Solutions

Omni-Channel Contact Center in the cloud

Many companies are recognising the benefits of moving their contact centre infrastructure to the cloud to differentiate themselves from the competition through customer satisfaction and retention while controlling costs. The cloud enables more efficient delivery of modern and personalised services that meet customer preferences and requirements. It also offers advantages in terms of cost, reliability and flexibility.

2-steps-ahead relies on Genesys Cloud and Alvaria Cloud Contact Centre solutions designed to help organisations maximise the benefits of cloud technology. Genesys Cloud offers deployment options that enable organisations to implement state-of-the-art solutions without significant capital or IT investment. This allows for the integration of extensive cloud-based technologies for interaction management and voice-based inbound, outbound and blended interactions. The solution also provides complete redundancy and no single point of failure ensuring robust security.

The Genesys Cloud Contact Centre solution is a flexible and easy-to-deploy option with inbound, outbound, hybrid and multi-channel capabilities. It integrates with our omnichannel self-service and provides user-friendly desktops for agents and team leaders. It also offers CRM integration analytics and many other features with a flexible all-in-one pricing model and the reliability of cloud technology.

2-steps-ahead provides a custom-designed cloud-based contact centre solution. Our principle software and services are all sourced from a single provider so that you can focus on your business. The benefits of our solution are compelling. Until recently organisations considered on-premise systems the standard. However, hosted voice application services emerged with VoIP approximately ten years ago. As broadband networks became widespread in recent years cloud-based applications proved effective. A modern cloud contact centre offers significant advantages over outdated on-premise solutions.

  • Cloud Reliability Because it’s built on the Genesys / Alvaria Cloud, their geographically dispersed data centers ensure your contact center is always up and running under the market-leading 100% uptime guarantee.
  • Always Up-to-date software: The software is always up-to-date eliminating downtime for planned or unplanned upgrades. The monthly price includes all maintenance and upgrade costs.
  • High availability: The cloud contact centre is hosted in geographically dispersed data centres.
  • Scalability: The contact centre can be expanded or scaled down to meet business needs. Such fluctuations can be seasonal in nature, depending on promotions or similar factors.
  • Multiple locations: Multiple connected contact centres are easy to deploy. Agents can be based in home offices or provide a customer service available around the clock („follow-the-sun“ model).
  • Predictable costs: All features are included in the monthly price. There is no need to plan for unexpected software or hardware updates or hardware replacement.
  • No long-term contract: There is no obligation to enter into a long-term contract. Customers do not have to commit to purchasing feature packages or agent quantities to support the Cloud Contact Centre. Additional features can be booked or cancelled in real time. Additionally, CFOs value cloud solutions because all costs can be treated as operating expenses.

“If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got”
(Henry Ford)

Communication between contact center and customer is generally via various digital channels nowadays. In the final analysis, what is decisive for the definition of a contact center is who establishes contact with whom.

If contact comes from “outside“ we refer to an ”inbound contact center“. If, on the other hand, contact is initiated from within the contact center, then we refer to an “outbound contact center“.

In-depth customer contacts mainly relate to:

  • one-to-one consultancy services (e.g. telephone tariffs),
  • product purchases (e.g. concert tickets),
  • queries regarding the last bill,
  • technical help in connection with equipment,
  • or numerous other matters that may give rise to customers wishing to contact a staff member
    of the company.

An increasing number of companies with inbound contact centers are also interested in proactive customer services in order to also use their contact centers for cross-selling and upselling purposes.

With this in mind 2-steps-ahead consulting specializes in the application of modern IVR systems in order to pre-classify customer queries before contact with the agency is made via DTMF or speech input. This pre-classification ensures that the customer is connected with the agent who is best qualified to help him. This results in more questions being processed with one single call, and customer satisfaction increasing noticeably. Not to mention the fact that consequently you increase agent availability and, at the same time, reduce the total volume of calls in your contact center.

