Interactions Simplified

Whitepaper

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

Table of Contents

1 2

Introduction Kind of technology 2.1 2.2 Globally Renowned Solutions Free or White Labelled Solutions

1 2 2 2 5 6 6 6 6 6 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 10 10 10

3. Ameyo contact center solution 4. Ameyo vs Free (Free based White Labelled) 4.1 4.2 Robustness and Reliability Intelligence 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.3 4.2.4 4.2.5 4.2.6 4.2.7 4.2.8 4.3 5 ROI Predictive Dialer AMD Lead Management Ameyo PACE Call Back Management CTI (Screen Pop) Speed Supervision and Reporting Voice Quality and Voip Handling

Success Stories About Drishti Customers Awards and Appreciation

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

www.drishti-soft.com

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

1. Introduction
Contact centers have been around for more than a decade and continue to show slow but steady growth. Most of the contact centers today run tele-sales processes with 10-100 seats on an average. Usually a BPO starts with one telemarketing process and acquires multiple processes over time. These BPO's run telemarketing processes wherein revenue is generated on a pay-out per success (usually sales) model. The outsourced telemarketing processes get paid in USD's whereas they pay their business costs in INR. The conversion rates thus make it a highly profitable venture. However, due to intermediaries, human errors or other dependencies payment such business usually turn into a bad investment. For instance: The middlemen simply delay the payment or in the worst case scenario frauds may happen. In this atmosphere the survival of a telemarketing contact center depends on its business continuity and ability to acquire and deliver over multiple processes.

Broadly the three pillars of such businesses are

l Business l Quality

development and Customer management and Technology

of Agents and operations

l Connectivity

Historically, these startups are mostly entrepreneur driven businesses and micro management of all the three pillars is done by a one man team. Who wishes to achieve as much cost optimization as possible. Such entrepreneurs instead must focus on BD and customer management rather than operations and fire-fighting of technology issues. The latter should ideally be handled by hiring good resources or finding good technology partners. However cash-flow problems and stringent budgets in a small setup, push entrepreneurs to curtail expenses on basic infrastructure and agent quality and thus the entrepreneur is always left to managing the operations internally rather than focusing on business development. This vicious cycle on one hand leads to many call centers shutting down the shop and on the other hand spawns many call centers due to an opportunity in place. Contact centers are primarily ITeS which means they are IT enabled Services and IT obviously plays one of the most important role amongst the three pillars. Therefore it should not be compromised to below hygiene levels. In fact it is highly disturbing to note that very few startups that choose to ignore technology in their initial phases, survive (less than 10%). The rest tend to do away with suboptimal IT infrastructure and move to better technology and IT. We at Drishti are operating in this domain since the past 10 years and our experience says it's mostly due to erroneous focus and poor technology specifically in terms of IT infrastructure and connectivity that leads to premature business death. Today, we replace around 4-5 such sub-optimal technologies every month wherein customers have invested in capex, only in small measures. We have witnessed very few businesses who are yet able to survive with sub-optimal technology.Those that do survive are mostly doing so because of exceptional entrepreneurial efforts, however even these end up highly under-utilizing their true potential.

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-1

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

2.

Kind of Technology

Now the most important question facing such companies becomes what are the technology options available to the telemarketers and what parameters should serve as a lamp post for choosing an optimal solution which offers a decent ROI. Especially for telemarketers one has to follow the methodology of doing it right the very first time therefore a hit and miss method is unadvisable.

2.1

Globally Renowned Solutions

Being legacy provisioners of contact center technology, these solutions are so well known in the industry that they are usually bought through peer references or after a brief introspection of their products. What makes them an unpopular choice among the contact centers is the cost implications with each seat costing around $2K+ dollars including other add on costs like software OS/DB/Server licenses or hardware implications. Also as with any solution that is implemented there are recurring cost considerations on its service and maintenance. It is erstwhile to note the expenditure involved in renewing. Keeping all these factors in mind, it can easily be deduced that these solutions are not affordable for a contact center.

