Many contact centres are moving to cloud-based solutions and opex models. (Image source: 123RF)
South Africa’s contact centre industry is growing fast, and BPO services are looking to agile, reliable cloud platforms to help them scale up.
So says Nazeer Adam, founder and CEO of wholesale telecoms provider iMobility, whose unified multi-tenant, redundant and extremely scalable platform is helping contact centres across the country grow their businesses.
Adam says: “The local contact centre industry is growing rapidly – particularly in the Western Cape – largely owing to our weak currency and local skillsets that make South Africa attractive to international entities.”
Cloud, opex for cost-effective scalability
As local contact centres expand their operations, many are moving to cloud-based solutions and opex models. Adam says: “Traditionally, South Africa lacked the fibre networks and wireless to meet the needs of high-capacity cloud-based contact centres, but I think we’ve crossed that bridge: fibre and wireless coverage has improved drastically in recent years, and costing has come down.”
Adam says: “The larger contact centres and telecoms providers are shifting from capex to opex models – often within their own environments for compliance and control. For this class of customer, iMobility offers a carrier class unified communications and contact centre, with single pane of glass management, on an opex model. For mid-sized and large contact centres, iMobility’s MobiContact is an enterprise-grade, cloud-hosted contact centre as a service (CCaaS) and CRM integration platform to manage unified communications and contact centre services support across web, mobile and desktop apps from a single platform.”
Built for reliability and scale
With over 10 000 unified communications and contact centre agents using the platform across various industries, iMobility is trusted for its reliability, scalability and high-level customer service
Adam says: “It’s a next-gen platform because it offers WebRTC; you can log on via a web browser and we offer desktop software for Windows and Mac, as well as a mobile client.”
Scaling with iMobility is simple: because the platform has clustered architecture, it scales horizontally. Adam says: “We can add more hardware as we need to and easily scale contact centres. And the fact that this platform is multi-tenanted means we have virtual segmented instances for different types of contact centres. Each instance can be white labelled for our partners, licensees and resellers. Every reseller could have their own branding within the platform.”
Adam says iMobility delivers a cost-effective, comprehensive platform that meets all the needs of growing local contact centres. He says: “For a start, we have a huge focus on service and the user-friendliness of the platform, to ensure a good customer experience.”
Customisation and integration
“Furthermore, the iMobility platform can be customised and personalised with APIs and webhooks for quick integration and expert customisation and development services from iMobility. This means we’re a lot more agile than some of the larger and longer-standing contact centre providers. So we can provide that personalisation entities need, and we can do it quite quickly.”
Whether a contact centre requires third-level integration with another entity for off-site recordings or compliance, or they want their reporting in a specific format, iMobility customises the solution to meet their needs.
Adam notes that MobiContact enables seamless native integration with key CRM tools such as Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, Odoo and Hubspot.
“We can integrate with any system,” he says. “For agents, what this means is a single interface. They don’t have to log into multiple platforms to view their customer profiles and offer better customer support.”
Because security and compliance are primary concerns for partners and customers, iMobility’s platform has stringent security built in from the ground up. Adam says: “Our platform is completely firewalled off, with layers of security including Fail2ban to prevent unauthorised login attempts, and geo-locking.”
He adds: “We have a huge focus on reliability and uptime, because we understand the productivity and financial impacts contact centres would face if their systems went down. This is why we have site redundancy and geo-redundancy built in.
“Another big differentiator for us is the high level of service we offer our partners. They gain direct access to our expert skills to support them adequately whenever they need us,” he concludes.
