dir="ltr">Masergy, a provider of cloud communications solutions, today launched its Cloud Contact Center, a system designed to help companies transition to a unified, omnichannel platform through which they can better direct customer interactions, boost customer satisfaction and sales, and lower operational costs.
An extension of Masergy’s unified communication–as–a–service (UCaaS) offering, the Cloud Contact Center leverages predictive analytics to dynamically determine how to best route each customer service interaction. In contrast to the traditional call center setup, which Masergy previously provided—designed to handle one call at a time, through inbound queuing—the omnichannel configuration allows agents to respond through social media feeds, SMS, and web chat, on one digital display.
The most important aspect of the product, however, is not its omnichannel capabilities,"where you add voice, chat, email, social interactions, SMS, and seamlessly blend and route them to the same engine—that’s big," says Dean Manzoori, vice president of product management for UCaas at Masergy. "What I think is more significant is the analyzer engine, which takes streams of data from not just the [automated call distribution] and call routing engine but also from outside CRM and business applications, and turns those streams of data into real-time business insights."
With browser-based analytics options, companies can segment and profile clients as well as get a visual rendering of automated call distribution, voice responses, and customer interaction data. The information can be imported to create interactive charts that aim to give users insights around customer behavior and agent performances.
"If you take some of that information and feed it back into the routing engine, you can make it more intelligent," Manzoori adds. For instance, if a customer calls a contact center, hangs up after 15 minutes of waiting, but calls back again the same day, the system will remember this and place that person at the front of the queue. Similarly, the system can analyze a customer's past interactions, based on caller ID, to determine their value and prioritize them, while choosing the best suited human agent for the job. With such capabilities, users can save time they'd normally spend asking for customer information to determine how to act, Manzoori says.
The Cloud Contact Center is available as an embedded app for Salesforce.com's CRM system, which allows users to can make and receive calls within the interface to review customer history, their intentions, and any other relevant bits of information surfaced via pop-up screens. Manzoori says that the product has API that supports integrations with other CRM systems as well.
In a statement, Cindy Whelan, a principal analyst at GlobalData, said that "the move to the cloud, omnichannel communications, and predictive analytics are key differentiators in the contact center market." She added that Masergy's Cloud Contact Center is a "next-generation solution that will help companies improve customer interactions and increase customer satisfaction."
Prior to today’s announcement, Masergy relied on partnerships with third-party carriers such as inContact or Five9 to fill gaps. With its own contact center piece in place, Masergy has a fully integrated solution, Manzoori says—one "that comes over a network that we own and control, a call platform that we own and control, and comes from a contact center solution that is fully integrated with the rest of our service offerings."
According to Manzoori, bringing the separate elements together promises a "low cost of ownership"—one that is far lower than a company could expect in deploying a premises-based solution, or having separate vendors for PBX and contact centers. He estimates the average cost per agent is about $125, "and that can get discounted with term and volume."
"To me, the intelligence that goes into this is huge—it's something that most contact centers aren't taking advantage of today, but we believe that this product will make it so much easier for them to do so," Manzoori says.