Cloud call center in a cloudless edge. Extraordinary New Year Adventures of ITooLabs in the Balkans
Traditionally, just before the New Year, it is customary to write about the results of the outgoing year, plans for the coming year, to congratulate customers, partners and colleagues on holidays. We do not want to break the established tradition and today we are publishing a post that will certainly create the necessary and proper mood among the readers of the ITooLabs blog. We want to talk about how the cloud business of our foreign partner, Balkan telecom operator VoxNet, how the work of Balkan colleagues looks, and how the ITooLabs platform helped automate a large European call center working on incoming and outgoing calls. At our request, the Macedonian colleagues took a lot of photos and even recorded a New Year video greeting.
The Balkan part of the ITooLabs business was not accidental. From the point of view of IT-technologies, the countries of the former Yugoslavia and Southeast Europe are quite an interesting place: little is known about Balkan developers or start-ups, the IT industry in the region is frozen in a state of “just about everything will start” at the beginning of zero and so far nothing started. The almost complete absence of e-commerce and digital, in some places very lame infrastructure, the predominance of WiMAX and ADSL. All together it creates a light veil of provincial and archaic nature. In part, this is the case: on the streets of Skopje or Sofia, you can still find a donkey harnessed to a cart with firewood. At the same time, there is one noticeable IT niche in the Balkans: just a huge, for a region with several million people, a number of high-tech call centers. This and outsource those. support for IT giants and a local large business that actively uses phone sales. The Balkans is the kingdom of Turkish TV shows and teleshopping, voice communication and many hours of telephone conversations, the Internet is used only for communication in social networks and instant messengers. For businesses, even large ones, it is not considered shameful to have a semi-abandoned Joomla site. Low salaries and qualified personnel, a high percentage of the population who speak foreign languages ​​and a good location have created almost ideal conditions for the work of contact centers, the number of which is only in one small Macedonia is several dozen.
Historically and tactically it turned out that ITooLabs became fairly easy to enter the Balkan market and at the end of 2014 we signed a partnership agreement with the Macedonian operator VoxNET, which works closely in the market for VoIP services and serves contact centers in all Balkans. It should be noted that an independent Internet telephony operator in the Balkans is a rather unusual phenomenon, the telecom-ball on the peninsula is ruled by major players and monopolies. The guys from VoxNET, who have been working successfully for over 10 years, command respect, if only because their business continues to grow, despite local specifics. After the first communication with colleagues, it became clear that the future of the ITooLabs Communications Server in the region exists and this future does not look completely vague. Among the regular and major customers of VoxNet, several large contact centers with hundreds of operators in each were found. At the same time, the automation of these KCs left much to be desired - open source development and “old Yugoslav” methods of work were used.
')
The first survey revealed the active interest of local businesses in the implementation of an advanced communication platform with the functionality of a cloud contact center. The business was willing to pay for cloud-based automation, which solved many problems that bored everyone, a large amount of manual labor, inefficient use of operator time, low efficiency. It's funny, but the local telecom grants didn’t consider it necessary to master this market segment, resting on monopolistic laurels and earning on voice traffic. Simply put - there were simply no decent SaaS or boxed offers on the local market. The first call center, which received a commercial offer in their native language, and even from a local operator, and on the basis of the platform of Russian developers, agreed to just a couple of days. We describe a case that we implemented and which made life much easier for real people: operators and supervisors, i.e. brought tangible benefits that are no less important than revenue and profit.
I would like to note that the call center is really big. The number of operators varies flexibly, depending on market conditions, but never less than 80-90 people. The call center works on both incoming and outgoing calls, the call center's central office: former Yugoslavs living throughout Europe, as well as completely typical Europeans. Business model: pure teleshop, but very intelligent. It is necessary to know the Balkan mentality well in order to understand the whole essence of the definition of “intelligent teleshop”. Residents of the Balkans are very friendly and affable and do not strain at all when they receive an incoming call with an offer to buy something, they have time to chat, they are positive and actively respond to the questions of telephone sellers without any irritation at all.
