The entire world went through a tough time in 2020, with businesses striving to deliver optimum customer experience in the new normal. Realizing effective communication is the key, Ameyo, a platform to solve all the customer experience problems through a robust Contact Center Solution. With Oracle as its strategic cloud partner, Ameyo has now become more competitive in the cloud contact center market and expanded its SMBs customer base. In an exclusive interview with CRN India, Arpit Vashishtha, Head-Cloud Infrastructure, Ameyo shares with businesses shifting to omni-channel cloud contact centers
Give us an overview about the latest trends with regard to contact center technologies.
Cost optimisation of contact center operations is on the rise, as most businesses are planning to go remote. With businesses shifting to omni-channel cloud contact centers, the landscape is changing significantly. To avoid wait times while trying to get connected to an agent over a call, customers are now flocking to brands’ websites and mobile apps to chat with available agents thus accelerating digital communication. Businesses are also trying to add engagement channels like Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger to their mix, so that customers find it easier to engage with a brand via a channel they are already familiar with. We are also seeing increased adoption of bots to resolve customer queries without human intervention, thus, improving first contact resolution. A video contact center software is a win-win for enterprises as it empowers them to optimize costs by replacing physical meetings with video interactions and at the same time improve first call resolution (FCR) and net promoter score (NPS).
How are organisations rethinking their customer connect strategies, post the pandemic?
In the post-pandemic scenario, it has become more important than ever to deliver a humane customer service experience and keep the empathy factor intact, given the contactless setting we have learnt to experience in the last few months. Customer service is also evolving to include more and more remote contact centers for the human-to-human interaction between brands and consumers, for Sales, Service, and Collections. The omni-channel customer engagement approach plays a pivotal role for businesses with their presence on a customer’s favorite channels like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. AI-driven bot technology is becoming the new normal to handle a surge in customer service queries, but the bot to agent deflection – in instances where the bot is unable to address a customer query satisfactorily on time – will remain the top requirement for most businesses. There is an increased demand for virtual customer onboarding in a contactless world, especially for banks and financial institutions in India. With RBI and IRDAI giving nod to Video-based Customer Identification Process (V-CIP), demand for Video KYC Solutions are on the rise.
What kind of business impact did Ameyo witness last year? What was your strategy to deal with that difficult situation?
The entire world went through a really tough time in 2020, with businesses striving to deliver optimum customer experience in the new normal. Realizing effective communication is the key, we increased our efforts to ensure human-to-human interaction, albeit virtually. As a company, we have always been empathetic towards our workforce, and it is heartening to see that in spite of the challenges, we came out stronger collectively.
At the same time, we tried our best to deliver a superior customer experience by gaining a deeper understanding into their business challenges and closely collaborated with them to minimize business disruption. With omni-channel customer engagement now a prerequisite for brands, we are expanding our solutions to cater to a customer’s preferred channels and ensure that their end customers get instant solutions for their problems/queries. We helped customers increase video engagement with their end customers, which helped humanize the virtual interactions, facilitating more trust and consumer confidence.
In parallel, we focused on establishing proper IT Governance. With remote teams and uncontrolled infrastructure, device health monitoring was important to identify and diagnose the root cause for issue/query resolution. We helped businesses establish remote governance with 360-degree Application Infrastructure Management (AIM) for device health monitoring to manage contact centers with trust. Our dashboards and analytics empowered customer operation managers to keep a tab on work-from-home and work-from-office setups for 360-degree governance.
What is Ameyo’s business model and USP? How is Ameyo empowering organizations to simplify customer experience?
For running a business smoothly, it is essential to manage customer relations seamlessly. And we have consistently focused on creating products and solutions that provide value to our customers. As a business, Ameyo provides plug-and-play integrations with enterprise-grade CRM platforms that give businesses additional flexibility to manage end-to-end customer interactions. Our focus is on digital transformation with an omni-channel contact center software where we try to deliver all digital and voice channels in one platform.
We provide seamless customer experiences for every Agent-Customer interaction. We have also refined our business model to deliver superior customer experience. In the last few years, we have been pivoting from a license-based model to a subscription-based model as there is a shift towards cloud-based contact centers. Our integrated omni-channel cloud contact centers empower businesses to keep pace with and surpass customer’s ever-evolving expectations across the entire customer experience journey.
How has Ameyo benefited from the strategic partnership with Oracle Cloud?
With Oracle as our strategic cloud partner, we have now become more competitive in the cloud contact center market and expanded our customer base. The superior cloud economics we are realising with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has given us the confidence and capability to win more SMB customers, who typically have budget constraints. Using OCI, our customers are reporting over 30% improvement in application performance. Also, we have realized over 30% more cost savings by moving to OCI.
What is Ameyo’s growth strategy & innovation roadmap for 2021?
Ameyo has always been an innovative company. Our product teams are closely studying the market to anticipate what our customers will need in the new decade. Accordingly, we will continue to push the envelope and continue to bring new innovations to the cloud contact center market. We are currently piloting some key initiatives we plan to make available for customers in our upcoming product releases. These include faster search on a large number of tickets using elastic search, vertical-specific Video KYC solutions for securities, insurance, amongst others.
