The 5 Best Contact Center Technology Solution Providers - 2021 by The Enterprise World

WWW.THEENTERPRISEWORLD.COM | AMERICA EDITION | DECEMBER 2021

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Offering Reliable CRM Integration Solutions

From Editor’s Desk “If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out all right.” -Jeff Bezos

ontact Center technology services are becoming a major inflection point, especially since the advent of digital transformation in companies. These services prove to be a major resource to companies and enable them to have superior customer relations and support. As it is rightly said, ‘Customer is King’ and if you treat them right, they will never leave your side! This issue of The Enterprise World, The 5 Best Contact Center Technology Solution Providers 2021, features some of the leading names in the Contact Center technology domain. These companies have proved their mettle and come highly acclaimed in the industry. Not only are their services highly sought-after, but it is also their innovation and dedication towards enabling their clients that sets them apart. Featured on the cover story is CCT Solutions. The company was founded to provide an omnichannel contact center solution provider & system integrator with the ability to provide unified handling of multiple customer interaction channels – voice, email, chat, SMS/text, IM, callback from the queue, or a call request from the website and social media – all integrated with one or more CRM or custom business applications. Uwe Kreuter, CEO of CCT Solutions has been leading the company since he has more than 25 years of experience in contact center and Unified Communications technologies. They have also launched new innovative services, read on to know more! Learn more about Anywhere365 and its services which are designed to natively integrate with Microsoft Teams and empower businesses to interact with customers across any channel, from anywhere and at any time. In early 2021, Microsoft’s Connected Contact Centers program recognized Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud as the first solution of its type for Microsoft Teams. There is a lot more to read inside. Happy Reading!

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Adeeb Malik

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For Editorial Concerns: editor@theentetpriseworld.com For Sales & Branding Enquiries: sales@theenterpriseworld.com For Subscription: info@theenterpriseworld.com Publisher The Enterprise World Creative Content Editor Shalmali | Adeeb Marketing Coordinator(USA) Peter J. PR & Marketing Coordinator James H. Business Development Executive Ginny Creative Design Head: Sushant K. Social Media Manager Narendra S. Digital Circulation Manager Amanda V.

This list is NOT a ranking. The companies on listed in magazine serve different aspects of the market, making ranking them in any order except revenue impossible and unfair. We try to bring a perfect platform for business organization to showcase their valued products/ services. Copyrights © The Enterprise World | 2019. All Rights Reserved. The images and content included in this magazine should not be copied, transferred or reproduced in any form or by any means, electronics, mechanical, photocopying, recording, otherwise, without proper permission from The Enterprise World. The Enterprise World solely owns all the reprint rights.

Leaders in Spotlight

This issue of The Enterprise World, The 5 Best Contact Center Technology Solution Providers - 2021 features In today’s business world, where fast and efficient rule the market, Contact Center technology services prove to be extremely resourceful and important. As the world is pushing towards digital transformation, these services become even more crucial for companies to have a solid and supportive user experience. Featured in this edition are some of the leading companies in the Contact Center technology domain. They are some of the most innovative names, providing services that offer end-to-end support and exhaustive customizations. Their vision, innovation, and mission revolve around providing soughtafter services with a promise of trust and reliability. Featured on the cover story is CCT Solutions. The company was founded to provide an omnichannel contact center solution provider & system integrator with the ability to provide unified handling of multiple customer interaction channels – voice, email, chat, SMS/text, IM, callback from the queue, or a call request from the website and social media – all integrated with one or more CRM or custom business applications. Uwe Kreuter, CEO of CCT Solutions has been leading the company since he has more than 25 years of experience in contact center and Unified Communications technologies. They have also launched new innovative services, read on to know more!

Learn more about Anywhere365 and its services which are designed to natively integrate with Microsoft Teams and empower businesses to interact with customers across any channel, from anywhere and at any time. In early 2021, Microsoft’s Connected Contact Centers program recognized Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud as the first solution of its type for Microsoft Teams. Let’s understand what makes Call Journey renowned for being a CX/EX disruptor. The company has changed the way companies gained crucial insights into their customers and their employees. It has also partnered with global leading firms like Microsoft, SAS, and Genesys. The company’s passionate interaction experts have combined the best in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Acoustic Emotional AI to create an industry-leading analytics ecosystem. In our leadership talks, we had an insightful interview with Pedro Barboglio, Founder and CEO, Remote Team Solutions. Remote Team Solutions Focuses on Building Great Teams for Great Companies helping companies save more than 60% on employee wage and benefit costs while eliminating the time and resource burden of active employee management and reducing employee turnover rate.

