Enghouse Interactive is on the hunt for local partners to host a new self service contact centre solution launching here in April.
Communications Portal, or CP, is a self-service engine designed to help improve the quality and efficiency of customer communications. The offering's integrated application development and management components enable organisations to deploy voice, video messaging, SMS, mobile IVR navigator and email communications via a single platform.
Rather than being a cloud offering, CP is a hosted offerings, with Enghouse on the hunt for local partners to manage the hosting.
John Cray, Enghouse Interactive vice president of product management, says the offering will be available to be sold for on-premise use for larger customers or run as a managed service, enabling smaller customers to harness the benefits of an Opex model, monthly subscription costs and access to the full features of the self service engine.
“Some of our partners will be offering this as a managed service,” Cray says.
“The concept here is to have the partner stand it up or host it as basically a cloud self service engine they'll offer to customers who wouldn't necessarily want to dedicate IT staff to putting this on premise.
Cray says a number of key markets across Australia and New Zealand – including financial services, regional and local government and utilities – are ripe for ‘highly efficient self service'.
The hosted offering is expected to have broad appeal for small businesses across a range of verticals.
“It's smaller businesses who wouldn't have a lot of IT staff, and that could be anybody who has customer service but is not necessarily a large scale IT organisation who wants to manage the application themselves.
The offering has been available in the United States and Western Europe for a while and Cray has been on a roadshow to introduce CP to local partners, with a formal launch to the market, via a webinar, due in a couple of weeks.
“It is very much a partner model and we're preparing our partners to take it to market with marketing and sales materials and our ability in the region to implement and support it.
Cray says the IVR market is ‘stable' with Enghouse seeing no decline, albeit no dramatic increases either.
“We're seeing the level of automation customers want increasing and with the movement to other kinds of media and the emergence of mobile device usage, we're seeing a lot of opportunity.
One area of CP expected to pique particular interest is the Mobile IVR Navigator feature which enables users on any device to participate in a self-service session through a mobile app.
Cray says a growth in proactive service, with organisations reaching out to customers before they engage with the company, is also being seen.
“Your doctors office sends you a text message to remind you of an appointment and if you can't make the appointment you click a link in the text message and go to a form on your mobile and it lets you change your appointment time.
That facility was introducted to CP last year and will be available in the ANZ roll out.
“Using CP Studio visual scripting you can construct the ability to send out notifications or send messages out to a campaign.
“There are so many applications for this – in financial services if your account is overdrawn, or your loan has been approved; in utilities if there's an outage in your area; in retail to say your item has been shipped, expect it this day, click here for more information. There are so many occassions now to send out notifications based on things happening in a business and CP supports that.