According to Kelvin Brown, customer operations executive at Telviva, integrations support businesses by enabling multichannel capabilities, with a focus on customer engagement, channel-centricity and quantity of channels, as well as omnichannel capabilities, with a focus on customer experience, customer-centricity and quality customer support.

This is especially important because the modern customer is spoilt for choice when it comes to communication channels, meaning businesses have to ensure they can provide seamless, transparent and personalised engagements with customers regardless of where they occur.

This requires strong, relevant insights about the customer, and so the starting point is a good customer relationship management (CRM) solution.

However, the world of CRM is not static. Deloitte research predicted that there would be 72% cloud CRM adoption by 2025.

With businesses increasingly moving away from legacy systems towards the cloud, there’s clearly an increased need for more flexible, cloud-based integrated communications solutions. Integrating communication capabilities with the CRM is vital for customer experience, workflow efficiency and built-in regulatory compliant features, among many more.

“Telviva’s CRM integration adds valuable context from voice or text-based customer interactions, beyond just a ‘timeline’ or ‘customer journey’ event lodged in the contact or account within a CRM. Telviva’s AI-powered contextual information filtering transcribes and extracts only the most relevant insights for each unique interaction, so that businesses can focus on what truly matters in each customer engagement,” says Brown.

He says key capabilities of the solution include summarised engagement notes, automated transcription and intelligent task management.

He explains that the integration solution currently meets almost all business requirements. Where a business does have unique challenges, or in instances where they have complex ecosystems, as is the case with many of the larger enterprises, Telviva’s local development team has the ability to customise in order to provide bespoke solutions.

Brown says that Telviva complements the standard CRM integration solution with its software development kit (SDK).

The SDK allows developers to embed Telviva’s communication functionality into bespoke or custom CRM systems.

“The SDK, which is in an advanced stage of development, provides functions such as calling and call control, various contact centre features, dashboarding for agent metrics, backend functions such as call recording and reporting, and transcription capabilities.”

He says that the SDK offering will benefit larger enterprises that cannot simply migrate to cloud CRM platforms.

“This solution enables organisations to integrate Telviva’s telephony and communication features directly into their existing systems. This provides flexibility and access to world-class, advanced communication capabilities, while maintaining their current infrastructure,” says Brown.

He explains that Telviva’s CRM integrations support multiple cloud CRM platforms, saying that market demand informs which CRM platforms are supported.

“The development decisions are based on market adoption in South Africa, with attention to global trends, and driven by our customers’ needs. In the UCaaS world, which is Telviva One, we support Zoho, Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Freshdesk. On the CCaaS side, we support native CRM integrations such as Salesforce, Freshsales, Servicenow, SugarCRM and Zoho, while the business also has open channel capabilities, integrating into any other CRM, legacy and in-house developed systems.”

CRM systems today are far more than just customer relationship software, as they are made up of many different components that are integral in day-to-day business operations. “For example, they may incorporate modules for billing and subscriptions, quoting, projects, support, development teams, HR and marketing,” explains Brown.

“This means that if the CRM is the default screen that teams use to do their work, the connector now enables the organisation to bring its communication suite from Telviva into this workspace and closes the loop, removing another device or application, with the obvious efficiencies attached.

“In the CCaaS world, the Telviva Omni system is typically the default screen, or the single pane of glass used by the agent, and in these cases, the integration between the Telviva Omni and the CRM is there to push and pull the relevant data to the agent to manage the interaction,” says Brown.

He says that Telviva caters for businesses that require a basic solution as well as those that are in need of a full omnichannel operation.

“Our teams work closely with businesses to understand their unique needs and context, and then provide the best fit for their digital journeys.”

To meet this growing demand, leading unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) company, Telviva, has extended its offering in the UK, which is enabled from AWS in Ireland, to both existing customers with UK requirements and in-country channel partners.

“UCaaS is enjoying robust growth globally,” says David Meintjes, Telviva CEO. He explains that during Telviva’s most recent presence at the Channel Live conference in the UK, it became abundantly clear that not only is Telviva delivering world-class UCaaS in the form of Telviva One, but there is also robust demand from channel partners for the types of solutions Telviva already offers to sub-Saharan businesses and its AWS-enabled customer in North America.

“The growth in UCaaS globally is driven by a number of factors. Businesses are moving from on-premise to the cloud for various reasons, but one of the most prominent growth drivers is the increasingly important requirement of dealing with multiple channels of communication.”

He explains that while the UK is further along the road of cloud adoption than SA, it is still only ahead by about 10 percentage points, so there is a long way to go yet.

