Category: productivity

Business, Collaborating, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, productivity

When is a Contact Centre, NOT a Contact Centre

Imagine asking 100 people to describe a Contact Centre. Most would likely envision a bustling office space with employees wearing headsets, sitting in front of computers, and handling phone calls. This common perception, however, limits our understanding of what a contact center truly is and inadvertently excludes other businesses from recognizing themselves as part of this ecosystem.

Yet, there’s a missed opportunity in this narrow perspective. Consider the remarkable advancements in Contact Center Technology.

Technology evolves rapidly, often leaving us struggling to keep up. Just think about the capabilities packed into your latest iPhone or Android device—it’s more powerful than the technology that once took us to the moon.

The ongoing technology revolution brings both complexity and immense capability. Unfortunately, the terminology itself sometimes leads to exclusion, preventing businesses from realizing the substantial benefits available.

Consider this scenario: A business leader or owner dismisses the idea of using contact center technology because their company doesn’t fit the traditional contact center mold.

Remember, every business relies on customers for survival. These very customers interact with your business, reaching out and receiving responses. Are you following so far? Excellent.

These customers are part of the same ever-changing cycle as we are. They, too, embrace technological shifts. Moreover, consider how the demographics of your customer base influence the transition from “real-time live voice” conversations to more digital, near-real-time, or asynchronous interactions—think WhatsApp and similar channels.

Ignore these changes at your peril, because we all know that customers will vote with their feet if you are not able to offer them the flexibility and choice that they demand of us.

This is not about Tech for Tech sake, but embracing the inevitable change that is happening with or without us. 

A word of caution, however. Do make sure that you plan this well and consider the fallout should you get this wrong. And some of the wrongest (I know, but it felt right to use the word) implementations are from some of the largest companies on the planet – why – I can only surmise that they feel they CAN, because they are the 400lb gorilla – but we all know they are wrong don’t we.

So my advice would be to dip your toe in the water and introduce these emerging DIGITAL channels into your NON-CONTACT CENTRE businesses and do it well. Making sure that you are not building them in siloes, but doing it in a joined up and connected way (Omnichannel) that keeps real people at the heart of the changes – your staff and your customers. 

Equally I would also investigate how AUTOMATION can better serve your customers – including Artificial Intelligence solutions using Generative AI. Although there is a place for less sophistication for some interactions 

Want some help and advice – just ask. I don’t bite, even as a Leicester Tigers 🐯supporter 😜

Business, channel, Customer Experience, partnership, productivity

New to reseller market:  Daktela UK – One App for All your Business Communications

October 2022: Omnichannel Contact Centre provider Daktela UK announces collaboration with Trust Partner Services, a move which will open significant new business opportunities for a select number of channel partners in the UK.

Daktela UK is an experienced player in the cloud contact centre market. Established in 2010, their senior leadership team have worked in the contact centre industry for over 30 years selling solutions through direct and indirect sales channels.

Daktela have an ambitious recruitment campaign underway with a mission to establish a small number of strategic partnerships within the UK channel reseller community. 

Differentiation is a critical component for resellers, and Daktela enables their partners to do exactly that – instead of being one of several bids with the same technology offer, Daktela is both unique and incredibly functional and feature-rich, across the small to mid-enterprise customer space.

To ensure that they connect with the best possible channel partners, they have engaged Trust Partner Services to guide them.

“We are excited to grow our footprint in the UK with Trust Partner Services. Daktela has the best technology at the best price, and we see channel partners playing a significant role in our expansion plans,” said Steve McSherry, UK Country Manager at Daktela UK.

“Sophisticated customers expect a sophisticated experience. Businesses are turning to their providers to source the right technology, but we understand you need to differentiate to remain competitive. With Daktela, resellers can stand out from the crowd and have a real point of difference.” continues Steve McSherry.

Graham Bunting, Founder at Trust Partner Services, said: “Demand is growing for omnichannel as customers demand a better experience. Daktela helps businesses enjoy a more joined-up approach to communications. We will be working with resellers to help deliver this message and explain the benefits of Daktela. Partners can also bring their expertise with Daktela’s open API, creating a joint enterprise that benefits both parties. This, teamed with their staged approach to Contact Centre deployments, gives ultimate flexibility for resellers.”

About Daktela UK

Daktela UK is a leading provider of cloud-based communication, uniquely combining pioneering digital technology with over 30 years of real-world customer experience. They are on a mission to help UK businesses to create extraordinary customer experiences with their flexible, scalable packages. To find out more, contact:  info@daktela.co.uk or visit http://www.daktela.co.uk.

