The next-generation voice solutions for the IT and ITES sector

Summary: Contact centres play a critical role in shaping customer experience but are difficult to manage and scale with their elaborate legacy infrastructure. The IT and ITeS companies that are ready to leverage evolving technology for leaner operations can now get a host of digitalised voice solutions to make their outbound and inbound telephonic services more flexible and cost-effective. These hosted solutions also support businesses in an age when the remote work culture is gaining ground.

A few years back, a contact centre was considered as a separate business wing for operational efficiency – it was desirable but not an essential part of an organisation. Also, only large companies with significant budgets could afford to serve customers via telephonic services. Today, customer experience has morphed into a key differentiator for companies of all sizes. Contact centre technologies, therefore, feature in strategic business decisions.

In times when digital and information technologies have become integral to general and corporate life, the ability of IT and ITeS companies to serve their clients seamlessly is critical in generating business value. They must be able to provide prompt responses when users of their products/services reach them for guidance and troubleshooting support through a phone call. The ‘contactless services’ that have increased since COVID-19 have made telephonic support even more essential for such businesses.

They must also have cost-effective and user-friendly voice channels to communicate with their B2B clients abroad.

The Challenges of Deploying and Managing Traditional Voice Solutions

Despite IT companies dealing in tech-rich products and solutions, setting up a conventional contact centre with elaborate equipment and servers can be complicated, requiring significant investment. The cumulative costs of initial deployment, followed by subsequent updates, hardware, infrastructure maintenance, and application administration can go into lakhs of rupees, depending on the employee strength.

ITeS that frequently run business process outsourcing (BPO) operations and increasingly offering work-from-home facilities to their employees must also have flexible channels to serve their clients.

The major impediments in implementing and managing traditional voice solutions are:

Siloed technologies:

To set up their contact centres, IT and ITeS companies have to source telecommunication technologies, equipment and software from different vendors, which are not always compatible. Managing and renewing licenses for multiple units also become difficult.

Inflexible infrastructure:

On-premise legacy infrastructure is difficult to scale and transfer. When a business adds a new department, starts a regional office, expands a team or has to meet new expectations of customers, it needs additional hardware. Or it may have to switch to a new PBX system if the existing lines cannot support the site(s).

Lack of visibility into business processes:

Siloed on-premise contact centres hinder a company’s ability to identify and address problems. Integrated dashboards for all employees are difficult to maintain, and quality analysts must barge into individual calls to analyse agent performance. Moreover, only experienced personnel in a dedicated IT team can manually navigate the system to analyse the log files.

Maintenance expenses:

Since it involves an elaborate physical infrastructure with multiple fixed PSTN lines and PRI ports, a legacy contact centre is also difficult to maintain. Each repair, upgrade and service can take several manhours, resulting in extra costs and unnecessary downtime for at least a part of the operations.

TTBS Voice Solutions for Efficient and Cost-Effective Voice Calls

From refining their existing contact centre infrastructure with IP technologies to digitalising the complete environment with hosted solutions, Tata Tele Business Services offers a range of voice solutions for IT and ITeS companies.

Here are a few options that our clients can use to build or improve their telecommunication processes:

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP):

SIP trunks enable phone calls through IP technology while using PSTN numbers. IT and ITeS companies that usually have high-bandwidth Internet service for their work centres can utilise the data connectivity for cost-effective calling via SIP.

The solution is also recommended for older enterprises wishing to reap the benefits of cost-savings and flexible communication without ripping off their existing PSTN systems. SIP can be deployed with traditional PBX by using a VoIP gateway that converts the PBX interfaces to Ethernet. It also packages the voice traffic for transfer over the IP-based trunk to the SIP vendor network.

In addition to voice calls, organisations can use SIP for instant messaging, email services and video applications at work. With low OpEx and ease of maintenance, it gives them a rich user-experience for multimedia conferencing.

SIP with Hosted PBX:

Newer IT and ITeS companies or those trying to move their contact centres to the cloud for offering their employees work-from-home abilities can consider a hosted PBX system for SIP functionalities.

The TTBS Smart Hosted PBX is an outbound call-connect solution that negates the need for investment in physical infrastructure. It enables an organisation to set up its telecom base on TTBS’ virtual cloud-hosted PBX.

Employees can log in to the system’s call patch application. Once it connects them to the central dashboard and dialler, they can use the click-to-call option for connecting with the assigned customers. This click-to-call service is browser-based and can be used on any desktop or mobile device. It can also be integrated with the customer’s existing CRM using the open APIs on our platform.

Smart Hosted PBX brings in all the benefits of SIP trunks with zero CapEx and the convenience of remote access, leading to cost-efficacy and high employee productivity.

International Bridging Service (IBS):

Many IT and ITeS companies serve global business customers and must be in regular touch with their clients for discussing strategies and communicating results.

The IBS solution enables them to connect with any international location with ISD facility on their phones. It also offers a centralised bridge facility to meet all conferencing requirements cost-effectively.

Enterprises do not need any physical infrastructure to deploy the IBS. The hosted virtual server for this voice solution is located in a secure TTBS-owned cloud data centre. Users get a consistent calling experience through any web browser on desktop or mobile.

For further security, IBS authenticates genuine users via number whitelisting/account ID/PIN. It also builds usage reports recording all the calls made by its employees for work.

Hosted IVR:

The TTBS Hosted IVR is a cloud application that enables callers to choose from a menu of automated prompts when they call a business number. Based upon their response, it directs them to the most appropriate resource for their query’s resolution – this could be a particular team or contact centre agent. Alternatively, the caller hears a recorded message concerning his/her account in the company or is directed to a voicemail service.

IT and ITeS companies often face a heavy flow of incoming calls for troubleshooting support on their products, requests for engineering services at home or to get more information on a product/service that customers may be interested in. With Hosted IVR, they can serve such callers efficiently and convert leads promptly, reducing the costs of customer service.

This self-service portal for callers also creates a better customer experience by saving their time with automated support.

A future-ready contact centre

As per a study by Gartner¹, by 2025, most contact centres would be in cloud-based applications for their calling operations. IP-oriented SIP technology and hosted voice solutions with no physical infrastructure make it simpler to meet customers’ growing expectations and offer 24/7 omnichannel support.

The SLA-backed voice services at TTBS help to build future-ready contact centres that IT and ITeS companies need to improve their service reliability and reduce the operational costs. To know more about our offerings, call us on https://www.tatateleservices.com/business-services/marketing-solutions/hosted-ivr-service.