Meintjes says that businesses are fast adopting text-based communication channels, such as live chat via a website or WhatsApp to augment traditional voice calls.

“To obtain a single view of customer engagements over multiple channels, a business requires a solution that aggregates that view over various channels and presents that information into the underlying business systems. Once that is in place then automation of high volume, low complexity interactions is often considered to create business efficiencies,” he says.

Another factor driving the adoption of UCaaS is the desire to move from a reactive to proactive service. Outbound communication triggered by events could be optimised over text-based channels, yet at all times offering the flexibility for a customer to move to another channel, such as voice.

Speaking to Telviva’s own growth, Meintjes says:

“We currently have operations in South Africa, Lesotho, UK, Canada and are busy extending the service to Australia. We largely follow a partnership model in jurisdictions other than South Africa.

“For the UK market, our focus is to service South African business process outsourcing (BPO) businesses and companies that have a UK head office or UK branch offices, as well as mid-sized UK channel partners,” he explains.

Giving more detail into how the offering works for companies that have requirements in both SA and the UK, Meintjes says that in an instance where a customer that has a registered entity in SA and the UK, and requires services in both jurisdictions, they only pay for the services in the primary jurisdiction in which they operate from and get the service in the other free.

He explains that each employee has the ability to dynamically register to two cloud PBXs – one in South Africa and one in the UK, which enables regulatory compliance alongside seamless communication at the lowest call costs. This is in addition to free on-net calling between teams.

In a nod of confidence for South African technology, he says channel partners in the UK have responded overwhelmingly positively to Telviva and its offerings, from UCaaS through to Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS).

“The first response is that the competitive product offering offers great margins to partners and that they can label the offering with their own brand. Partners see it as a future-proofing decision because they are dealing with an actual operator and not just someone selling software,” he says.

“The fact that it is a complete business communication solution is also attractive to partners, as is the scalability of the service from within the AWS environment. Then, in our engagements, we have certainly picked up that useability matters, as does full training and onboarding. Partners like that the solution is easy to adopt, and that they can start small and grow as needed with ease of integration.”

We’ve all experienced difficult customer experiences. Just recently, I opted to use WhatsApp to engage with a business but was channelled back and forth between channels to ultimately accept that I was number 200-odd in the voice queue. Ironically, that was the most positive outcome.

How, then, do businesses get it right?

It starts by balancing digital transformation with CX. Businesses are under pressure to implement digital channels and technologies such as artificial intelligence. They’ve heard about the benefits and everyone is speaking about AI.

The challenge, then, is ensuring that when new digital channels and technology such as AI are introduced, they improve efficiencies and don’t add to the problem.

The truth is that enabling a digital channel without properly designed backend processes can harm CX. If the channel that a business is setting up is not suited to the engagement it is trying to conclude, and the backend process has not been automated effectively or correctly, forcing customers to engage in complex, manual processes with agents, then that CX is going to suffer, ultimately resulting in an unhappy customer.

It is abundantly clear that delivering the technology is only one part of the equation. There needs to be a holistic approach with the following components in place: The right technology, a comprehensive customer journey mapping exercise, and the facilitation of the required automation. In other words you want your partner to deliver the channel and process, map your customer journey and ensure that automation makes for a fluid, seamless customer journey.

A key component of getting it right is matching the right channels to interaction complexity. Simple transactions can be actioned using digital channels and a level of automation.

On the other hand, more complex transactions should rely on human input and the use of traditional channels, such as voice and email.

A good rule of thumb is: When an engagement is complex, go with the agent, when it is transactional, you can automate it.

Delivering a good CX is not about making an investment and then forgetting about it. There needs to be ongoing quality assurance checks, and modern tools that enable real-time quality assurance can radically improve a customer journey.

Automated quality assurance is able to sample 100% of interactions as they happen, which is obviously far more effective than traditional quality assurance which relies on humans to sample a small percentage of engagements.

This technology is giving rise to the new trend of real-time analysis, insights and intervention. This is where a business has the ability to transcribe a call in real time, to analyse it and pick up on the sentiment of the engagement – whether it is by voice or text. If an interaction is not progressing the way it is expected to, an alert will enable a human to intervene in order to remedy the issue and save that customer at that exact point of frustration. But to get to this point, the basics need to be in place.

Simplifying customer engagements requires successful channel management, which goes beyond just implementing technology.

It is important that a partner can deliver a full suite of technology, but it’s crucial that they are also adept at mapping customer journeys efficiently while knowing how to design backend processes and automate effectively. The best partners can manage contact centres as a service to ensure the sustained health of a customer engagement ecosystem. Modern customers don’t stick around indefinitely – they demand a superior CX.