Interactive intelligence yesterday unveiled a customer engagement cloud service that it said will help contact centres throughout South Africa improve customer service and engagement.
According to Interactive Intelligence, PureCloud which runs on top of Amazon Web Services, offers contact centres accelerated business impact, more consistent outcomes, and the most innovative customer and agent experience.
The way contact centres are delivering customer service today is being disrupted by technology, says Deon Scheepers, strategic consultant at Interactive Intelligence. It is becoming harder for contact centres to keep up with customer demands using old contact centre technology, adds Scheepers.
"It is becoming challenging to be agile and flexible and monitor all the channels customers are using to engage in.
"We realised the world is changing and customers are changing, our organisations are looking for something that can disrupt the market."
Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, said the way to be ready for disruption is to embrace the cloud.
Without utilising algorithms, analytics, and processing power which the cloud makes possible, it will not be possible to service demands from millions of people all at the same time, he added.
The scale of customer demands requires communication channels that are flexible, capable and can handle capacity, noted Goldstuck.
Andre le Roux, Interactive Intelligence managing director, said PureCloud was built from the inside out with the most stringent security requirements in mind.
It also addresses contact centre pain points such as high costs, lack of scalability, and difficulty managing geographically dispersed remote sites, he added.
While cloud solutions have matured quickly, many organisations are still concerned about security, said Goldstuck.
"It's important to understand that cloud architectures differ quite a bit, and these differences have important security implications.
As organisations evaluate their cloud options, they should assess a vendor's security certifications, access management controls, encryption, and intrusion testing protocols."
With careful assessment, organisations will find that in many instances modern cloud solutions are more secure than on-premises solutions, said Goldstuck.
Combined with month-to-month subscription terms, these cloud solutions can give organisations an incredibly flexible, low-risk, high-value option, he added.
According to Goldstuck, the contact centre of the future will become driven by smart phone, apps and the needs of the user rather than what the technology limits the user to do.
"It will be cloud-centred, otherwise you won't have the flexibility and capability without embracing the cloud. It will be truly omni-channel in that it will allow people to interact with whatever mechanism they have at their disposal."
Therefore agents will need tools at their disposal that is made possible with by the cloud and analytics and be empowered through using these tools, said Goldstuck.
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