In the case of outbound contact centers it is the company employees themselves who call the customers, for example to:

  • inform the customer that an ordered product has arrived,
  • remind them that an invoice is still outstanding,
  • perform a customer survey about the last auto repair visit,
  • confirmation of a transaction, i.e. confirmation of an online banking transaction
  • or merely because the customer has asked to be called back.

Outbound contact centers are mainly geared to telephone contacts, on the one hand because that is the traditional form of establishing contact and, on the other hand, because it still remains the normal procedure.

Most companies nowadays call their customers, only a minority send personal emails. Usually only promotional mails are sent by email as mass advertising, and many customers ban unexpected mails straight to the recycle bin as spam, while an unexpected phone call is more likely to arouse interest.

2-steps-ahead consulting offers various solutions in order to conduct outbound calls automatically with speech dialog systems. This means that in most cases these phone calls take place without agency contact, but it can be established anytime if the customer wishes. Besides the telephone channel also other media such as mobile web or chat are possible. In these cases the customer will be informed by a text message about this possibility, The customer then determines itself when and on which channel he/she wants to communicate.

2-steps-ahead consulting helps you set up your call center for future needs and to open up new communication paths. In close cooperation with you we draw up a concept of the vital steps to be taken towards setting up a modern contact center in place of a traditional call center.

A typical approach in this process is to migrate your existing system to a modern multi-channel system, such as, for example Voxeo CXP, so that additional channels such as web or instant messaging can be offered in the next stage.

In traditional contact centers the entire interaction between customer and center goes via personal contact with the agent.

Self-service centers, on the other hand, shift a high percentage of this work to automatic dialog systems such as IVR – interactive voice response. This changeover results in enormous cost savings and also speeds up response to customer queries. In this context there is often the term “Zero Distance”.

Zero Distance ” shortens the distance between customers and companies. It will be an integration and digitization of the front-end and back-end systems to provide “Automated Self-Services”. The informed and connected customer wants relatively promptly and quickly communicate with the company. “Zero Distance” ultimately shortens dialogues and the communication with the customers.

Nowadays a customer is a mobile client, which is well informed with a corresponding expectation. In this expectation, it is essentially a question: “I always want everything immediately and everywhere.” That is the principle. Companies need to adapt to this behavior accordingly and provide for services that can adequately communicate with the client. And those companies who do not will get into hard times.

Self-service systems are the answers to provide “Zero Distance”, they prompt customers to answer a few questions by giving a verbal answer, by pressing the relevant keys on the pad or by clicking the relevant hyperlink in a web application. Instant messaging is also an option. Each answer brings the customer closer to the information they are looking for. Such systems are being increasingly installed and are experiencing an ever higher degree of acceptance among customers.

The benefits for the customers are obvious. These systems are specifically designed to process customer queries twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and even at peak times there is no shortfall resulting in a customer having to wait for a reply.

Typical application areas are the provision of simple information such as

  • account balances,
  • addresses,
  • opening hours or
  • procedure instructions.

But such systems are already capable of processing more complex transactions that go beyond mere information retrieval.

Examples of this are:

  • online banking,
  • changing tariff options for mobile phones
  • transmitting meter count readings
  • reserving cinema tickets.

2–steps–ahead draws on years of experience in building and remodeling multichannel contactcenters in various industries. As a specialist in this area, we also offer a range of pre-finished industry solutions that can be adapted without much effort on your needs.

Your local call centre has served you well. However, yesterday’s systems are not designed to meet the ever-changing customer expectations. Moving away from your existing technology does not have to be daunting. With the right guidance, navigating the migration process becomes easier and more predictable with significantly reduced risk and a faster time to business value.

Our cloud migration services enable a smooth transition to a cloud contact centre to enhance the efficiency, scalability and security of your applications and workloads. This process is applicable whether you wish to migrate data from an on-premise environment or from another cloud provider.

Given that a cloud migration directly impacts your company data and applications, we begin with a comprehensive assessment of your existing IT infrastructure. We analyse your workloads and develop a bespoke solution design that aligns with your objectives and organisational structures. We provide reliable support from the inventory to the holistic migration planning and the actual migration, regardless of whether you intend to completely rebuild your infrastructure as part of the migration or replicate your proven infrastructure 1:1 in the cloud.