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20. Anywhere365

COVER STORY

Offering Reliable CRM Integration Solutions

he integration of multiple enterprise communication tools — such as voice calling, video conferencing, instant messaging (IM), presence, content sharing, and so on — into a single, streamlined interface to improve user experience (UX) and productivity is known as unified communications (UC). Whether on a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, unified communications technology allows users to smoothly switch from one medium of communication to another within a single session. Someone might, for example, start a conversation via chat before elevating it to a video conference with a single click, rather than needing to open a new window. CCT Solutions was founded in order to provide an omnichannel contact center solution provider & system integrator with the ability to provide unified handling of multiple customer interaction channels – voice, email, chat, SMS/text, IM, callback from queue or a call request from website and social media – all integrated with one or more CRM or custom business applications. Uwe Kreuter, CEO of the company has been leading the company since he has more than 25 years of experience in contact center and Unified Communications technologies.

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Uwe Kreuter, CEO www.theenterpriseworld.com

COVER STORY About CCT Solutions The company has the ability to all customer interactions like inbound and outbound calling campaigns, web callbacks, callbacks from voice queues, web chat, callbacks scheduled by agents or customers, and outbound SMS campaigns. Therefore, it has launched a new range of services—ContactPro— the ability to manage and report on all customer interaction channels and to have that data merged with customer databases to identify trends and opportunities. This solution will prove beneficial to the customers since they will have more flexibility to interact with the organizations, they do business with, and this makes them more satisfied. Moreover, it will ensure that the CRM integration enables the agent to handle customer interactions more efficiently by providing screen pops, customer journey, and pre-built response templates and that leads to the end customer getting what they need more quickly, which is the primary variable customers use to measure customer service. CCT Solutions also provide its customers with virtual agents who thereby help them to assist customers and human customer service agent automatically and they can incorporate a video stream with cobrowsing and screen sharing to help improve the communication effectiveness. The company delivers an easy way to enhance its existing call center system investments by adding new interaction channels, blend outbound calling and callbacks, and integrated customer interactions with the CRM and business applications to all its clients. Notable Services Offered by CCT Solutions The CCT ContactPro is prone to increase customer satisfaction, agent efficiency, and profits as sometimes a voice calls are not possible or simply too expensive and thus customers today want other easy options on a computer or a mobile device to contact organizations. Thus, this solution is the best fit as it enables the organizations to offer email, video, webchat, SMS/text, and social media as interaction channels. Additionally, the organizations that use CCT ContactPro are known to integrate their CRM and business applications to provide real time data directed with screen pops to help agents be more efficient and which increases the efficiency to gain better results. CCT ContactPro makes sure that the customer journey information helps organizations to identify trends and opportunities because a detailed reporting of agent handling activities is a prerequisite for improvement. Uwe Kreuter said, “In times like COVID-19 where supporting a home office workforce is critical, having a multi-channel enabled contact center is critical to organizational flexibility. One of the biggest challenges for enabling work at home agents is the internet connection for some home offices is not suitable to a good quality voice connection for customer service. With a multi-channel enabled contact center, you

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could have those agents who have a limited voice connection be the ones handling none real-time contacts such as emails, webchats, SMS/text, and social media customer interactions. The needs for the agent and the agent desktop have risen as a result of globalization and new techniques of automating client conversation. Service personnel requires more context-related information and the ability to interact via many channels at the same time in order to fulfill consumers’ increasing expectations. The omnichannel architects at CCT ensure that the concept, configuration, and professional project implementation follow CC Solutions' high-quality standards. Lots of these projects rely on CCT ContactPro as an important component. It enables smart adoptions and provides the necessary information to the agent for optimal and efficient client engagement. Overcoming the Hurdles During the establishment of the company, CCT Solutions is known to have undergone some obstacles. Uwe put forth that incorporating IT infrastructure advancements like NoSQL databases, microservices, and cloud virtualization while adding new features and supporting existing customers is a balancing act that was a kind of challenge during the initial times. The company has attempting to blend in some of the new features to ensure that there are screen infrastructure improvements by keeping the software architecture similar. In addition to this, the company had to look for a new way of reporting data because analytics for multi-session handling of chat and email-based interactions presents a new set of reporting data that doesn’t exist for voice-only call centers. It was a bigger challenge as agents generally work on multiple contacts simultaneously and it becomes quite difficult to collect and report all of the appropriate timestamps to accurately calculate customer wait time, agent handle time, and customer response time. Uwe Kreuter: A Guiding Light and Mentor Mr. Kreuter is a graduate engineer of communication engineering and has advised numerous well-known companies in the field of strategy and technology for customer interaction management and has presented at numerous contact center conferences. He had the vision for the ContactPro omnichannel suite and has led the team to create a solution. On questioned about his leading his team, Uwe said he believes leadership is not simply management, the managers of the company need to plan, measure, monitor, coordinate, solve, hire, and do so many other things. He stated, “In CCT we always maintain a very fair and open ear environment for our employees, we guide them, and we help them to achieve their goals and results. In CCT we are successful to provide a positive work environment, each individual helps to create a personal development plan and this can have a very high impact on his personal goals and future work results.”

