Exploring Enghouse Interactive

Enghouse Interactive, recently featured in my Top CCaaS Providers for 2019, provides an omni-channel contact centre, delivered via cloud, hybrid or on-premises deployments and is certified for Cisco, Avaya, NEC and Skype for Business. To drill down into the nitty gritty of the portfolio, I spoke to Dave McDowell, Senior Technical Consultant at Enghouse Interactive, to get a run down of the latest product enhancements to the portfolio.

Omni-channel and social aggregation

As a leading CCaaS provider, it’s a given that Enghouse Interactive provides voice, email, web chat, SMS and social media into a single pane of glass agent experience. I’d seen a few demos of the Enghouse Interactive contact centre before so I quickly skipped over the standard functionality and asked Dave how much they can do with social media. Sometimes, contact centre providers cite social media integration and it leaves a lot to be desired.

“We often work with the customer’s aggregator like Hootsuite or Conversocial so we can take almost anything via email from the aggregator as well as social media channels directly. What we are experts at is the queuing, delivering and reporting”

Ultimately, the agent receives an interaction regardless of the platform is enters from. This enables contact centres to work via blended interactions. “An agent receives a request in the same platform irrespective of the route it takes into the contact centre”.

Messaging into the contact centre

I asked Dave what Enghouse Interactive are doing with the extended branch of social media – messaging. He told me that things like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger will be treated as chat interfaces.

“What we’re doing is opening up the Enghouse Interactive products to allow third party chat interfaces to integrate to the platform. That’s important when you have a self-service interaction going on and a customer needs to escalate to a live human – with the context so the customer doesn’t have to start their conversation again”.

By using a persistent chat style, the business enhances its productivity as agents don’t need to gather information that has already been captured and the customer experience is greater as they only must provide information on their request once.

APIs to drive intelligence

Enghouse Interactive recognises they won’t be able to invent everything and deliver it to a customer. However, Dave told me that they do need to be open to allow integration with any emerging technology.

“I might have an email address, a phone number or an account number. This allows us to intelligently route that contact. By taking information from third party systems, we can drive whether a customer is high value or maybe they owe money and need to go through to accounts straight away”.

That then allows intelligent routing to become dynamic routing. Dave gave me an example.

“Offer the options that make sense to the customer’s relationship with you. If you know a customer only takes 5 of your 200 products, offer them those 5 rather than sending them down the route of all 200 products”.

Once they are in the right channel and right option, Enghouse Interactive then pops all information using CRM integration. This is applicable across all channels – rather than just CTI for phone and computer integration. So, your web chat and email agents have all this information popped to their screen, empowering them for any interaction.

Recording and evaluation

I informed Dave that I’d seen the call recording and screen recording modules in Enghouse Interactive. He was quick to add that when conducting evaluations, quality management is now about managing all interactions in the contact centre.

Supervisors with access to the quality management suite can now access emails, web chats and call recordings for evaluation after the event.

Speech to text technology is an additional module that also provides a transcript of each call recording. Utilising this, Enghouse Interactive can search recordings via keywords and phrases – and this is now across all channels.

Dave then told me about Vocal Coach which is the real-time speech analytics module. “Here, we’re looking at real-time metrics on the call. It’s split into soft analytics and hard analytics.”

Soft analytics

Soft analytics is made up of feedback noises like “uh uh” and “okay, hmm”, volume, silence and cross talk. On a desktop client, the real-time coaching can let the agent know they are talking too fast. This allows the agent to correct their behaviour as the call is in process.

Hard analytics

Hard analytics is made up of predefined keywords and key phrases that you want to hear – or don’t want to hear – in a call. “This is more common in regulated industries where business have to read specific terms and conditions. It allows the agent to get feedback in real-time and confirm that all key phrases have been met or not met”.

The cost to the company is getting it wrong. Regulated industries often receive fines if all terms and conditions are not covered so the ROI is clear.

Quality management

Vocal coach also auto-generates scorecards marking these soft and hard evaluators. This allows the quality manager to search calls based on the automatically generated call. As I was talking to Dave, I paused to think how much time a quality manager would get back in their working week – and the increase in sample size you can quality manage.

Automation is all about getting bots or machines to do the leg work for you. This frees up so much time for quality managers to do the value add work instead of ticking off criteria for agents that have performed fine and require no coaching.

Outbound notifications

Enghouse Interactive provides an outbound campaign module which includes outbound SMS and IVR calls. The difference with Enghouse Interactive’s outbound module is that it is tightly integrated with the contact centre for when people respond to those outbound notifications. Dave gave me a real-life example of a housing association using this tech today,

“When an SMS reminder goes out that rent is in arrears, customers can respond to the SMS or IVR call and they either get routed through to an agent or to an automated payment system if they are ready to pay”

Throughout the customer journey, from triggering the inbound interaction into the contact centre to after the event quality management, Enghouse Interactives’ portfolio does a little bit more in every area. It’s not simply an omni-channel contact centre solution.

To explore Enghouse Interactive in even more detail, you can visit their website here.