BT announces innovative new capabilities for its BT Contact portfolio

Wael El Kabbany, managing director, BT Middle East and North Africa, said, "BT Contact continues to innovate, helping organisations in the Middle East create an 'omnichannel' approach to customer service. Our latest enhancements to the portfolio empower organisations of all sizes to provide world-class care to their customers. It gives agents a much broader access to the information needed to manage customers' interactions regardless of channel used. And it provides organisations with the ability to add new communication channels without significantly increasing complexity or cost."

"BT manages 10 billion minutes per year of inbound voice calls to our enterprise customers' contact centres. We understand voice; we understand contact centres and we're enabling new online channels such as social media. This makes us the partner of choice to help organisations deliver an outstanding omnichannel customer experience," he added.

Those innovations, including the latest evolution of BT's cloud-based contact centre solutions, will help organisations in the Middle East keep ahead of trends in 'omnichannel' customer service — customer service delivered over multiple channels but connected together within the organisation to provide a seamless customer experience, regardless of channel used.

The growth in omnichannel service has been driven by demand for simpler and more consistent interactions via online, social media and video channels.

The innovations to the BT Contact portfolio include technologies from BT's key partners and also feature products and services optimised for mid-market organisations with contact centres of between 100-1000 seats — the fastest growing contact centre market. The BT Contact solutions are designed to provide the same sophistication as large contact centre deployments but packaged in a way to avoid expensive bespoke developments.

The updated BT Contact portfolio now includes:
•BT Inbound Contact: harnessing the reach and reliability of BT's global voice network and employing its intelligence to route and queue calls all around the world. BT Inbound Contact allows organisations to provide a uniform service across all contact centres, providing callers, regardless of geographical location, with the same range of access numbers and routing plans. This helps international organisations present themselves as local operators and allows them to connect customers and agents across multiple contact centres, minimising the need for investments in call routing technologies.

As part of the enhancements announced today, BT Inbound Contact is being rolled out to eight new countries throughout the next 12 months including Chile, Colombia, Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Romania offering organisations cost savings on average of 30% by avoiding the use for international numbers, which incur higher access charges for organisations and are more expensive for customers to call.

•BT Auto Contact is an automated system that allows customers to use self-service technology to deal with simple, routine queries in a convenient manner. It allows organisations to focus resources on managing more complex customer enquiries, offering cost savings in agents' time of up to 90%. BT is expanding its cloud-based self service solutions to the US and Latin America, in addition to existing capabilities in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

•BT Cloud Contact enables agents to work from any location, meaning experts are available 'on demand' regardless of where or how the customer enquiry is made. Customers get consistently higher service and enterprises can make the most of the skills and expertise spread throughout their organisation. BT Cloud Contact's technology allows organisations to flex capacity in line with operational needs and is available as a 'pay-as-you-go' service. BT Cloud Contact will benefit from new features such as 'desktop connectors', allowing organisations to incorporate more information on agents' desktop to help better serve customers.

BT is also introducing Cisco SocialMiner to provide social media tools for agents using BT Cloud Contact. This allows cloud-based scanning and monitoring of social media networks, incorporating those into normal contact centre operations to help provide a fully omnichannel experience. Relevant social media posts can then be presented to agents as a live feed which they can then choose to action.

•BT Onsite Contact: building on the success of BT Cloud Contact, BT Onsite contact has been enhanced for mid-market organisations, allowing for transparent capture and routing of customer requests, regardless of channel of contact.

•BT Optimise Contact: launched as a cloud service from £30 per user per month, BT Optimise Contact is a suite of optimisation tools that gives deeper insight into contact centre operations, from who is making contact, when and how, to staffing and service levels, helping organisations maximise efficiencies and improve customer service. This new BT capability is being delivered in a way that allows organisations to flex up and down in line with operational needs.

The BT Contact portfolio harnesses the latest technologies from Cisco, Avaya and Genesys and is complemented by BT Advise Contact: a consultancy service drawing on BT's strong design and integration skills with experience across multiple vendors, multiple channels and multiple technologies.