2.2

Free or White Labelled Solutions

These are almost free solutions that can be downloaded off the internet and sold or white labeled by few companies at costs as low as $500 for limitless licenses in a setup costing upto only $200 per seat. Since most of these solutions are cloaked they show implemented features as tick-marks but rather they lack intelligence for any good productivity and are unstable (constant system failures and unreliable operations). They are not meant for serious business and are at most a short term fix. All it takes is one rotten apple to spoil the bunch, non-productivity is a cost that a business cannot afford to bear. Sales or engineering oriented teams download an open-source solution and either sell it as a service or in most cases illegally white-label it in their name. The companies selling this freeware usually deploy onsite engineers who do very frequent site visits only to simply reboot the server and restart the application rather than fixing the bugs. Since the bugs are not fixed, errors are again introduced, affecting uptime and productivity. This proves that companies peddling the freeware lack the knowhow on fixing these blocker bugs. Which is obvious, given the fact that none of their engineers or developers (nobody from India) are a part of the support or development forums (not a single line of source code has been written).

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-2

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

Given below is a screenshot of Freeware owners that clearly warns consumers that freeware is being illegally white labeled by such firms.

Source - http://www.callcentersindia.com/showall-orig.php?value1=50012_REBRANDED Vicidial(http://www.vicidial.org/vicidial.php)* is an open source AGPL licensed free contact center software which has no licensing or sizing restrictions, no matter whether you run ViciDial with 5, 10 or 100 agents. Vicidial has an online support forum where companies running the solution post queries on blocker bugs, these queries are then resolved in an ad hoc manner by few moderators or mostly fellow VICIDIAL users who have suffered similar problems. Not surprisingly, sometimes the queries go unanswered overall, in spite of being categorized as a major issue that the user is facing. Source - http://www.vicidial.org/VICIDIALmantis/view_all_bug_page.php

The above screenshot shows the number of major bug issues filed by users in the VICIDIAL support forum as of 12/13/2012. It is appalling to note that all of them are in open status since the past year. In Case ID 0000420: Around 1% of all calls are being dropped in the middle of a conversation with customer. The user clearly states The problem seems to be caused either buy a bug in Vicidial or an erroneous configuration. The problem has a huge impact in the operation of the Call Center and it is a major source of annoyance for the agents, but it is especially difficult to identify and solve, because it only presents in 0.5 - 1 % of the calls. I would be glad if anyone could give an insight on how to pinpoint the root cause of the issue to proceed with a solution.

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-3

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

This was the user's condition over a year ago, and the issue hasn't been closed till date. It is therefore safe to assume that this customer would have migrated over to other technology or is not in business any more. In a telemarketing environment where the number of customer connects are so low, if you end up losing a percentage of those connects due to technology problems it is fatal to your cause. Proving the lack of accountability when it comes to quality and support is another query shown below where the user is suffering from a missing sale in his team performance report. Having clearly stated the fact in the beginning of this paper that most business work on a Pay per Success model, how can the business get paid if the details of a sale (success) is missing?

This issue has gone unresolved since 16-07-2012 with the user being in clear agony. What serves more as a proof of poor technology than support in this case is the fact that the same issue keeps on coming back and the user keeps on asking for a resolution after multiple self attempts at troubleshooting, with no help coming from the forum.

The teams re-selling this solution are worse as they are not even members of this support forum and mostly, won't even follow such bug issues, lacking the knowledge on how to do so. Instead they would restart the setup or work on relationship building. No serious software programmer or business would work in such an environment as any competent professional team would work in building a genuine technology rather than white-labelling a free software that has no accountability in the first place and is a temporary fix at best.

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-4

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

3.

