Technology powering Cloudagent-Cloud based Call Center Product

We at Ozonetel take great pride in powering the call centers for SMEs/SMBs and Enterprises as well. We know that the call center is generally the first point of contact for a customer with a business and we are proud of the architecture we have created to make this contact as error free as possible.

Some numbers:

Currently Cloudagent handles more than 10 million call center minutes in a single month with more than 30,000 agents logging in. We also manage 10s of terabytes of data(audio, logs etc)

The Cloudagent API is also pretty robust and handles 10s of millions of API requests every month.

Technology Stack:

We have dabbled with all the cool new kids on the block including Redis, Mongo, Nodejs etc, but for our core, we have gone with the tried and tested stack and it has held us in good stead.

1. Mysql: The complete backend is handled in Mysql. Our star DBA, Anupam, has created a set of scripts and procedures which somehow magically handle whatever we throw at it.

2. Java and PHP: For the application layer we went Java and PHP. Though they may not be as sexy as the new programming languages, they have got the job done and we have so far found no reason to try out new things.

3. Beanstalk: For all queuing purposes we use Beanstalk. Once again, we had to add a lot of monitoring stuff on top of this, but its fairly solid.

4. Mongo: We push all our logging to Mongo and manage that centrally.

5. Redis: This is a new addition to the family, we are experimenting with a new analytical engine using Redis. The results are encouraging and we will be rolling out new dashboards next month.

Really sorry, this blog post is not about some flashy new tool which has helped us out :)

But the truth is, the old, tried and tested tools with proper fundamentals and good design patterns have helped us to reach this scale. We will talk about our design patterns in another blog post.

Taking a rural BPO operation live in a day - Just another day in the life of a cloud telephony company

August 14th:
Just another normal day of office. We are all working on our respective jobs( or playing TT :)). At 10:14 am we get a lead on our portal at http://www.cloudagent.in. This was from one of the biggest rural BPO organization in the country. Immediately sales team reaches out to the lead and gets the details.

The Requirement -

1. Calls from every circle in India, have to be greeted and treated in their local language or atleast identified and tagged for that circle. 
2. Also, calls should be routed to North, West, East and South based on circle of the caller. 
3. All calls have to be greeted first, then loaded into the dialer so that heavy loads can be catered to.

This is for a prestigious government project and has to go live immediately after the independence day speech. Some time ago UPA government gives a nod for one of their dream project. Soon, a private BPO provider with agents from rural areas in India bags the contract and reaches out to us, Ozonetel, to help them out in setting up a cloud based call center.

Image courtesy:bpovoice.com

2:30pm:
All teams are a go for making this project a success. The telecom team reaches out to our partners in various telcos to get a fancy number. The provisioning team starts the resource provisioning process and the IVR team gets the requirement on the IVR.

5:30 pm:
Requirements are frozen and all systems are kept ready for deployment once the announcement is made.

August 15th

Independence day speech- The Prime Minister Announces about the project to the Nation to keep their promise.

9:00 am: Ozonetel starts work and deploys the contact center solution with the complete requirements in 4 hours. This includes configuring agents, setting up skills, configuring administrators, user management.

Every good thriller story has a twist and even our go live had a twist. Though we were told that the go live date would be August 17th, we were told at 12:00 pm that the advertisements about the service would come the next day itself and hence the go live would be on August 16th. No problems, the wonderful team at Ozonetel has handled much harder twists than this.

4:00 pm: The call center goes live with training to the agents for 15 minutes ( Our Agent UI is that simple to understand and use ). The agents take test calls and are happy with the simplicity of the system.

10:00 pm: Call testing is finished.

12:00 am: Ozonetel team calls it a day and the team break open a few bottles of beer.

August 16th:

The phone number is published in leading dailies and agents start getting live calls.

Now - We have a happy client, UPA breathes comfortably at the successful go live ( just kidding :) ) and our team still working on other such projects...its an every day job at Ozonetel to make live such projects....

More stories coming ....The real ones ...from the Experts in Cloud Telephony.