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COVER STORY Andrea Kreuter (CEO): Andrea is the co-founder and CEO of CCT Solutions and leads the project management implementation services for complex software integrations for contact centers. Andrea has more than 25 years of experience in setting up and operating multichannel, omnichannel and CRM solutions for medium and large companies, especially in the areas of voice, email, chat and IM messaging for contact centers. Before Andrea cofounded CCT, she gained experience in management positions at companies such as Avaya, NCR, Siemens Business Services, T-Systems and other leading providers of communication and CRM software.

Uwe Seiler, (Manager System Integration & Implementation): Uwe has more than 20 years of experience in building and running communications solutions for large enterprises, with a particular focus in the areas of voice communication and contact centers. He is leading CCT to build and operate integrated communication solutions based on Avaya Aura, Avaya IP Oﬃce, Nortel CS1000, RingCentral/ACO and other vendors. He is a long-time expert in CCT´s solutions and leads CCT`s system implementation team.

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Stefan Schneider (Director Product Management): Stefan is a startup member of CCT and leads the product management, as well as the development organization of CCT Software. He has more than 15 years of experience in building and operating multichannel and omnichannel solutions for medium and large enterprises, especially in the areas of voice, email, chat and IM messaging for contact centers. Stefan has many years of experience in customer interaction management solutions with companies such as Avaya, Twilio, Cognigy and Google CCAI software.

Stefan Kovacs (Vice President Sales & Marketing):

Stefan Kovacs has more than 25 years of experience in the communications and information technology industry, with a particular focus in the areas of multi-experience contact centers, workforce optimization and consulting around customer experience management. His experience with sales and management responsibilities includes leading technology companies such as Aspect, Avaya, Tieto (Consulting & IT and Product Engineering Services), Verint & NICE. Prior joining CCT, he was Regional Director Sales and Business Development for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at Teleopti.

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COVER STORY Jörg Ueberwolf (Manager Customer Service): Jörg has more than 30 years of experience in communications technology in the areas of UC and CC. He started his career in 1988 with an apprenticeship as a telecommunication electronics technician at the German Telekom, after which he obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering. In the course of his career, he gained in-depth knowledge of PBX systems from a wide range of manufacturers (Northern Telecom, DeTeWe, Siemens, Alcatel). He has been working with AVAYA products for more than 17 years, and for more than 12 of those years he has been working speciﬁcally in the area of customer service/helpdesk.

Daniel Homm (Director Solutions Engineering): Daniel has over 20 years of experience in the communications and information technology industry, with a particular focus on the multiexperience contact center sector. After his apprenticeship as a telecommunications electronics technician, Daniel gained in-depth knowledge of PBX systems from a wide range of manufacturers during the course of his career. Special emphasis was placed on the products of the manufacturer Avaya. For more than 12 years, Daniel has been a senior consultant to numerous well-known companies in the area of strategy and technology for customer interaction management. For more than 7 years he has been strengthening CCT and is now leading the Presales team. As Director Solutions Engineering he is also responsible for the product portfolio at CCT.

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Remarkable Achievements of CCT Solutions Avaya is the market leader in the contact center market with more agent seats than any other contact center system in the world and CCT was the Avaya 2019 Innovation Partner of the Year International and the 2015 Avaya Global DevConnect Partner of the Year. CCT ContactPro is a complementary add-on solution to Avaya contact center solutions and in recognition of that, Avaya carries CCT ContactPro parts on the Avaya parts list. Apart from that, CCT was also selected in 2017 by CIOReview as one of the 20 Most Promising Contact Center Technology Solution Providers. In 2019 CCT was selected as one of the top ten Contact Center solution providers by Industry wired. Pacing With the Changing Market Trends The company successfully serves large and medium-sized enterprise contact centers in several industry segments such as health care, logistics & transportations, telecoms, insurance, financial services, and manufacturing. However, most of the development of the new features and solutions is done jointly with its' customers to ensure the solutions provide exactly what the organizations are looking for as the company believes in listening to the customers. The engineering team of CCT Solutions has created a well-designed software architecture that allows for new feature development to occur rapidly and with high quality. Furthermore, the company's most strategic partnership is with Avaya, the leading contact center solution provider in the world. CCT is often brought in by Avaya to help its customers solve very challenging integration requirements. Uwe's Take on R&D The CEO of the company has anticipated a stronger move towards cloud-based contact center applications CCaaS. He stated, “The voice component of the ContactPro omnichannel solution, integration with cloud Unified Communication and CCaaS & CPaaS providers like Twilio, Ring Central, Nice CXOne ,Amazon, and Microsoft Azure are focused while continuing to support Avaya customers with onpremises and Avaya One Cloud CCaaS contact center systems.” Uwe considers that the evolution of NLP and AI to automate customer interactions will continue to evolve and be further integrated into the live agent experience to provide the best of both worlds – live agents with AI-based automated responses assisting those agents on sensitive and complex tasks. Thus, the company sees customer journey analytics and big data playing a bigger role in finding new opportunities.