AMEYO Contact Center Solution

Ameyo is the de-facto solution today for small telemarketing BPOs in India and Philippines, preferred by more than 1000 customers, the solution is the brainchild of the Drishti team founded by IIT alumni with a vision to build one of the the most respected technologies amongst the world and has won multiple accolades:

Awards and Appreciation

NASSCOM Innovation Awards 2008 Contact Center World.com Award 2008 Deloitte Fast 500 company in APAC NASSCOM - EMERGE 50 - 2009 Red Herring Asia Top 100 2010 Winner TMC Lab - Innovation Award - 2012 IP Contact Center Technology Award 2012 Best Contact Center Suite Award 2007 Red Herring Top 100 - 2008 IT & ITES Business of the Year Awards 2010 Best CC Technology Award at MECC 2011 International tevie Bronze Award - 2012

The core IP based product is built on known Java programming paradigms by Drishti team. It utilizes proven open source components like Asterix, Eclipse and JSON which due its open source roots reduces total cost of ownership. It is priced in the mid range bracket from $500 dollars to $1000 dollars making it an attractive option for businesses who do not wish to compromise on their technology.

Horizontal vs Vertical open source

Proven open source technologies are horizontal use based, open source software like that of Linux, Postgres, MySQL, Asterisk are a few prime examples . By horizontal we mean anything that can be used by most enterprises as part of their IT infrastructure. Such software are tested, supported and contributed by a large audience and get stable in much less time frame than those of vertical counterparts such as library management software or process specific call-center software. Where development is need specific, solutions that are based on the vertical approach are limited to usage for each particular purpose.

Keeping this in our rearview at Drishti labs, we practice stringent benchmarking and certification of all software including Ameyo as well as associated hardware. We believe in delivering our application to the customer as handy as an appliance wherein the customers access the solution via user-interfaces. The idea is to attract minimalistic mindshare of the entrepreneur to IT while our solution is in operation giving him the freedom to focus on other verticals of his business.

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-5

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

4. Ameyo vs Free/White-labeled
The solution differentiates from its competition for its Robustness, Reliability, Intelligence, VOIP Handling and World class Support & Services at affordable prices. Having serviced ample businesses we have multiple case studies and references which delineate Ameyo's capabilities as a solution. Before any agreement is reached Drishti does a strategic POC with each client for comparing the productivity and overall business results. The success rate of replacing the sub-optimal technology for this solution is 100% till date. Drishti's claim is to prove in black-and-white that no call center should opt for a suboptimal technology even if they are paid to use and test such technology. Few clear differentiators between AMEYO and the white labeled solution are:

4.1

Robustness and Reliability

While most operators say that downtime is not a critical issue when involved in outbound campaigns like telemarketing, so that they can go for white labeled solutions. The fact of the matter is that this negatively impacts business momentum. Frequent downtime is responsible for deteriorating agent quality as it impacts his focus and motivation, due to which errors are introduced. Ameyo is certified through stringent certification procedures and is built for enterprise grade deployment with 99.9% uptime. To add in document here is an extra spacefurther, Ameyo provisions redundancy and disaster recovery for mission critical processes. The certification process does not only ensure uptime but also guarantees that your operations are error free and of the best customer interaction quality.

4.2

Intelligence

The solution empowers organizations to increase the quantity, as well as the quality of a telemarketing campaign through intelligent features like predictive dialing, AMD, Advanced Lead Management, PACE, Call Back Management. These features make your operations intelligent so as to increase outgoing call volumes, optimize interaction time, improve quality, and further refine processes. 4.2.1 Predictive Dialer

AMEYO's patent pending predictive dialer algorithm is state-of-the-art and is based on machine learning. It learns more than 40 parameters based on which it takes a decision on how many numbers to dial. The agent wait time is minimized with almost zero calldrops (compliant to OfCom regulations) The intelligent algorithm alone enhances connects and reduces call-drops by more than 15% in comparison to FREE/White labeled or free based solutions. 4.2.2 AMD