KC specializes in the sale of insurance policies, IP TV subscriptions, credit cards, and medical services. Such sales involve active communication seller-buyer, large amounts of processed personal data, a huge number of incoming numbers, the division of staff KC into groups for each of the products, while the contact center is separated and geographically: there are several offices in three cities in Serbia and Macedonia. This is almost an ideal environment for automation, and it is these examples that cloud service provider product specialists like to use when drawing up commercial proposals. Cloud with ITooLabs Communicator (this is our own business softphone) as a single corporate messenger, had to be very handy and decided one time a whole lot of problems. We had to introduce an enhanced version of the communication platform, which was able to provide, first of all, automation of the work of operators.
Since KC operates in different countries, and even offers a whole product line in each country, many incoming numbers are actively used so that in case of a missed call, the client immediately gets to the operator of the desired group with the necessary script.
In general, in the virtual PBX service for telecom operators, we use another trendy interface , very minimalistic and with sharpened functionality for a small business. However, for KC, the previous version of the interface with much more functional (but not necessary for small companies) is better suited for now. Therefore, we decided to give the decision on the past interface, and we will bring beauty to KC in 2016.
This is how the division into grocery groups within geographically distributed offices looks like, and it’s not at all the fact that operators from the same group are in the same office, they can be located in different countries.
Each product group for each country is allocated its own incoming numbers, which are used as a caller ID during telephone calls. There are a lot of numbers, maybe even more than they are required after the fact, but KC deliberately goes for the maintenance of such a zoo, which simplifies the life of the client, who always gets where he needs, and does not walk through complex IVR. Pay attention to how many incoming numbers are used - 125 of them! Curiously, setting up such a number of incoming calls is not at all burdensome, since the numbers are purchased from one provider and are automatically “taxed” into a single trunk immediately after purchase. In this sense, ITooLabs creates miracles - two clicks and earned a new incoming.
At the same time, the company has an advertising, Toll-Free, number, analogue of the Russian 8-800. Customers from all over Europe call this number when an active advertising campaign is being broadcast on TV or in the press. The call can come from Bosnia, from Turkey, and even from Australia. The caller is met by a multilingual IVR.
IVR is built is not easy, but logical. We spent a lot of time developing the most effective scheme: a difficult task was set to bring the client to the necessary group of operators, pronouncing all the messages in his native language.
Here is a tree behind each of the IVR grocery.
As a result, we have created, albeit a multi-level, but very logical tree, which the call center owner likes to demonstrate to his acquaintances, like a true Serbian-Russian know-how.
The number of clients of the call center amounts to tens of thousands, and the daily traffic exceeds 10 thousand minutes. Since quite expensive items are sold, we are obliged to record all conversations. The amount of recorded information is truly huge and should be stored for a long time, because the contract for IP TV is a minimum of one year. The ITooLabs recording server has been coping with such a burden for customers and developers for a year now.
One of the important tasks that we have solved with the help of a cloud platform is to automatically call customers with various reminders: the arrival of the next payment date or the appearance of a promotional offer. To do this, we used the “autodiler” module, which, according to the schedule and the list of subscribers, using multilingual IVR, performs all the rough work (before this work was done manually and took a lot of time). Now the launch of the “notification” is 10 minutes to create a list of the necessary numbers and 30 seconds to launch a smart robot-dialer. Balkan colleagues are just happy, the robot does what it used to be done by the hands of patient employees.
Another seemingly unsolvable corporate task was solved in an elegant, cloudy way: communicating separated offices with each other and communicating with VoxNET technical support. With such a huge number of employees and supervisors, any abnormal situation simply caused a flurry of messages on Skype and other instant messengers. This, in turn, reduced efficiency and often delayed the solution of the problem. Now, for any communication within the company and calls to technical support services, ITooLabs Communicator is used, which shows the presentation statuses of the necessary employees, shows their activities, allows you to collect conferences and transfer calls by clicking the mouse. The whole company is visible in one screen, no forgotten numbers and unanswered messages.
In addition, the communicator solves another very important task: the operator, when making outgoing telephone calls in different countries, has the opportunity to select the caller ID with which the call will come to the mobile or city client. When calling to Bosnia, the Bosnian number is shown, and when calling to Sweden - the Swedish number. Sales began to be done gracefully and naturally, the average bill for the operator grew by at least 20-30% only due to the fact that the human factor disappeared with a very complex algorithm for working with clients.
