Ever since the contact centre began, companies have been looking for ways to streamline and improve the customer experience. The less time an agent spends on a call, the more efficient a contact centre becomes. Combine that with the fact that experience is the most important differentiator in the modern world, and it's easy to see why the call centre discussion is so important.
For almost eighteen years now, the Customer Contact Week event has been looking at the latest technology and innovations in the customer service space to support companies around the globe. I was lucky enough to physically attend the event at Las Vegas this year, alongside thousands of other attendees looking for ways to boost their contact centre solution. While I was there, I caught up with Joe White, the CTO of Brightlink - a leading solution provider and carrier that enables contact centers with voice, data and messaging capabilities.
Tell Us About Brightlink - What Can You Do?
As mentioned above, Brightlink is a communications solution provider that also offers a leading data messaging network and voice platform. This is a company that aims to offer customers a true and immersive alternative to using some of the bigger traditional carriers for voice and messaging, whose offerings don't include the same level of rich features and quality of service. For instance, Joe told me that Brightlink has a product called "LiveView®,” which allows people to look at the traffic in their network as another set of key data points for optimising their contact center operations around call quality and delivery.
"We give our customers a chance to look at the traffic inside our network, see the trends that are happening over time that may impact the customer experience - any instances of packet loss, and if there's something they might need to change. Customers can even set specific alerts."
When Brightlink was founded in 2009, it began as a traditional wholesale carrier, designed to support other large carriers in the space. However, the company quickly began to scale, and grow a network that's still expanding in the US. "We also plan on building a data centre in London this year, and we're moving into APAC in 2019."
Tell us About Your Messaging Option
Brightlink has a diverse range of top tier customers all the way from carriers to enterprises, and its offerings range from SIP Trunking to applications and services built on their leading IP-based platform, such as messaging. Brightlink is also unique in that its communication service offerings are designed for turnkey delivery either direct to customers or via channels.
"We're thinking about how channel partners can sell these products from the inception of development. They can use the SIP trunk, or they can use our hosted PBX platform."
Essentially, Brightlink provides their hosted PBX as a unique and simple UCaaS offering: "We're giving customers a frictionless way to move into the /unified-communications/ucaas space. Resellers can now have a product to offer when bidding on a customer’s voice environment without having to bring someone else in."
What Are you Showing at CCW Right Now?
While Brightlink were clearly demonstrating their entire range of capabilities at CCW, the particular focus was on the LiveView solution, the contact center platform, and the embedded voice origination and messaging capabilities that can be a complement to any contact centre solution, such as the 8xx NumberView solution, Joe told me: In addition to being able to manage contact center interactions,
"We think it's really important for contact centres to understand what's happening with their calls, why people are dropping out of queues and things like that. We want to make sure that the customer knows exactly what's happening."
Also important is the ability to enable a more holistic omnichannel experience with 8xx numbers and messaging.