The Answering Machine Detection feature of AMEYO ensures high answering machine detection rates and complies to standards. The AMD detection for FREE /White labeled

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-6

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

solution is usually less than 70% while error rate of more than 5% (they dispose of human interatction as AMD's). Ameyo delivers more than 80% while error rate is is less than 0.5% (as well as provides a mechanism of reducing the error rate further to even 0.1%). 4.2.3 Lead Management

Ameyo provides detailed Lead Management in which each lead has priorities and weights. It manages the higher priority lead list to be dialed first and once this is exhausted it moves on to the second highest priority. As in case of equal priority lead lists, it dials according to weighing that you assign on each list for example: weighing means you allot x% of calls to be dialed from one particular lead list and similarly allot y% from other list. The supervisors are enabled to manage the connects with help of lead lists intelligently, at a very granular level. 4.2.4 AMEYO PACE

Ameyo PACE (Pro-Active Connect Enhancer) is an algorithm that adds brains to the predictive dialer. The operators can configure customer behavior to the dialing algorithm using PACE. Based on call history and other available data, customers are automatically segmented for further processing of contacts as per the needs of the business process. PACE provides for better lead selection and for better productivity under similar pacing modes. 4.2.5 Call Back Management

Callback mechanism allows the users to schedule callbacks to call customers at their preferred time. In case the customer requests to talk to the same agent in his next interaction, you can enable the same agent callback. You can also specify the number of retries or set a callback reminder. Ameyo allows you to direct a callback to another agent or a workgroup of the same campaign after the specified expiry time. Ameyo has an easy-to-use interface for configuring and managing callbacks. Users can retrieve callbacks as per specified parameters such as the campaign, the time duration when the callback was uploaded or the time duration for which the callbacks are scheduled.

Department & role specific modules Need-based routing

Customizable

Future-ready

IP based networks Easy migration path to future Multi-tenancy

Increase in Business Availability Maximum customer contact SLA Management

Reliable

Holistic Approach

Extensible

Adaptable to different service use models (SaaS or Premise) Least turn-around time (Quick time to market) with rapid feature development.

CRM Configuration for user-friendly interface Modifications in run-time campaign and process parameters

Configurable

Manageable

Centralized management of users and processes Single-site & Multi-site environments

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-7

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

4.2.6

CTI (Screen Pop) Speed

The component services framework (patent pending) guarantees the real-time handling of critical events in a general purpose Enterprise Application processing environment. Ameyo guarantees events for customer call to CTI (Agent Browser) within 300 ms. It is a claim that even renowned solutions in the industry are also not able to make. It enables better customer greetings and prevents agent stress and fatigue. 4.2.7 Supervision and Reporting

Ameyo's advanced supervision interface presents user, campaign/ process and system level data in an easily interpretable and user-friendly graphical display. Independent interface concepts for processes and campaigns are shown on a more categorized display of resource performance. Entire telemarketing shift data is made available in graphs that helps identify trends and patterns. Thus supervisors, managers and analysts can constantly analyze performance efficiency, map planned strategy to actual performance, and improve on respective processes. Ameyo empowers design and generates business-oriented comprehensive reports to track necessary information for agent productivity, process efficiency, organizational performance and metrics tracking. Reports can be generated using real-time, latest data locally, or via a web-interface for remote access. Moreover, the Report Designer allows users to generate specific reports based on what they would want to gauge in any chosen performance parameter. 4.2.8 Voice Quality and Voip Handling

Call Center VOIP is usually a product of multiple redirections and often is troubled by many not-so-good implementation of switches and proxies. Ensuring QOS over errant networks and such an infrastructure is a challenge in itself. Call center IT has to struggle with blame-games between network provider, service provider and technology providers. AMEYO's expert SIP handling capability takes care of many usual issues and even allows a good quality of Voice interaction in usual issues, that are not taken care by FREE/White labeled solutions. Further, support team is equipped with right tools to identify and troubleshoot any issues. As a practice our support team provides logs and traces highlighting the exact issue, which expedites the process of resolving the issue at hand.