Top Reasons Indians Call Businesses

We at Ozonetel, handle millions of call center calls in India(more than 700 million so far). Most of the top companies in India use our products to power their communication infrastructure. To support this we have a whole host of monitoring dashboards. Today, we want you to have a peek at a cool Live calls dashboard that we have built using Arborjs and Angular that gives you an insight into what verticals Indians call. This is a live dashboard(but only of a subset of the total calls) of the verticals which are receiving calls on our platform right now. It auto updates every 10 secs.

We will be open sourcing the dashboard code on Github next week.

You can view the live dashboard in a separate screen

Ideas to reduce your Agent talk time in an Inbound Call Center

In this article, we will discuss on how to improve agent productivity by discussing on various ideas with which Agent's Talk Time can be reduced. Call center software solution should look at reducing the agent talk time as much as possible. The premise for this discussion is that the Agent / Call Center Executive is the costliest resource in the system and every thing else works around them to help and maximize the Agent's efficiency.

Some of these are common sense and most common practices across Contact Centers. Some of them are specific to how the agent talks and walks the script with the customer. We have listed them down all here:

1. Have Cheat sheets -
• Ready made information like phone numbers of branches , Escalation numbers where you need to transfer etc. Some of this information can be stored in your contact center software itself like transfer number lists, conference numbers etc - This feature is part of our product http://cloudagent.in 
• Some data will be specific to your process, like if you are a cab operator you will find that having all the operator numbers listed ( easy to search) will shorten your talk time, or like having all numbers of bus operators will help in case you run a call center for a travel operator
2. Your Contact Center software should be integrated with your CRM ( CTI integration) for giving a POP to the agent with the customer information. It has been observed that POP helps reduce Agent talk time by almost 30% in various processes.

• Here at Cloud Agent , we ensure that all our customers experience this efficiency by integrating their CRM systems. We have integrated almost 30 different CRM systems till date.
3. Incoming Number display - Agents will have ready made reference of the customer number and they need not spend time in asking the number.
4. Script:  Having a script which is related to your process is another way to reduce your agent talk time. The agents can quickly get the problem addressed. Obviously, the script is an evolving phenomena and has to be changed based on feedback received periodically. Script reduces talk time by 10% especially in support contact centers
5. Skill Based Routing:  Diagnosing the customer problem/ needs in the IVR itself by providing options in the IVR is another way to reduce talk time. The moment call lands on the agent screen, your agent is equipped with information on what the customer wants. This works best in tandem with Screen POP and is the most effective feature.

There are lot of ways to reduce talk time or eliminate the need to talk to an agent in the IVR itself. You can refer to our previous blog for this - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/06/5-characteristics-of-good-ivr-system-in.html

Hope to save some bucks for you ...Cheers

5 characteristics of a good IVR system in a call center

Browsing on Quora, I came across a question

IVR : everyone hates IVR's , wonder if anyone thought to visulize them instead listening to these long and complicate recordings? We only want to speak with someone ... Not to a machine

That started me thinking about the reason why in general, people hate IVRs.

A good IVR should not make you hate it :)

The main reason why people hate IVRs is because they are not well designed. Unfortunately, not many people

design good IVRs. Just as a badly designed web site will lose a prospective customer, a badly designed IVR also leads to a lot of heartburn. Studies have shown that more than 80% people with a bad IVR experience will stop giving business to the company and more than 70% will spread the bad news through word of mouth. So it is imperative that companies spend time and thought on designing their IVRs. In-spite of this, we have found that most companies provide an IVR as an after thought which does more harm than good.

But a well designed IVR is really useful. Remember, customers are calling your hotline to get some information. The main reason is not to talk to someone as the question above indicates. They want to talk to someone because customers believe that people can solve their problems better. But if they call and find their answer in an IVR, they will be just as happy. If the IVR is intelligent enough to recognize you, do a database dip and and answer your query automatically(like playing the status of your order etc), then you would not need to talk to a person also and you would still be happy.

So, based on our experience with call centers in India, we have come out with the following 5 characteristics that every IVR system should have.

1. Recognize your customer

This is by far the most important one. When a caller calls and you welcome them by name, you show that you care. You start of on a good note and the caller gets a little bit more confidence on the IVR system. Without this, the caller thinks the IVR is just a dumb system and will start looking for the option to connect to an agent.

