HelloSpoke Partners with Enghouse Interactive to Deliver Reliable Cloud Contact Center Service for SMBs
Excellent service quality makes for happy, loyal customers, who in turn can help spread the word about your company and product or service. But with today’s customers demanding different types of customer service through various channels (phone, chat, email, etc.), meeting customers’ expectations can be difficult. A recent Forbes interview piece highlighted how today's customers have a "digital-first" mindset, preferring technology and chatbots as opposed to real human interactions. And this, in turn, has made the challenge of delivering quality customer service even tougher. But one way that contact centers can meet these challenges and simultaneously improve the customer experience is by leveraging an enterprise-grade Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution to support a wide range of business and communication functions.
VoipReview recently spoke with David Durik, the Chief Executive Officer at HelloSpoke, to discuss the advantages of using a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution as well as how their new cloud contact center platform is helping small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) enhance their user experience and improve customer engagement. HelloSpoke also shared some insights as to what businesses can to do to ensure successful cloud contact center adoption.
How the Cloud is Changing the Contact Center Communication Landscape
Cloud contact center solutions have seen a dramatic increase in demand and growth over the past number of years. A recent study from MarketsandMarkets revealed that the cloud-based contact center market size will grow from USD 5.43 Billion in 2016 to USD 15.67 Billion by 2021. And based on the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 23.6% during the forecast period, it’s clear that many businesses are moving from traditional, on-premises contact center models over to cloud contact center solutions.
"The cloud has made high-powered contact center technologies available to SMBs, empowering them to deliver the same level of customer experience as the large enterprises who may be their competitors," said Durik. "Prior to the arrival of cloud contact center and its subscription-based, OpEx pricing model, SMBs that operated small contact center environments were hamstrung by rudimentary technology, which was all they could afford. But because of the cloud, contact centers no longer require a six-figure capital (CapEx) investment to deliver the omnichannel customer experience.”
By leveraging contact center as a service (CCaaS), SMBs have the power to connect and engage their customers through various unified communications solutions such as voice, email, text message, social media, web chat, and co-browsing. Because of this, businesses can gain a better understanding of how to most effectively communicate with their customers. And in turn, customers can easily and seamlessly communicate with the business from anywhere, using the platform that they are most comfortable with. As a result, employees are more effective in delivering an elevated customer experience.
“It really is about educating business owners and C-level executives on the affordability and power available to them with a cloud-deployed contact center like HelloSpoke,” said Durik. “Once they see how it dramatically improves their customer interaction, that’s all that’s necessary to really grab their attention.”
Redefining Contact Center Communications with HelloSpoke
As a leading Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony service provider, HelloSpoke makes it easier and cheaper for SMBs to adopt the cloud contact center solution by selling the service with no long-term contract. Through their innovative CCaaS platform, businesses can cut expenses by shifting the financial burden from crippling capital costs for legacy technology to a monthly subscription model that reduces price points. This way, modern contact centers become empowered with the flexibility, agility, and scalability benefits that HelloSpoke's revolutionary CCaaS platform provides.
According to Durik, there are several compelling factors that are driving cloud contact center adoption. One is the move away from CapEx to OpEx, or subscription-based pricing. Second is the continuously evolving feature set, as well as the ability to scale agent licenses up and down as the business needs dictate. The inherent fault-tolerant design is valued, as many businesses can’t afford resilient systems. And the third factor is business agility. The ability to be quick and nimble in regards to changes in the business environment is relevant to companies of all sizes. Hence, the ease with which the contact center service can be deployed (and how easy it is to trial and roll out new communication channels or features) is one of the areas that customers value most when it comes to cloud contact center adoption.
"Although the plain old telephone service (POTS) is still an instrumental communication tool in commercial environments, the right contact center solution should also incorporate chat, email, and social media capabilities," said Durik. “Again, especially in the SMB space, these other modes of communication were cost-prohibitive for most businesses to incorporate.Their on-premise and legacy technologies are typically anything but agile, so a project to trial something new, for example, to roll out chat or SMS as a communication channel, meant investment and often long, difficult projects." And a cloud model makes this quicker and less expensive, with no big hardware and/or software upgrade required. With the right cloud service, these new ways to communicate with customers are very cost effective and exponentially elevate the user experience.
Pointers for a Successful Cloud Contact Center Deployment
Durik also offered these three important pointers to help SMBs have a successful cloud contact center deployment:
- Learn your business' call flow and what communication solutions work best for your needs. “It’s important to understand what currently happens when a call comes into the business,” said Durik. “Who does it go to? If they don’t answer, where does it go? Afterward, map out the ideal communication flow. Does it include a ring group? Auto attendant? Are you implementing chat, email or social? If not, why not? Is it because it seems hard or expensive?" By answering these questions, businesses can gain an understanding of what communication solutions are working or not working and how they want internal and external communications to be handled. This will make for a much smoother deployment.