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-8

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

4.3

ROI

As per our study, the cost of running a BPO is mainly divided into:
1) Agents cost and Administrative overhead (including office, and infrastructure) which is of the order of 70%, 2) 3) Business development cost which is around 15%, IT cost which makes up the remaining 15 %.

The cost of IT infrastructure includes cost of Server machines, IP connectivity, Telecom services, PC and LAN infrastructure, Software licenses and many-more. Amongst this the cost of Ameyo (software) would be around 4%.In case a telemarketer opts for a FREE solution, the total savings are 4% wherein an immediate productivity drop of around 20% is witnessed due to lack of intelligence of the installed software solution. Moreover, the telemarketer is also deprived of the benefits of robust and quality operations of Ameyo which could have been attained at a minimal investment of 4% of the total cost. We have live case-studies substantiating our claims, we can also furnish the facts and figures on request for any detailed query.

5.

Success Stories
Before choosing Ameyo we were running our operations with a technology provided at almost 1/10 of the cost. We knew from the start that Ameyo was a better solution. However we were a startup and had financial restrictions. We were inclined towards reducing costs. Our sales and business development was excellent, but our time was spent on solving problems and escalation management. In due time wie lost valuable customers which prompted us to switch to Ameyo and now our business has grown exponentially. When we first used our previous solution, the idea in our head was a cost effective solution that could maximize our profit margins. The solution was the cheapest in the market and in the beginning it helped us with our telemarketing process. However, as we went forward we experienced a lot of glitches and lost customers due to the unstable technology. We realized that we were incurring more expenses in the lost customers, trying to get them back on board and resolving the small issues that popped up daily. We heard about the Ameyo Solution and decided to switch to the technology after getting convinced of its long-term benefits. We had a seamless operations and didnt lose any customers, over the long run it turned out to be more cost-efficient than our previous solution and our good profitmargin spread allowed us to expand and double our capacity in a short span of time. Providing a telemarketing process, we need to call out to customers and provide them with the correct product offerings on hand. We used a solution that was very cheap with a basic dialing functionality that claimed to do the job. Throughout our operations we experienced a lot of problems, there were application failures and several troubleshooting had to take place. After getting frustrated with the amount of technical faults we decided to try the Ameyo Solution. It greatly improved our customer connects and allowed our agents to sell our products to a broad range of customers. Now our agents are making more sales than ever before and we are looking to expand in the near future.

Mr. Vijay Raj, (CEO)

Zealous Call Center Services Pvt Ltd

Jerry Mathew, (CEO)

Hello Group or Hello Information Services

Mr. Vinoth, (COO)

Acme

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-9

Choosing the Right Telemarketing Contact Center Solution for BPO's

Whitepaper

About Drishti
Drishti-Soft is an innovator of Contact Center Software and Enterprise Communications Applications. Working in the domain of customer interactions management solutions, Drishti has consistently delivered futuristic applications to un-complicate communications. Call center solutions from Drishti is powering millions of inbound, outbound and blended interactions across the globe.

Customers
Drishti's next-generation communications applications have powered numerous mission critical processes having stringent SLAs. Solutions powered by Drishti's patent-pending Ameyo Platform have increased process efficiencies for customer processes across different industry verticals and multiple geographies. Our esteemed customers include:

Awards and Appreciation

Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Main Office - INDIA +91-124-4771000 +91-124-4039120 www.drishti-soft.com

Drishti Philippines, Inc. Philippines +632-923-8136 +63-905-331-5418 +632-7521416 www.drishti-soft.ph

India | Philippines | Sri Lanka | Bangladesh | Malaysia | Indonesia | Vietnam | Africa | Middle East | USA

info@drishti-soft.com

2013 Drishti-Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page-10