Hosted contact centre provider NewVoiceMedia Ltd has turned on a call centre-as-a-service offering that integrates with the Service Cloud, Salesforce.com’s next-generation platform for customer service.
NewVoiceMedia has embedded its telephony services so that customer service agents can use the Service Cloud to manage their calls and cases.
When a call comes in, an agent is instantly presented with data drawn from Salesforce.com and Service Cloud to provide items such as the caller’s contact details including their call history, purchasing profiles, and even any call recordings held on file.
“The system will take care of incoming call monitoring and recording, it handles call routing and provides an agent with everything they need to deal with it,” Neil Kirtley of NewVoiceMedia told us.
Unlike on-premise contact centre setups, the system is delivered entirely as a service and needs no hardware or software implementation. “We simply charge £25 per month per agent to use the system,” he said.
Like the Salesforce.com CRM software, the on-demand call centre CTI application can be configured by the user company.
All calls can be monitored or recorded using the system, which then uses speech analytics embedded in the platform to support business analysis, Kirtley explained.
A Salesforce.com license is needed for it to be used with Service Cloud. Where it is integrated with the CRM software, intelligent routing rules can be used to send calls to the same agent to provide continuity of service, or alternatively, value-based routing used that recognises that callers are in different stages of a buying process.
It could also be primed to prioritise VIPs in a call queue, Kirtley explained. Equally, it could provide individual caller treatments such as targeted messaging to cross-sell and up-sell.
Set up by a founder of Genesys, which was acquired by Alcatel-Lucent, NewVoiceMedia has been selling hosted contact center services for over 10 years and claims customers as diverse as the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and ParcelForce.
“The service is based out of a cloud data centre run by Cable & Wireless and is capable of serving up to 5,000 simultaneous calls per node on each of the five nodes we run,” said Kirtley.
The company has found only 20% of companies currently take advantage of the benefits of computer telephony integration, and Kirtley said the new service was being aimed squarely at the mid-market offering ‘big company’ features at an affordable price point.
As many as 60,000 companies are said to use Salesforce CRM to run their customer service, sales and marketing operations.