A description of all the technical delights that we have co-created with our colleagues would require a whole series of posts and we don’t want to abuse the time of our readers, but in order for the case to get a human face, we post some photos sent by our Balkan friends especially for publishing on Habré . The photos were taken on the eve of the upcoming holidays and the contact center moved to a festive mode of operation, which is why there are not so many people in the photos.
In the client's Macedonian office, the workday ends and the girl operator smiles graciously in front of the camera, radiating a positive. She is slightly tired, because a good and intelligent cloud robot has done most of the work for her today.
The girl Militsa from the Belgrade office talks enthusiastically about something with a client, without noticing the photographer.
System administrator Dejan received new laptops and installs the necessary software. Hello colleagues from Russia.
A shift in another Balkan office. Thanks to the present status in the communicator, the change of operators is quite easy - there is no need to jump in order not to miss the unexpected incoming.
The girls-operators, having learned that they are being photographed for the Russian techno blog, began to smile and began to pose against the background of the Christmas tree.
This is what a camera room looks like after the completion of a work shift. Outside the window is visible green and misty Balkan winter.
Having learned that we are preparing a post describing a case implemented from a common client, our partner’s team, VoxNET, also wanted to take part in a photo shoot and congratulate Russian colleagues and readers of Habr on the upcoming holidays. It is clear that we could not refuse.
The head of the company VoxNET, Vlatko Vasilev, a telecomman with experience and a great fellow. Thank you for your active cooperation. Just below his video greeting with the New Year.
This is Oliver, she speaks excellent English and is well versed in the clouds, but this does not mean that she is in them.
And this is Sophia, she is from Macedonia. Sofia just recently came to VoxNET and exudes a good mood.
The head of VoxNET, Vlatko, after thinking a little, suggested recording a New Year video appeal for his Russian friends. How could we refuse him? In this video, he on behalf of the Balkan colleagues congratulates all of us on the New Year and Merry Christmas.
We sincerely hope that today's Balkan-New Year report will cause positive emotions to all readers. In the coming year we solemnly promise not to slow down and not just talk about our developments and achievements, but also create positive mood in every way.
To complete the picture of the Balkan-Russian friendship, we post a card, which was sent by our friends from VoxNET. #balkan_design
As a matter of fact, we just have to join in the congratulations and wish all readers of Habr a great mood and continuous development in the professional sphere. Happy New Year, see you soon!
The Balkan part of the ITooLabs business was not accidental. From the point of view of IT-technologies, the countries of the former Yugoslavia and Southeast Europe are quite an interesting place: little is known about Balkan developers or start-ups, the IT industry in the region is frozen in a state of “just about everything will start” at the beginning of zero and so far nothing started. The almost complete absence of e-commerce and digital, in some places very lame infrastructure, the predominance of WiMAX and ADSL. All together it creates a light veil of provincial and archaic nature. In part, this is the case: on the streets of Skopje or Sofia, you can still find a donkey harnessed to a cart with firewood. At the same time, there is one noticeable IT niche in the Balkans: just a huge, for a region with several million people, a number of high-tech call centers. This and outsource those. support for IT giants and a local large business that actively uses phone sales. The Balkans is the kingdom of Turkish TV shows and teleshopping, voice communication and many hours of telephone conversations, the Internet is used only for communication in social networks and instant messengers. For businesses, even large ones, it is not considered shameful to have a semi-abandoned Joomla site. Low salaries and qualified personnel, a high percentage of the population who speak foreign languages ​​and a good location have created almost ideal conditions for the work of contact centers, the number of which is only in one small Macedonia is several dozen.
Prehistory
Historically and tactically it turned out that ITooLabs became fairly easy to enter the Balkan market and at the end of 2014 we signed a partnership agreement with the Macedonian operator VoxNET, which works closely in the market for VoIP services and serves contact centers in all Balkans. It should be noted that an independent Internet telephony operator in the Balkans is a rather unusual phenomenon, the telecom-ball on the peninsula is ruled by major players and monopolies. The guys from VoxNET, who have been working successfully for over 10 years, command respect, if only because their business continues to grow, despite local specifics. After the first communication with colleagues, it became clear that the future of the ITooLabs Communications Server in the region exists and this future does not look completely vague. Among the regular and major customers of VoxNet, several large contact centers with hundreds of operators in each were found. At the same time, the automation of these KCs left much to be desired - open source development and “old Yugoslav” methods of work were used.