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Streamlining Contact Centre Operations to Reduce the IT Costs

orking from home or other remote places has become the new normal for many individuals in the last 18 months as businesses across the world strive to adjust to guarantee they can stay operational while keeping their staff and customers safe throughout the epidemic. The first concern for many firms is to guarantee that their staff can continue to work productively, communicate and cooperate successfully with coworkers, and provide high-quality services and experiences to consumers.

To do this, businesses have moved away from legacy IT infrastructures and oﬃce-based phone systems and towards cloud-based enterprise communication and collaboration solutions like Microsoft Teams. This has allowed them to link everyone in the company to a single platform, allowing employees to easily communicate with one another as well as external partners and clients.

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Gijs Geurts , Founder & CEO

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Many businesses, however, continue to struggle to deliver seamless and efficient customer service. IT help desks are busier than ever and contact center personnel is spending more time dealing with time-consuming consumer concerns, diverting their attention away from higher-value duties. This is exacerbated by the fact that clients are difficult to please, seeking immediate responses and individualized services that feel suited to their unique wants and tastes. As a result, now is the moment for businesses to rethink how they handle client discussions, shifting them away from the conventional contact center and instead of directing them to anyone in the company is most qualified to handle them, whether it's in customer service, sales, IT, or the executive team. Gijs Geurts, Founder, and CEO of Anywhere365 founded the company and the services provided by the company are designed to natively integrate with Microsoft Teams and empower businesses to interact with customers across any channel, from anywhere and at any time.

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A Wide Array of Services In early 2021, Microsoft's Connected Contact Centers program recognized Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud as the first solution of its type for Microsoft Teams. The solution assesses and routes client inquiries from different channels to Microsoft Teams using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and Microsoft Azure. Routine client inquiries are handled by AI speech bots and chatbots, which may send more difficult inquiries to real customer care agents or knowledge workers if necessary. Call receivers are picked based on data from the customer relationship management system, as well as the abilities of the caller. Customers may be contacted by employees using any device, channel, location, or time zone. They also get contextual information about the caller, which allows them to tailor the service and rapidly handle the issue. Users may also make use of a variety of features and functions, including call recording, real-time translation, customer

interaction timelines, wallboards, and more. Instead of jumping between separate point solutions, they can access all of these features, as well as client data, from one page, saving time and money. This increases staff productivity and efficiency while also guaranteeing that firms can provide personalized services that meet or exceed client expectations. Furthermore, Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud monitors client interactions across all platforms, giving company executives a complete customer history as well as real-time reports to monitor service levels and assess customer happiness. The program is also ISO27001 certified, suggesting that it is safe and meets industry standards. Under the Leadership of Gijs Geurts Gijs believes in the motto, “Leadership is choosing your own path. We don't copy-paste philosophies and solutions from competitors, we create our own and change 'normals' in the market doing so. For example, our licensing model. We don't charge per agent, but rather per concurrent dialogue, optimizing flexibility for our customers.” Founded in 2009, Gijs has helped the company's clients to engage their customers effortlessly across any

communications channels, from any device, location, and any time. The employees of Anywhere365 work on more complex dialogues in order to ensure first contact resolution of any issues. Moreover, the team comes with solutions that enable not having to switch between different point solutions, which will result in faster call handling, saving costly time, and over-delivering to the customer's expectation. Key Achievements and Futuristic Approach Anywhere365 has rapidly grown since the inception of the company and has expanded its reach to Europe and North America. The adoption rates for its clients are noteworthy. The company believes in providing the ultimate and best solutions to its clients. The customers of Anywhere365 love the usability of its products and solutions. Generally, the clients belong to several and renowned international enterprises, including a couple of dozens of Fortune500 companies. When questioned about the essentiality of R&D, Gijs stated, “We continuously invest profits back in the development of new features, UI improvements, and data center resilience.”

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4 CONTACT CENTER TREND

he pandemic of COVID 19 brought the world to a standstill. All the industries and their work were halted suddenly. Every industry had its share of challenges they faced and had to overcome, but the call center industry was one among all that was posed with some unique challenges.

During the period of the pandemic, call centers started receiving high volumes of calls which became a little difficult to handle. Another challenge the contact centers faced was shifting their employees to remote locations, and for extended periods. A survey has stated that during the time of the pandemic, the number of difficult calls increased by as much as 50%. The reps working at call centers were not quite equipped with the kind of advanced technology that would automatically route the calls. This resulted in about 68% increase in escalations as the reps tried to deal with difficult customer calls with complaints. Due to the lack of automatic routing of calls, there was a 34% increase in hold times in the early phases of the pandemic.