About Trust Partner Services

Trust Partner Services are a niche consultancy specialising in supporting Technology/Voice/Software vendors’ go-to-market strategy and ecosystem building in the UKI & Europe. Founder Graham Bunting’s experience of local markets, and network, is second to none, having worked at partner, distributor, and vendor levels.

To grow your business, we are committed to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. Simplification, communication, and localisation provide a clear advantage in any market. We are the company you can trust to help you deliver Experiences that Matter to your channels and customers.

For more information – graham@trustpartnerservices.com

Business, channel, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, partnership, productivity

Trust Business Partners and INOVO Partnership

Trust Business Partners and INOVO Partnership

London, 16h February 2020 – Trust Business Partners today announced that it has expanded its strategic partnerships through a new agreement with INOVO, who provide the tech and ongoing optimisation to boost contact centre efficiency, productivity and CX.

Trust Business Partners will be the face of INOVO in UKI & Europe, representing the brand through sales and marketing activity, recruiting new channel partners, systems integrators and creating local European strategic alliances. Trust Business Partners has over 30 years’ experience in the UKI & European contact centre space working directly with customers and partner channels.

INOVO is a cloud contact centre solutions provider that focuses on delivering business results rather than just enablement. The company devotes a dedicated team of industry specialists to every customer account to drive continuous improvements in efficiency, productivity and CX. INOVO’s clients vary from 10 to a few thousand seats across several sectors such as: financial services, retail, telecoms, healthcare, BPO, hospitality and travel.

INOVO was established in 2006 after a group of experienced contact centre specialists joined forces to disrupt the contact centre market. By adopting a “partner” over “vendor” approach, the goal was to deliver business services that extended beyond just providing great technology, and really focused on understanding, and meeting a customer’s unique requirements.

“Our success has stemmed from our ability to identify specific business challenges and use cases and be innovative in how we help businesses solve them. We look at a business holistically – whether it’s the underlying processes or the tech – and work with our customers to continually drive improvements. We’re looking forward to working with Trust Business Partners to help deliver this kind of business value to contact centres in UKI and throughout Europe,” said Wynand Smit, CEO and founding partner of INOVO

“Customers today demand well-informed and intelligent business conversations around technology and processes to enhance their contact centre and customer experience. INOVO’s ability to enhance services while improving time to resolution and reducing costs will be very attractive for partner channels seeking to grow additional revenue streams and service customers better. We believe that with this partnership, customers and partners in UKI & Europe will be able to differentiate themselves significantly with INOVO’s unique offer.” said David Pitts, Founder Partner at Trust Business Partners

About INOVO

INOVO is a cloud contact centre solutions provider that focuses on delivering business results rather than just enablement. The company devotes a dedicated team of industry specialists to every customer account to drive continuous improvements in efficiency, productivity and CX. INOVO’s clients vary from 10 to a few thousand seats across several sectors such as: financial services, retail, telecoms, healthcare, BPO, hospitality and travel. For more information, visit https://www.inovo.co.za.

About Trust Business Partners

Trust Business Partners are a niche consultancy specialising in supporting IT/Voice/Software vendors and suppliers go to market strategy in the UKI & Europe. David Pitts and Graham Bunting’s (founding partners) experience of local markets is second to none having worked at partner, distributor and vendor level plus running their own successful businesses.

To grow your business, we’re committed to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. Simplification, communication and localisation provide a clear advantage in any market. We’re the company you can trust to help you deliver Experiences that Matter to your channels and customers.

Business, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, productivity

Automation, bots and more

We have all experienced web chatbots havent we? How was your experience?

The thing about automation and Digital Channel engagement, is that it needs to be well thought out and implemented carefully – too often it seems like a knee-jerk reaction and tactically deployed and siloed from other customer-facing areas of the business. For example, a twitter account, or Facebook account are set up and the marketing teams engage with customers driving news, promotions and the like, but when customers reach in through that “window” for help, they are left frustrated and alienated because the social team are “unable to help”…. never a good look is it.

A much better solution is to create a unified engagement experience – built on a “universal engagement” platform that allows an experience to be created once and deployed on any digital channel available, allowing customers to choose their route into your business, and to always receive the same high quality conversations – including self-serving where appropriate. So whether this is WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram or SMS, the experience can easily be deployed.

Not stranded

When the self-service attempts fail – and they will on occasions, because the customer might be after something you had yet to consider they might need, your customer needs to be carefully handed over from automation, to a human agent ALONG WITH THE CONVERSATION TO THAT POINT, so they do not feel frustrated, abandoned or marginalised.

