OMG! Contact Centres are going OTT !

by James Radford – Product Manager Natterbox

Non cloud contact centres are falling behind the curve.

The 2016 Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report provides some interesting insights into Contact Centre trends such as the fact that over 60% are now planning for the cloud which is surprisingly low given the rate of adoption of cloud technology in general. The “Rightscale Cloud Computing Trends: 2016 State of the Cloud Survey” states that 95% of respondents are using cloud.

So why do Contact Centres seem to be behind the curve?

Barriers to cloud adoption

Although organisations are becoming much more accepting of cloud technology some commentators cite lack of resource and expertise supplanting concerns about security as key inhibitors for adoption.  At Natterbox we have observed that in the context of Contact Centre it’s often capital investment in legacy infrastructure such as on-premise PBX and telephone hardware that holds an organisation back from adopting new technology.

Incompatibilities between legacy telecoms and new Virtual Contact Centre services causes reluctance to upgrade, causing many to miss out on the significant benefits the cloud can offer.

For example; if a business is in the market for a new CRM system they are more likely to adopt a Cloud based CRM like Salesforce.com or Service Cloud, particularly if they are planning on operating across multiple geographies.  However, if they want to leverage their existing on premise phone system they may face a number of compatibility, deployment and operational challenges.

CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) deployed either as a software client or browser plug in can be temperamental about browser versions and can be buggy burdening your IT staff with support tickets.  From an operational perspective unifying a contact centre across different office telephone systems or including mobile workers is also problematic if not impossible in many cases.

In the end, it all comes down to having operational standards that allow you to achieve business goals. According to a study by DialogTech, 15% of callers will wait less than one minute before they hang up.

Over The Top Contact Centre Solution lets the cloud come to you

However for customers who want to user their existing PBX the challenge is effectively extending all the features of cloud telephony to their legacy telephone systems.

Fortunately, this can be achieved via Natterbox Over the Top Contact Centre solution providing all the customer service and productivity benefits on their existing telephone systems such as Call Queues, Intelligent Call Routing, Dynamic IVR, Salesforce Integrated CTI providing Click to Dial and Contact Record (screen) Pop.  Also including Call Recording, Contact Centre Wallboards and over 120 pre-configured reports available from within Salesforce.com.

So how is this possible? There are multiple ways of achieving the implementation with varying degrees of complexity depending on the customers set-up however in essence what Natterbox is doing is moving your call queues and IVR into the cloud.  This allows us to determine where the call should go in the cloud according to your business policies ahead of call distribution.

You can learn more about the detail here in our solution whitepaper or just call us. We love to talk!