')
The first survey revealed the active interest of local businesses in the implementation of an advanced communication platform with the functionality of a cloud contact center. The business was willing to pay for cloud-based automation, which solved many problems that bored everyone, a large amount of manual labor, inefficient use of operator time, low efficiency. It's funny, but the local telecom grants didn’t consider it necessary to master this market segment, resting on monopolistic laurels and earning on voice traffic. Simply put - there were simply no decent SaaS or boxed offers on the local market. The first call center, which received a commercial offer in their native language, and even from a local operator, and on the basis of the platform of Russian developers, agreed to just a couple of days. We describe a case that we implemented and which made life much easier for real people: operators and supervisors, i.e. brought tangible benefits that are no less important than revenue and profit.
Case
I would like to note that the call center is really big. The number of operators varies flexibly, depending on market conditions, but never less than 80-90 people. The call center works on both incoming and outgoing calls, the call center's central office: former Yugoslavs living throughout Europe, as well as completely typical Europeans. Business model: pure teleshop, but very intelligent. It is necessary to know the Balkan mentality well in order to understand the whole essence of the definition of “intelligent teleshop”. Residents of the Balkans are very friendly and affable and do not strain at all when they receive an incoming call with an offer to buy something, they have time to chat, they are positive and actively respond to the questions of telephone sellers without any irritation at all.
KC specializes in the sale of insurance policies, IP TV subscriptions, credit cards, and medical services. Such sales involve active communication seller-buyer, large amounts of processed personal data, a huge number of incoming numbers, the division of staff KC into groups for each of the products, while the contact center is separated and geographically: there are several offices in three cities in Serbia and Macedonia. This is almost an ideal environment for automation, and it is these examples that cloud service provider product specialists like to use when drawing up commercial proposals. Cloud with ITooLabs Communicator (this is our own business softphone) as a single corporate messenger, had to be very handy and decided one time a whole lot of problems. We had to introduce an enhanced version of the communication platform, which was able to provide, first of all, automation of the work of operators.
Since KC operates in different countries, and even offers a whole product line in each country, many incoming numbers are actively used so that in case of a missed call, the client immediately gets to the operator of the desired group with the necessary script.
In general, in the virtual PBX service for telecom operators, we use another trendy interface , very minimalistic and with sharpened functionality for a small business. However, for KC, the previous version of the interface with much more functional (but not necessary for small companies) is better suited for now. Therefore, we decided to give the decision on the past interface, and we will bring beauty to KC in 2016.
This is how the division into grocery groups within geographically distributed offices looks like, and it’s not at all the fact that operators from the same group are in the same office, they can be located in different countries.
Each product group for each country is allocated its own incoming numbers, which are used as a caller ID during telephone calls. There are a lot of numbers, maybe even more than they are required after the fact, but KC deliberately goes for the maintenance of such a zoo, which simplifies the life of the client, who always gets where he needs, and does not walk through complex IVR. Pay attention to how many incoming numbers are used - 125 of them! Curiously, setting up such a number of incoming calls is not at all burdensome, since the numbers are purchased from one provider and are automatically “taxed” into a single trunk immediately after purchase. In this sense, ITooLabs creates miracles - two clicks and earned a new incoming.
At the same time, the company has an advertising, Toll-Free, number, analogue of the Russian 8-800. Customers from all over Europe call this number when an active advertising campaign is being broadcast on TV or in the press. The call can come from Bosnia, from Turkey, and even from Australia. The caller is met by a multilingual IVR.
IVR is built is not easy, but logical. We spent a lot of time developing the most effective scheme: a difficult task was set to bring the client to the necessary group of operators, pronouncing all the messages in his native language.
Here is a tree behind each of the IVR grocery.
As a result, we have created, albeit a multi-level, but very logical tree, which the call center owner likes to demonstrate to his acquaintances, like a true Serbian-Russian know-how.