Shifting to remote locations was all in itself a challenging task, but it was worsened by the unreliable internet connections and a lack of coherence with their teams and leads. The use of advanced hardware and software technologies in the call centers has enabled the support teams that have helped to cut down on many of the common call center issues. This use of technology has helped them to operate even more eﬃciently and have a proﬁtable business. The design of call center technology is such that, it provides automation support, customer relationship management, and also predictive analysis to the call center reps who are facing customers. With the deployment of the right technologies, your call canter can help provide customers not only gain a rich customer experience, but it can also increase your organizations' internal activity by reducing the operational overhead. As we step into the new year of 2022, the interactive voice response (IVR) and the analytics capabilities, which are

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DS TO LOOK OUT FOR traditional to the call center technology will remain a standard. But at the same time, newer technologies like AI and chatbots will help call center reps with more actionable information, made available easily without having to look for it. Here are a few technologies call centers are looking for in the year 2022, to make systems more efficient and productive. Artificial IntelligenceThere is no denying the fact that this technology age is here to stay, especially that of Artificial Intelligence. In 2022, call centers will be looking forward to innovative technology to standard issues for the organizations. With multiple benefits to the organization, AI will help call center reps reduce the need for manual call routing programming. This can help route calls of customers directly to the senior authority, and they can speak with the most qualified person. Another benefit of AI is that it can provide people with predictive responses during the flow of a conversation. With these multiple responses in front of the call center reps for clients, it becomes easier to solve the problem and handle the situation. AI also comes in handy, as this technology can help the call center employees to collect and analyze information of a customer across all channels, thus looking at a unified view of the customer. ChatbotsChatbots or also called conversational AI is a form of Artificial Intelligence that is capable of recognizing multiple languages, understanding what words are being said, and then deciding what path to choose to respond to the customers, in the most human way possible. With Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), these chatbots can recognize the intent of the customers in asking questions. These chatbots can help lessen the burden of call center employees by providing account updates, helping customers in various processes, taking payment updates, and much more.

Omnichannel IntegrationWith a wide base of customers, everyone is using different channels of communication, like the web, phone calls, text messages. If a customer is interacting with a company through one channel, they expect an inclusive experience when they tap from any other device. When a customer is associated with a company, they expect a personalized and more relevant experience, no matter how they choose to interact with the company. Omnichannel integration will help in achieving this goal, as they leverage the unified customer profiles across organizations. IVRCall centers have been using IVR technology for a long time now. It was one of the first-ever technology trends that were introduced to call center organizations. The pandemic of COVID 19 just pushed this technology forward, and the organizations already using it reported a tremendous increase in its use. When IVR is used in a combination with other technologies like AI and chatbots, the resultant is speech recognition and its ability to detect moods. This helps to deliver to its customers a fully personalized experience. Looking forward, the heavy use of technology in call center organizations will be the most beneficial to both the customers and the organizations. The call center executives will be able to know better about their customers, and would thus be able to properly assist and guide them in their problems. These technologies will make organizations ever more efficient and will also increase their effectiveness of it.

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Pedro Barboglio, Founder & CEO

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Focusing on Building and Stafﬁng Teams in A Better Way

edro Barboglio, Founder and CEO, Remote Team Solutions started the company in order to provide every aspect of virtual employee management, recruiting, and human resource functions to help companies start, scale, and run their remote team. The Enterprise World presents an interview of Pedro, Ÿ

Brief us about the company.

Remote Team Solutions Focuses on Building Great Teams for Great Companies helping companies save more than 60% on employee wage and benefit costs while eliminating the time and resource burden of active employee management and reducing employee turnover rate. Seeing how our USA clients from the other companies needed to hire big teams for their growing business, but didn't have the budget, time, or talent, we got together to try to see the way to help them. They wanted to offshore their teams, but they demanded the same time zone, same culture, and high-quality motivated talent with low turnover rate, and didn't want to have to fly for more than 15 hours in case they need to see their team or bring a team member to their offices. They wanted a company that would treat their staff like they would do. After several meetings and research, we decided that Mexico was the place to have their teams, and we

went on to try to ﬁnd a company that could do this for them. After a long search for the right company, we discover that none meet the demands; so, we decided to help them and start our own company, Remote Team Solutions. We started with just a few customers from our other businesses and quickly started growing. Ÿ

What are the key challenges you tackled while establishing the company?

In the beginning, our ﬁrst clients were a bit skeptical of nearshoring their staﬀ to a company in Mexico. Therefore, one of our key challenges was to become trustworthy for the USA clients. Ÿ

How have the company's graphs changed since the foundation?

We have been growing double digits each year. Ÿ

What are the products and services the company focuses on? How are your services diﬀerent from those in the market?