Imagine the response from a customer when the agent engages and knows, not only who they are, but also understand their journey to that point.

Business, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, productivity, Social

Contact Centres – YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK, GOODBYE

Contact Centres – YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK, GOODBYE

Change or die is the message here. Progress means change is inevitable, yet we often see reluctance from business in this regard.

Changing gradually, is more of an evolutionary path and generally means a less bumpy and more controlled transition.

Change for the sake of change is questionable, however, change because your customers are demanding it is smart and clearly demonstrates customer-centric behaviours. It says “we are listening, and we are implementing the services you’re telling us are important to you”

A business’s inability to evolve generally results in frustrated customers, and ultimately customer defections.

It does increasingly feel like businesses make it difficult for you to contact them, doesn’t it, and although many of them are embracing digital channels like social media to broadcast their marketing messages. Ironically, this opens up new channels for customers and, yet those same organisations have so far failed to embrace the two-way nature of the communication that it enables. Broadly speaking, this is because these have become siloes that are unconnected, and unregulated, and staffed by unprepared team members.

There is no excuse for this, because the technology to rapidly deploy a connected omni-channel solution is available today. And to meet customers on their chosen channel without needing to rip and replace existing investment can be in place within days.

Business, channel, productivity

Trust Strike Ascentae Deal

Creative Workspace SolutionsTrust Business Partners has announced a new contract with Ascentae to support growth into the UC VAR space. Trust will provide business consulting services to support the growth strategy of Ascentae, a fledgling UK distributor of AV equipment and services.

David Pitts and Graham Bunting will be working with Jon Knight of Ascentae to promote CREATIVE WORKPLACE SOLUTIONS as a key differentiator for UC VAR’s to sell more to their existing customers and make them stickier.

It’s a debate that many businesses face as they ponder the possibilities of digital transformation. How can the benefits of greater collaboration be embraced without losing all paper-based processes? The business value of improving collaborative opportunities may be obvious, however, there seems to be a degree of apprehension when it comes to transferring to digital. One major barrier to change is workplace culture and the reluctance to introduce new technology for fear of disrupting tried and tested processes. Organisations want to take small steps towards a new working world rather than a giant leap to overhaul existing practices.

Ascentae’s exclusive distribution agreements include the Nureva HDL300 Audio conferencing technology. At the heart of the HDL300 is Microphone Mist technology, which fills the room with 8,192 virtual microphones.

Listening to all microphones simultaneously, it dynamically selects the one closest to the speaker, ensuring the best quality sound for remote listeners.

“Trust and integrity are the foundations of partnerships,’ says Graham Bunting ‘and we are looking forward to working with Ascentae to help grow and expand their business.”

Business, productivity, remote working, working from home

Workspace not Workplace | Workspace updates

Workspace not Workplace | Workspace updates. The whole concept of Work is changing – there are many reasons why this is happening, but changing attitudes to work coupled with agile working policies underpinned by technology innovation are probably a few of the key factors.

Business, partnership, productivity, remote working

Unified Comms Nirvana

UC is a philosophy and a culture underpinned by technology. It’s about communications and collaboration which are people centred rather than technology lead. UC is a journey towards a better personal and customer centred environment, that is not about just a technology refresh or buying new. As there is no universally accepted definition, this presents a challenge of common understanding in discussion, which can be overcome by simply investing a small amount of time to work back from a future vision to a current position. In doing this, the language can be neutralised as a potential barrier to common understanding. One of the key challenges beyond the definition is that of “baggage”. What I mean by this is that we are all a product of our experiences and whilst in many or most cases this can be a real asset, in the world I am discussing here, I see it as a potential pinch point. My rationale here is that telephony in particular has worked in a certain way for many years and in particular PBX functionality has been somewhat staid, and most people still use telephony in the same way they always have:

Scene 1
* Phone rings
* Answer phone (if you’re lucky)
* Conversation and perhaps transfer or enquiry
* Terminate call

Scene 2
* Pick up handset dial number speak and disconnect

Now when you start to shift your thinking – the whole communications experience can become enriched and the process cycles reduced. In the above examples, there are often additional actions that will take place after the call, such as an email will be sent to support the call, or to confirm the conversation or a document is shared via email. With a UC solution such as Microsoft Lync, the experience could look more like this:

Scene 3
* Lync client alerts to inbound call
* Click to answer and talk on your headset – hands free
* Caller shares a document with you and a focused conversation takes place
* You decide to bring in a third party who works for a different organisation, but because you federate your presence status you can see (using the rich presence capability) that they are free so you can simply “drag tham” into the conference.
* The call continues and you need to leave the office you transfer via a mouse click to your mobile device and continue the call * Whilst in the call, you send an IM message from your mobile to your colleague to ask a question not for general consumption, and get a response in seconds
*Call terminates and the project is advanced.