The number of clients of the call center amounts to tens of thousands, and the daily traffic exceeds 10 thousand minutes. Since quite expensive items are sold, we are obliged to record all conversations. The amount of recorded information is truly huge and should be stored for a long time, because the contract for IP TV is a minimum of one year. The ITooLabs recording server has been coping with such a burden for customers and developers for a year now.
One of the important tasks that we have solved with the help of a cloud platform is to automatically call customers with various reminders: the arrival of the next payment date or the appearance of a promotional offer. To do this, we used the “autodiler” module, which, according to the schedule and the list of subscribers, using multilingual IVR, performs all the rough work (before this work was done manually and took a lot of time). Now the launch of the “notification” is 10 minutes to create a list of the necessary numbers and 30 seconds to launch a smart robot-dialer. Balkan colleagues are just happy, the robot does what it used to be done by the hands of patient employees.
Another seemingly unsolvable corporate task was solved in an elegant, cloudy way: communicating separated offices with each other and communicating with VoxNET technical support. With such a huge number of employees and supervisors, any abnormal situation simply caused a flurry of messages on Skype and other instant messengers. This, in turn, reduced efficiency and often delayed the solution of the problem. Now, for any communication within the company and calls to technical support services, ITooLabs Communicator is used, which shows the presentation statuses of the necessary employees, shows their activities, allows you to collect conferences and transfer calls by clicking the mouse. The whole company is visible in one screen, no forgotten numbers and unanswered messages.
In addition, the communicator solves another very important task: the operator, when making outgoing telephone calls in different countries, has the opportunity to select the caller ID with which the call will come to the mobile or city client. When calling to Bosnia, the Bosnian number is shown, and when calling to Sweden - the Swedish number. Sales began to be done gracefully and naturally, the average bill for the operator grew by at least 20-30% only due to the fact that the human factor disappeared with a very complex algorithm for working with clients.
A description of all the technical delights that we have co-created with our colleagues would require a whole series of posts and we don’t want to abuse the time of our readers, but in order for the case to get a human face, we post some photos sent by our Balkan friends especially for publishing on Habré . The photos were taken on the eve of the upcoming holidays and the contact center moved to a festive mode of operation, which is why there are not so many people in the photos.
In the client's Macedonian office, the workday ends and the girl operator smiles graciously in front of the camera, radiating a positive. She is slightly tired, because a good and intelligent cloud robot has done most of the work for her today.
The girl Militsa from the Belgrade office talks enthusiastically about something with a client, without noticing the photographer.
System administrator Dejan received new laptops and installs the necessary software. Hello colleagues from Russia.
A shift in another Balkan office. Thanks to the present status in the communicator, the change of operators is quite easy - there is no need to jump in order not to miss the unexpected incoming.
The girls-operators, having learned that they are being photographed for the Russian techno blog, began to smile and began to pose against the background of the Christmas tree.
This is what a camera room looks like after the completion of a work shift. Outside the window is visible green and misty Balkan winter.
Our partner VoxNET
Having learned that we are preparing a post describing a case implemented from a common client, our partner’s team, VoxNET, also wanted to take part in a photo shoot and congratulate Russian colleagues and readers of Habr on the upcoming holidays. It is clear that we could not refuse.
The head of the company VoxNET, Vlatko Vasilev, a telecomman with experience and a great fellow. Thank you for your active cooperation. Just below his video greeting with the New Year.
This is Oliver, she speaks excellent English and is well versed in the clouds, but this does not mean that she is in them.
And this is Sophia, she is from Macedonia. Sofia just recently came to VoxNET and exudes a good mood.
The head of VoxNET, Vlatko, after thinking a little, suggested recording a New Year video appeal for his Russian friends. How could we refuse him? In this video, he on behalf of the Balkan colleagues congratulates all of us on the New Year and Merry Christmas.
We sincerely hope that today's Balkan-New Year report will cause positive emotions to all readers. In the coming year we solemnly promise not to slow down and not just talk about our developments and achievements, but also create positive mood in every way.
To complete the picture of the Balkan-Russian friendship, we post a card, which was sent by our friends from VoxNET. #balkan_design
As a matter of fact, we just have to join in the congratulations and wish all readers of Habr a great mood and continuous development in the professional sphere. Happy New Year, see you soon!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/273997/
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