The main service is staffing; we help our clients build and staff their teams. Our differentiation is quality, service, and added value. We thrive on giving excellent service to our clients; each day, we see how we can add more value. We have an IT, HR, and

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Talent Develop department who work with our clients to make sure their staﬀ grows with them. We also staﬀ their team in our state-of-the-art facility. The quality of our talent is the best; we make sure they are motivated and happy working for the client. We tailor each service specially to our clients' needs and we can build the team our clients require not just IT, Virtual Assistant, etcetera; we have more than 100 positions. Ÿ

Please brief us about your professional experience.

International entrepreneur and chief executive officer with a demonstrated history of successes in different industries, including the service industry, IT, and food manufacturing. Founder / CEO of Remote Team Solutions; partner and board member of Comal Foods. Thirteen years' experience leading businesses and overseeing HR functions, hiring, and staffing processes. Advisor to NAFINSA, Member Social Council of Polytechnic University, and Investor of Rokk3r Labs. Selected “Businessperson of the year” by the LAQI Ÿ

How do you deﬁne leadership? How do you empower your workforce?

A leader empowers his or her team to grow and is there to help their team achieve the best results. The leader should always inspire conﬁdence and catalyze a clear and shared vision for the company and move his team to action. He needs to always listen to his team to understand their needs and get his team to do what must be done. To empower your team, you need to trust them and let them know that they can make mistakes; that is the most important thing. There should always be KPI or OKR in place and a shared vision so that the team knows precisely what is expected from them and let them act and take responsibility. Ÿ

What are the key achievements of your business journey?

One of our best achievements is being recommended by our own clients; many new clients come from referrals of our current clients, which means that they are delighted with our services. Other achievements

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are all the awards we have won; last year we won 10 awards from 6 diﬀerent companies Ÿ

What kind of clients do you serve, any special mentions?

We serve all kinds of clients in the USA and Canada. We have clients in the digital marketing area, fintech, law firms, IT companies, medical companies, production companies, and many more. Our clients range in all sizes. We have from a small office with one to two personas which we have a team of 1 in our offices, to big clients who we have a complete call Center or design team Ÿ

How do you keep up the pace with the changing market trends?

Our philosophy on this is always to keep improving and learning to become better each day. All the team is constantly learning via courses, reading, training, and going to seminars, which helps us keep up with the changing market trends. Ÿ

What are values and ethos do you encourage in the company as well as in your personal life?

Always give your best and never stop learning. Treat everyone like you would like them to treat you; treat your clients and co-workers as a family. Have fun while working. Some of our values and ethos are: ·

Obsession for Customer Service

Strive to be the best place to work.

Invent and Simplify

Learn and Be Curious

Always do your best and get things done. people thirst to do everything better every day.

Team player

Insist on the Highest Standards

Think Big

Earn Trust

Deliver Results

Never assume

Delivering an Interactive AI Platform with An Advanced Ecosystem

endors create contact centre platforms to help contact centres of diﬀerent sizes, shapes, and industries manage their operations. These platforms use cloud-based or on-premises services to give the best possible customer experience. Skills-based routing, intelligent routing, voice analytics, insights, and digital agents are among the most sought-after contact centre features. Many contact centre platforms also provide omnichannel features, which enable contact centres to go beyond traditional phone service and human agent assistance and promote and nurture consumer involvement. Customers may be supported across social media, text or SMS, video, email, audio, and voice over IP (VoIP) technologies using omnichannel technology, which can be integrated with other communication platforms. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other critical systems can be integrated with contact centre platforms to provide workforce management (WFM) and quality optimization.

Paul Humphrey, the CEO, and Co-Founder laid the foundation of Call Journey as he wanted to provide a platform that will help in delivering interactive AI to deepen and enrich the way that organizations understand their customers and people. The company is a global leading AI Speech analytics organization, with an advanced ecosystem – VoiceAI, that captures and analyses each and every conversation had with an organizations customer to produce nuanced insights in a simple, searchable, and actionable format, thereby helping organizations improve their customer experience, business performance, risk management, and compliance. Call Journey is renowned for being a CX/EX disruptor, that has helped in changing the way companies gained crucial insights into their customers and their employees. It has also partnered with global leading ﬁrms like Microsoft, SAS, and Genesys.

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Paul Humphrey , CEO & Co-Founder

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The Plethora of Services

Upsurge in the Graphs

The company's passionate interaction experts have combined the best in Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Acoustic Emotional AI in order to create an industry-leading analytics ecosystem.

During the establishment of the company, Call Journey did quite a few “soft trials” with customers to get real live feedback on our product and approach. It was during this research that it found out that almost all contact centres had common issues of gaining more eﬀective insights into their customer experience and to how well their agents were managing that experience. The feedback from all of the “trial” customers was indeed helpful as the company could successfully create eﬃcient services from the data and insights gathered from the trial conversations.