A Visual Interface for your IVR

Voice IVR’s have inherent limitations, and, let’s face it, your customers don’t really love them. Endless menu trees, confusing options, poor voice recognition and limited ability to collect information (Just try entering an email address using touchtones…) the visual IVR displays the choices (menus) and the retrieved information visually on a smartphone or tablet.

In comparison to the auditory communication of information that is usually done sequentially and therefore always requires a memorization of the announced information, the visual representation of all  information provides crucial advantages:

  • All information can be obtained at a glance, you can see all choices compared to each other. Now your customers simply touch their way through your IVR, with the ability to enter complex data and easily go back and choose different options.
  • More complex infomration can be presented graphically preprocessed for better information transmission.
  • Also more complex user inputs are possible using a visual IVR, one thinks, for example, to the input of addresses.
  • Of course, the contact to an agent is also possible in a visual IVR as well, either through chat or by establishing a phone connection.

A visual IVR initially requires no telephony infrastructure, communication is done using the HTTP protocol. That’s an important fact, compared to the conventional IVR, the visual IVR provides a significantly cost saving potential. The telephony infrastructure is then only needed for establishing a call connection to an agent if required, but not already for the operation of the IVR itself.

We also support companys in turning their Voice IVR into a visual IVR or just extend the exisitng Voice IVR by the visual representation of their IVR. The new graphical interface then intergates seamlessly into the exisiting IVR infrastructure.

A visual IVR is used both in inbound and outbound contact centers as well as in self-service application. 2-steps-ahead will help you to create an appropriate and consistent concept for you that is exactly tailored to your requirements in order to realize your goals to please your customers efficiently.

Your website gets a virtual assistant that is a lifelike, conversational agent providing a unique, interactive, and personal way for users to get answers and assistance on your website, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A user simply chats with the virtual assistant (or chatbot) which acts as a guide, taking customers on a tour of the website, providing answers, guiding them in their shopping decisions, and seamlessly escalating to agent-assisted channels when necessary. The virtual assistant provides the frontline support so your customer service staff can concentrate on more complex tasks and individual advising.

Features

  • Brand-aligned avatar-based chatbot
  • Natural Language Understanding (Text-NLU) capability
  • Connecting Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Seamless, context-full escalation to assisted channels

Integrated Internet Solutions

Beside call centers, webseits are generally known as one ot the most important customer Touchpoints, but many websites are often impersonal advertising spaces merely for the purpose of corporate presentation.

But the fact remains that the Internet is one of the most important communication and marketing channels for successful companies. The number of online purchases continues to increase steadily.

But is it still enough to just leave customers to themselves to deal with their requests?

If we put any thought to this matter we will quickly come to the conclusion that customers often cannot cope with the quantity of information and options, and they merely disappear from the website after yet another click.

Product and services diversity increases steadily with the result that customer-relevant information can no longer be produced in a simple and clear manner – just think of the numerous number of tariffs offered by different mobile phone service providers.

It will be helpful here to deploy support systems that are capable of giving customers practical assistance. Our solutions go beyond this – they make it possible to enter into dialog with a competent adviser straight from the website, either via instant messaging or a direct call from the website to an adviser in the contact center.

This enables customers to have their questions answered while they are still using the website, without having to change to another method of communication.

And for your company it means that completely new performance potentials unfold. The Internet and contact centers continue to grow together. Synergies develop, whereby customer satisfaction, and consequently also the degree of market penetration of your company, will expand significantly, and at the same time you always have direct feedback on the design of your website. Such feedback serves as a basis on which to regularly optimize the structure and services offered on the Internet.

2-steps-ahead offers consultancy services for the concept and development of new interactive websites. In addition to designing and installing a completely new website we can also upgrade and develop your existing website to a solution integrated into your contact center. Engage customers with dynamic offers and real-time web assistance using video, text chat, click to call, and cobrowse. Conference in experts, transfer sessions, and whisper to enhance collaboration.