Telephony vendor, INOVO has partnered with Verint to make workforce optimisation (WFO) tools available to African contact centres.
The significance of the partnership, according to Wynand Smit, CEO of INOVO, is that both services will be available as a hosted, opex-based model, which will lower the barrier of entry for SMEs by avoiding significant initial capital costs.
INOVO is Verint's first African partner for the hosted, opex WFO model.
Smit says WFO is an essential tool for call centres because many call centres have streams of disparate information that are not analysed to provide useful information for business decisions.
"The difference between perception and reality in contact centres is huge, and customer-centricity can only be achieved if we have business and customer intelligence rolled up into analytics and modelling."
He adds that a good WFO tool must take quality, customer feedback, and workforce management, and bring it all into a single analytics engine. "It shows you exactly what's going on, so you can see the impact, and go and effect the change."
It is vital for the technology and operations in call centres to keep up with customer expectations, notes Smit, adding that customers expect a higher level of service, and they expect it on multiple media, including e-mail, social media, Web chat, and SMS. "The trend, in terms of technology, is bringing everything together."
Call centres must mature by becoming totally client-centric, says Smit, ensuring that all decisions are made based on customer feedback. "The majority of SA's contact centres are sitting towards the lower end of the scale in terms of maturity and, in order to move up the scale, they must invest in solutions that provide them with actionable business intelligence to implement operational improvements, improve customer service and first-call resolution, and reduce the cost of operations."
Going hosted
In SA, 78.9% of contact centres have below 100 seats, and 89.8% have below 250 seats, making solutions for smaller call centres essential, according to Smit. Access to technology is a struggle in the small local market, explains Smit. "Because our market is smaller, technical and commercial models developed abroad are not readily applicable to us, so the market has been struggling to invest in the technology they need."
A further difficulty, he explains, is the long delivery time on installation projects, with the time taken to deploy solutions and extend existing technology preventing swift adaptation to call centre needs.
The solution, according to Smit, is to move to a hosted model. "Where five years ago, nobody asked for hosted, now everybody at the very least asks - awareness is very big." The hosted model reduces the time to market, and the opex model avoids the problem of initial capital outlay. Skills can then be supplied on a consulting basis, and systems can be extended easily. "Once deployed, adding more functionality is more a licensing exercise than anything else," adds Smit.
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