Voice AI is just one of the services offered that unlocks the critical intelligence from each and every customer interaction, producing nuanced insights in a simple, searchable, and actionable format and delivering value to organizations at various stages. With the help of the services offered by Call Journey, organizations can expect improved revenue generation, customer experience, risk management, and enhanced compliance management. Some of the other notable services offered by the company are: Ÿ

Intervention AI – Live Engagement: Intervention AI analyses calls in real-time providing enriched data streams at an utterance level, that can be used for agent prompting such as integration to knowledge base systems or triggers and alerts for management.

Speech AI & Conversation AI – Post Engagement: Speech AI transcribes speech-to-text leveraging the highest performing and most accurate interchangeable Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) engines available depending on region and dialect, enriching the data stream with enhanced call attributes. Conversation AI generates rules and ﬁlters that can be ﬂexibly applied with no practical limit allowing organizations to dissect the data for any use case.

Coherence Unstructured data is complex and diﬃcult to analyse. Call Journey's Coherence leverages a range of artiﬁcial intelligence and machine learning logic to create structure and neatly put the piece of the puzzle together deriving the reason for a customer contacting your organisation and the core topic discussed. Coherence organises the complexity of unstructured data to produce true insights.

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WordBench & Data Bridge – Data Visualisation: The key to analysing voice data is the preferred method of data visualization. As voice data has many interested parties – from contact centre leaders to senior management and data scientists, Call Journey provides complete ﬂexibility in the form of a proprietary cloud solution in addition to a BI connector tool and preconﬁgured templates for many common BI tools.

MM 2021 2021 December

Throughout the last few years, Call Journey has been tremendously grateful to enjoy significant customer growth. Thus, the customer numbers graphs of the company are up significantly and the coverage of almost all different industries represented in the fortune 500 space has accelerated significantly as well. Moreover, over the last couple of years, the volume of customers utilizing contact center conversation data outside of the contact center has also grown at a huge pace. Additionally, the graphs measuring customer measures (NPS and renewals) and employee engagement (EPS) have trended at a very high level. Paul Humphrey's Guidance, Values, and Ethos Paul has been the CEO of Call Journey and has worked in several industry verticals. He has a strong background with over 30+ years of experience and he has delivered high caliber results across the significantly competitive areas of IT/Telecommunications, Financial Services, Energy, Media, and Human Capital Services thereby helping many individuals and organizations through professional services consulting. Apart from being a consultant, Paul has led teams of up to 15,000 people which included teams involved in startups, early-stage companies, and large enterprises, and has led large-scale teams across Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, IT, and Operations. Because of his customerfocused and action-oriented mindset, Mr. Humphrey is known to be passionate about the people in his organization or business unit and their growth, development, and engagement. Being a part of the Call Journey family, Paul expresses his gratitude for having to lead a team and the staff. Paul has values-driven culture within the business that focuses on a few key areas such as:

Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ

Customer commitment Vulnerability Transparency Self-Improvement Collaboration Diversity Curiosity

He added, “In both work and personal life, I believe being your authentic self is crucial, being open honest, and transparent and supporting people of all walks of life do be their best self (that last one's a bit cheesy but true). I believe that if you create an environment where people can feel “psychologically safe” through living and demonstrating a cultural focus that supports this, you can do anything.” Empowering the Workforce Paul believes “Leadership” is mainly about managing expectations of boards and investors whilst ensuring there is an environment and framework in which the other business leaders can excel and customers can be served in a high caliber way. Paul is a follower of Daniel Goleman because his views on leadership and emotional intelligence are exclusive. He believes that great CEOs at their core are “people” leaders, they intrinsically know how to drive, motivate, and empower PEOPLE. If it is not their natural “style” or their true self to be people-centric, then he thinks that is a huge challenge to become a successful CEO. On questioned upon work pressure, Paul stated, “The ability to work under extreme pressure is crucial – I have a saying that the true face of a leader is exposed when the Bunsen burner is turned on! Being calm under pressure and unwavering in ethics and principles in this scenario is crucial. Equally, the ability to make tough decisions and drive down sometimes unpopular paths is crucial.” Lastly, the ability to be an awesome chess player is crucial – having the IQ to see moves, risks, challenges, and opportunities ahead of time and the EQ to mobilize people (again the organization's biggest assets) to execute the moves.