- Take advantage of the flexibility benefits of a cloud contact center solution. “You aren’t locked into one way of doing things, and it can be changed relatively easily,” said Durik. “So if you discover a bottleneck in your call flow, that can be adjusted. If you discover you need a few more people responding to social chats than phone calls, those agents can be switched or easily added – and you only pay for what you use.”
- Make sure to train all contact center agents. “Training needs to be scheduled with all agents before the contact center is live,” shared Durik. “The interface is pretty intuitive, but having agents that are confident and knowledgeable in the new contact center will make those first weeks much smoother!”
HelloSpoke + Enghouse Interactive: Helping SMBs Elevate the Customer Experience
HelloSpoke empowers the digital workforce and helps businesses maintain the highest level of customer service through its innovative Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution. Based on the Enghouse Interactive Contact Center: Service Provider (CCSP) platform, HelloSpoke’s Cloud Contact Center service brings an unmatched level of customer interaction, contact center functionality, scalability, convenience, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
“HelloSpoke was founded on the principle of providing high-quality business communications that align with the needs of today’s digital workplace,” said Durik. “Being in and around telecom for over two decades, we saw the need in the marketplace for a simple, reliable, and cost-effective way for businesses to upgrade or enhance their phone system without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars in the process.”
Durik also added that teaming up with Enghouse Interactive allowed them to deliver enterprise-grade communication solutions for SMBs with a strong emphasis on streamlining the user experience. “Enghouse Interactive is an ideal fit for HelloSpoke,” said Durik. “We had previously worked with Enghouse on a product rollout for a Global, Fortune 100 company. During that time we both had the opportunity to see how each company operated, and I can say that their engineers were some of the sharpest engineers we have worked with in the VoIP space. We also really fell in love with their technology.”
Like Enghouse Interactive, HelloSpoke designed and built their network and technology specifically for cloud deployments. Because both companies came from a cloud-only approach, HelloSpoke and Enghouse Interactive could seamlessly marry their technologies for a very robust and fault-tolerant offering. “True multi-tenanting allows us to scale way down to the SMB space or to roll out a thousand seats in a geographically dispersed international contact center environment,” shared Durik. “A multi-tenant CCaaS solution [that] shares computer resources and requires far fewer infrastructure requirements and IT resources to set up and manage can be just as profitable for a 10-user deployment as it is for a 1,000-user deployment. So no matter the call volume or number of agents, the HelloSpoke contact center powered by Enghouse Interactive is ready to deliver.”
Jacki Tessmer, the Vice President of Cloud and Service Provider Strategy at Enghouse Interactive, also had this to say about the partnership: “HelloSpoke is telephony for the next generation with a services portfolio that is tailor-made for cloud communications. We are excited to work with such an innovative company and an executive team with an extensive track record of industry success.”
With HelloSpoke’s cloud contact center service, customers of any size can be both agile and flexible. HelloSpoke also values web-based provisioning and administration, so the business can rapidly and effectively onboard new customers to the platform and extend self-service operational capabilities. “For instance, contact center managers could perform tasks such as adding new agents, changing agent skills, recorded prompts, or the contact center schedule without relying on HelloSpoke personnel,” added Durik. Plus, customers can enjoy built-in disaster recovery in case of network or Internet failure. Also, calls can be answered through the HelloSpoke Mobile Client (which is compatible with both Android and iOS) that empowers remote agents to deliver the same level of service as their on-site colleagues.
To learn more about Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions, please visit HelloSpoke and Enghouse Interactive.
About HelloSpoke
HelloSpoke is a privately owned VoIP service provider based in Louisville, Kentucky. For more than two decades, the company has been delivering both business VoIP and contact center solutions that are reliable and cost-effective. Each HelloSpoke business customer receives professional and detailed attention in order to ensure that the deployed technologies make for an exceptional user experience.
About Enghouse Interactive
Enghouse Interactive designs and develops a comprehensive portfolio of customer interaction management solutions that include contact center software, attendant console, predictive outbound dialer, knowledge management, interactive voice response (IVR), and call recording technologies. Established in 1984, the company has grown both organically and through the acquisition of various service specialists including CosmoCom, AndTek, Datapulse, Arc, IAT, Presence Technology, IT Sonix, Voxtron, Reitek, Syntellect, Safeharbor, Telrex, Trio, and Zeacom.
