Enghouse Interactive, recently featured in my Top CCaaS Providers for 2019, provides omni-channel contact centre solutions, delivered via cloud, hybrid or on-premises deployments and is certified for Cisco, Avaya, NEC and Skype for Business. To drill down into the nitty gritty of the portfolio, I spoke to Dave McDowell, Senior Technical Consultant at Enghouse Interactive, to get a run down of the latest product enhancements to the portfolio.
Omni-channel and social aggregation
With it’s predigree in the contact centre space, it’s a given that Enghouse Interactive provides voice, email, web chat, SMS and social media into a single pane of glass agent experience. I’d seen a few demos of the Enghouse Interactive contact centre before so I quickly skipped over the standard functionality and asked Dave how much they can do with social media. Sometimes, contact centre providers cite social media integration and it leaves a lot to be desired.
“We often work with the customer’s aggregator like Hootsuite or Conversocial so we can take almost anything via email from the aggregator as well as social media channels directly. What we are experts at is the queuing, delivering and reporting”
Ultimately, the agent receives an interaction regardless of the platform is enters from. This enables contact centres to work via blended interactions. “An agent receives a request in the same platform irrespective of the route it takes into the contact centre”.
Messaging into the contact centre
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Dave McDowell[/caption]
I asked Dave what Enghouse Interactive are doing with the extended branch of social media – messaging. He told me that things like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger will be treated as chat interfaces.
“What we’re doing is opening up the Enghouse Interactive products to allow third party chat interfaces to integrate to the platform. That’s important when you have a self-service interaction going on and a customer needs to escalate to a live human – with the context so the customer doesn’t have to start their conversation again”.
By using a persistent chat style, the business enhances its productivity as agents don’t need to gather information that has already been captured and the customer experience is greater as they only must provide information on their request once.
APIs to drive intelligence
Enghouse Interactive recognises they won’t be able to invent everything and deliver it to a customer. However, Dave told me that they do need to be open to allow integration with any emerging technology.
“I might have an email address, a phone number or an account number. This allows us to intelligently route that contact. By taking information from third party systems, we can drive whether a customer is high value or maybe they owe money and need to go through to accounts straight away”.
That then allows intelligent routing to become dynamic routing. Dave gave me an example.
“Offer the options that make sense to the customer’s relationship with you. If you know a customer only takes 5 of your 200 products, offer them those 5 rather than sending them down the route of all 200 products”.
Once they are in the right channel and right option, Enghouse Interactive then pops all information using CRM integration. This is applicable across all channels – rather than just CTI for phone and computer integration. So, your web chat and email agents have all this information popped to their screen, empowering them for any interaction.
Recording and evaluation
I informed Dave that I’d seen the call recording and screen recording modules in Enghouse Interactive. He was quick to add that when conducting evaluations, quality management is now about managing all interactions in the contact centre.