The company's customers now are across many different countries including the U.S, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Italy, and Belgium. With all of these key achievements, Call Journey's true biggest achievement is changing the lives of our customers and their businesses through crucial insights. Call journey's client profile covers both the private and public sectors. With customers in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Italy, and Belgium, its global coverage is expanding. From an industry perspective, its customers represent all industries in the fortune 500 with Financial Services and Health Care fast-growing sectors. Call Journey also has customers across Utilities, Telco, Media, Software, Manufacturing, and Agriculture. Furthermore, the customer size spans from large enterprises to SMB and SMC and in the public sector, it has a good volume of Local Government and State Government entities as well. Call Journey's Take on The Ever-Changing Trends The company we listen very carefully to its customers as they drive trends, not companies. Companies respond to their customer demands, needs, and requirements and Call Journey is absolutely a customer-first organization. It has many customer forums and regularly meets with all of its customers to track closely their progress and requirements thereby making R&D essentiality. The company has a “do it quick” philosophy in that it wants to fail fast or win quickly with the company's R&D initiatives. It plans well ahead and ensures that Call Journey is always “pushing the envelope” in terms of its thinking. It doesn't just innovate or develop new features and functionality for the sake of it, the R&D program is carefully planned and prioritized leaving enough scope for flexibility when/if required.

Noteworthy Triumphs of Call Journey For a start-up to quickly position itself as a leader in the speech analytics space and to become the preferred vendor for the global giant and contact centre technology leader Genesys, has been a great achievement. Since then, Call Journey has helped organizations across all types of industries and geographies realize massive beneﬁts through enhanced CX and Ex insights.

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CONTACT CENTER C

all centers and contact centers have been serving as the front lines for many organizations for an improved customer experience and customer service, and most of the organizations of aware of that fact. Although, understanding the difference between a contact center and a call center is of key importance for organizations so as to shape and enhance their customer experience and service. So how would you differentiate a call center from a contact center? Let's dive into the world to know more about it. What is a Call Center? A call center is generally the centralized department of a company where there sits a team of dedicated staff who manage all the incoming calls. Sometimes the team also undertakes outgoing calls for the current or some potential customers. The nature of these calls generally revolves around marketing, selling, and serving the customers. There are numerous differences between a call center and a contact center, but one of the major differences is that call centers are operated and connected by B2C brands. The call

centers are generally focused on inbound and outbound calls with their customers in order to gain more information about the situation or to complete their purchase process. These kinds of actions are revenue-driving and are usually considered as “conversion” or “sale” by a company that predominantly operates in sales or marketing niche. Call centers are traditionally seen as a contact point for brands. One of the main objectives of a call center is gratification. People who phone in a call center expect a quick solution to their problems without any further hush. To ensure a good customer experience, there are a number of systems that work in unison, all focused on a single goal. To operate smoothly and efficiently, there are a lot of features working together in a call center. Some of the significant ones are·

Interactive voice response (IVR)

Skill-based routing

Call recording

Computer telephony integration (CTI)

Call tracking and monitoring

Live call transfers

Desktop notiﬁcations

CRM integrations

Live call coaching

Call center analytics

Other software or technical components that call center reps use are Computer Telephony Integration, Script and Flow Designer, CRM, Intelligent Call Back, and many more. Another interesting thing about a call center is that it is and should always be a part of a contact center. This improves the consistency and eﬃciency of customer experience. What is a Contact Center? A Contact Center is something that handles the current and

December 2021

VS. CALL CENTER

The Key Differences

potential customer queries on multiple channels. Contact Centers not only handle these queries, but they also field emails, live chats, SMS, and also the inquiries that come from social media handles, like Twitter. Unlike Call Centers, which field only calls, a contact center receives calls from various channels like that of the company website, emails, company-branded applications, chat apps, social media, and many more. The responsibilities of a Contact Center team include marketing, selling, and serving the customers. The key differences between a contact center and a call center are thatContact Centers handle inquiries from multiple channels while call centers handle inquiries only through calls. Contact Centers employs agents that have the ability to multi-task and handle inquiries from a number of channels. Contact Centers have a structure that is more specialized. This structure is designed such that the customers are directly routed to an agent that is best trained and equipped to handle the kind of situation that is at hand. These include situations like sales, customer service, cancellations, particular product, and business lines.

App integration

CRM and Business Tool integration

Customer survey

Apart from these, the technologies or software that are of utmost importance in a contact center include CRM Integration, Workforce Management Software, etc. At the end of the day, do customers care who exactly they are calling to solve their queries. The answer is most probably no. This is a detail that the customers can choose to just ignore, or would not want to really be aware of. But if you were to look for a broader view of the customers and growth of your brand, upgrading to a contact center would be the best choice for your brand. It will help you interact with your customer across multiple channels and with it, they are also able to deliver a higher quality service faster. With the kind of technologies deployed in contact centers, you can also capture a larger pool of current and potential customers. Understand your customers' needs and expectations better for the best customer service and experience.

To ensure maximum eﬃciency, contact centers also employ much better systems and technologies, that allow them to deal with multi-channel operations. Some of these technologies include·

Omnichannel friendly

Digital receptionist, chatbot integration, autoresponses

Call recording

Agent status

Contact center analytics

Seamless transferring

Internal chat

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