redesign customer interaction processes in synergy with the newer technology being adopted. The cloud platform must ensure that complete business intelligence and reporting capabilities are available to customers," concludes Dinat.

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Ocular Technologies

Ocular Technologies is a specialist customer engagement and digital experience solutions provider with a unique set of individuals that are experts in understanding, managing and ultimately ensuring an optimal customer experience. With a vision of being regarded as an internationally respected leader in the customer engagement market, Ocular Technologies strives to have its customers appear as heroes in the eyes of its customers.

With over 13 years' experience in the customer contact life cycle space, the team at Ocular creates quantifiable business impact through intelligent interaction management, robotic process automation, natural language processing and cognitive analysis and design.

Drawing from a focused selection of best-of-breed technologies and methodologies, Ocular is uniquely positioned to offer everything from strategy and planning, through implementation and delivery, all the way to enablement and operations. As a 100% black-owned, level 1 B-BBEE contributor, Ocular has the added advantage of offering a preferential procurement level of 135%.

www.oculartechnologies.com

Editorial contacts

Debbie Sielemann
icomm
(084) 414 4633
debbie@pr.co.za
Ebrahim Dinat
Ocular Technologies
(011) 589 3200
sales@oculartechnologies.com