As organisations come to terms with the new normal, they’re moving on from the rapid response challenge of continuing to operate and working out how to sustain efficiency and customer service over a longer period in which workers that normally would be in offices are working from home. The base level unified communications (UC) apps have done an excellent job of keeping colleagues and customers connected but they only go some of the way to providing the tools needed for the services customers expect.
“UC solutions such as Microsoft Teams don’t have the contact and call centre functions and facilities – they’re just not there,” confirmed Saif Ahmed, a director at SCB Global. “Teams was initially designed to get a few people together as opposed to enabling an individual to handle inbound flows of calls that need to be monitored, tracked and made more efficient for hundreds of people. Normal call centre solution features such as queueing of callers, compliant call recording and ways to route calls to the appropriate person are also not present.”
Ahmed added that another important missing capability is transcription of calls. With more and more contracts taking place over phones, it’s important that the contract is recorded. However, it’s cumbersome to pick the important contract conversation and confirmation from the call. A transcript means the contract can be simply sent on to the customer so all parties have the agreement to refer to in case of later dispute or improved business efficiency.
Teams doesn’t have this capability so SCB Global has developed three major improvements to help organisations that implement Teams to access all the usual call centre and other functionalities. These are all part of the company’s OPTO4Teams and OPTO4Contact offering and comprise the call centre features, compliant call recording capability and worldwide inbound number solutions plus reduced call packages to international destinations.
The additional contact centre features enable an omni-channel experience for the agent to receive messages in WhatsApp, SMS, other social media, SMS, email and deal with them all within Teams as opposed to having to use a separate systems.
OPTO4Teams also supports not only basic call recording functionality but offers the associated artificial intelligence-enabled capabilities to enable features such as queueing, routing and transcription.