Scene 4:
* You want to convene an ad-hoc conference call so you click on meet me and add the participants from your lync client.
* Meeting commences as colleagues join you record the call and share the recording for others as reference point to agreements and actions and whilst on the call schedule the follow up.
* Call ends and project is progressed

This is a paradigm shift in the way we think about communications and collaboration and has to be experienced to be really appreciated but for sure it is a move in the right direction. Why not check it out – you will be glad you did…

Business, productivity, remote working

Reduce your email traffic? Yes please.

It’s all got a bit out of hand now hasn’t it? Email started off so well too. Immediate communications from your desktop rather than the lengthy process of “word-processing” a document, printing it, fetching it, walking to the fax machine….. You remember that – right? Then the traffic began to build, and build, and build. Where do all off the emails come from. Conversation being held via email, copying “all” followed swiftly by a “copy all” WILL YOU STOP COPYING EVERYONE ON YOUR RESPONSES.
So is it any wonder that the introduction of a tool that’s”fit for purpose” is gaining high rates of adoption. Microsoft lync’s instant messaging does exactly what it says on the tin, removing the need for protracted email conversations AND because presence status shows availability and out of office message before contact is attempted, unnecessary traffic is avoided. In addition to which this capability can, through federation, function beyond corporate boundaries with clients, suppliers and partners within your chosen ecosystem.
The user experience is best in class, and you don’t even have to be at your desk to access it. Lync sets you free to work from wherever you can access a data connection….. Which also reduces your call charges.

Why wouldn’t you want to consider lync?

Business, productivity

Bring Your Own Device

I was recently pondering technology and specifically the kind of technology that I’ve spent a significant portion of my working life with and that is telecommunications – telephones and data communications if you will.

For a long time the enterprise or business community led the way as far as technology adoption went and especially telecommunications. I’m sure you all recall the first mobile phone “bricks” that were for a long time “status symbols” in the workplace. But now it’s all change,as nearly all of us have I am sure, very “smart” smartphones full of the latest apps, and tablet devices aplenty for our own use, and acquired personally. And so most people have better technology available to them in their pocket than many enterprises have afforded them today. As a result of this “dynamic”, increasingly individuals are deploying their own devices in the work environment (Bring Your Own Device) causing an absolute headache for the IT department as far as security of information is concerned. Notwithstanding this, many enterprises are stepping up to the plate and enabling their workforce to deploy their own devices which on the face of it might seem to be a good thing for the enterprise – allowing them to save money on not equipping everybody with new technology – perhaps?!

However this is only part of the conundrum given that ultimately communication is all about, well …..communication and the very disparate nature of these devices with different operating systems et cetera clearly presents a challenge in terms of integration and of course making them all work seamlessly. And that’s before we even get into a conversation about support. So having said all of this what’s my point. Well my point is this. The Legacy PBX and communications infrastructures are clearly creaking at the seams, in fact many haven’t been updated since the end of 1999 (when the Millennium bug was going to see planes falling from the skies) amidst fears of failure if nothing was done, and I begin to wonder who today is really offering the greatest innovation to meet the needs of the way we’re choosing to communicate and work these days?

Many of the usual suspects are struggling with the very legacy that everyone else is, and I can’t currently see any vendor really rising up to the challenge, however, I can’t help feeling that one of the worlds biggest players albeit not known for their “voice” credentials – Microsoft may well have the answer with their Lync offering and the partnership ecosystem (or ISV ecosystem) that I’m seeing beginning to evolve.

There are increasingly so many compelling reasons to ensure we review and change the way in which we communicate, not least of which the challenges around travel and the drive for organisations to become increasingly more green and create a much smaller carbon footprint. So I guess the biggest challenge here really is the disparate nature of these technologies and the understanding for organisations in order to be able to successfully integrate these technologies to work effectively and of course in these austere times to find an affordable solution. So in the final analysis I can see that we will increasingly see the adoption of the aforementioned technologies and in a “use what you require” cloud supplied utility price model. And it seems to me that for the next few years certainly that this will increasingly be the preferred acquisition model. Services organisation with a heavy bias on knowledge workers will be the “glue” that makes it all work, and ultimately free us from the “desk”??  – well that is I believe a completely different challenge and discussion for another day.

But what do I know…..