2. Recognize context

If I have called your IVR earlier and asked a question and you have an answer to my question, the next time I call, the IVR should recognize the state and give the correct contextual answer to me rather than asking me repeat the question.

3. Provide default options

A customer should never be lost in an IVR. He should always be able to go back to previous menu, go to the top menu or talk to an agent directly. These are the bare minimum. Also, you should have fallbacks for touch-tones and allow a caller multiple tries for entering the tones.

4. Route caller to correct agent and pass info to the call center

After collecting caller information, select the proper department/specialist and route the call to that location so that the caller can talk to the corresponding expert immediately. 

5. Support multiple languages

India is a land of many languages.So, provide options to callers to choose their language of choice. More importantly, remember their choice so that the next time they call, they are welcomed in their language of choice.

Maintaining a Toll Free Number for your Inbound Call Center in India

Indian businesses have been on a exploration path in terms of customer communication. Every business running a support process goes through this. What should be the published number ? Should we take a Mobile, a Single Number solution or a Toll Free Number. What are the costs involved? Too many questions to be answered.....

In this article, we will discuss on what it takes to take a Toll Free Number and what are the advantages/disadvantages of choosing it? Some primary reasons when you should definitely go for a Toll Free Number:

• When you are offering a service for which you need to attract more customers - especially when starting new or against an established player/competitor
• When you have established a good business and customer base. Now, you want to offer better services to your customer on the phone free of cost
• When your service should provide incentive's to callers - in scenarios like Grievance cells, Emergency numbers, Complaints etc
• If you are an NGO and want to give callers a service without the caller paying anything.

Some advantages you get by taking a toll free number:

1. Your business will have a single number across India by which you can operate on
2. Branding becomes much easier 
3. Redundancy is ensured

Some disadvantages you acquire in this process:

• Operational expenditure of support goes up
• Lot of nuisance calls might come - since it is a Toll free
• You have to be conscious of the costs involved and continuously monitor the contact center

Suggestions we can give based on experience:

1. Ensure that your Average Talk time is kept to a minimum
2. Pick up times have to be optimal
3. Nuisance calls should be blocked using your contact center software
4. Have a very small IVR instead of a very lengthy one 

There are a lot more things you can do using a Toll Free Number. For further information,please contact us on sales@cloudagent.in or call us on 1800-200-0820. Visit us at http://cloudagent.in 

Key Performance Metrics for an Outbound Call Center in India

Some time back, we started our discussion with data points for an Inbound call center in India. We highlighted what has been our experience across customers for an Inbound Call Center - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/03/key-data-points-to-consider-while.html

In this article today, we will discuss our experiences with Outbound Call Centers and Key performance Metrics you can look at before deciding on your Outbound Process.We will compare Outbound Dialing between a Manual Process  and an Automated Dialer.

Manual Dialing :An Agent types a customer number and manually dials a call to a customer.

Automated Dialer: Data of customers to be dialed is uploaded via an Excel sheet or with an integration to the dialer API. Dialer automatically dials the customer calls when the agent is free.

Stats for Manual Dialing:

When Agents have dialed Manually, it is found that they are achieving a success rate of 55% connected calls. Also, they are spending almost 20% time wrapping the call which means that the outbound processes need more data inputs than a regular process and hence agents need more time to wrap the calls. Agent Utilization is roughly around 30% excluding the regular process activity.

Stats for Automated Dialing: 

Interestingly, even automated dialer gives almost the same amount of success rate in terms of connected calls. Agent Utilization is significantly higher at 68%. When using a dialer, agents are found to dispose the calls faster thus reducing the Wrap up time duration. ( comparison was made in the same outbound process )

Conclusions:

Automated dialer scores significantly higher in terms of agent utilization.

But depending on the Outbound process, customers have often chosen Manual Dialing like when agent has to scrutinize the case before dialing to that customer. Though the above stats give an idea on the agent efficiency you can achieve using a tool , depending on how your process flow is ( which is the superseding factor) the choice can tilt in favor of Manual dialing even though efficiency is lower than automated dialing.