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 launched at the start of February in South Africa, O!Connect will offer the full range of advanced contact centre capabilities in a simple, 100% cloud model.
Brought to market by local 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.
"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."
Get a free trial and learn more about Ocular Technologies' O!Connect solution.
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