South Africa VAR Intelleca Creates Growing Hosted Contact Center Business with CosmoCom Call Center Technology

 

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A New Contact Center On-Demand
Business in South Africa

In their recent experience as a VAR in the South African call center market, Intelleca observed a large and unsatisfied demand by enterprises of all sizes for hosted contact center services. Being an aggressive and innovative technology company, they responded by building a new Contact Center On-Demand (CCOD) business based on the CosmoCall Universe platform. Intelleca targeted its CCOD offering to both enterprises and outsourcers. Their first fully operational customer is Telemed, a large Medical Insurance provider with two contact center sites operating on the hosted Intelleca platform. Intelleca has signed on and deployed additional customers, and demand for its CCOD service offering is strong. The basis of Intelleca’s success was their selection of a call center platform that is built on IP open standards from the ground up to provide multi-tenant and unified multi-channel operation, and that is highly scaleable.

Booming Enterprises Reluctant to Make
Large Capital Expenditures

The South African economy was booming, and flush with growing enterprises that needed to provide quality customer service. Many of these companies had legacy call center solutions that were ready for replacement or in need of expensive upgrades; some were green field applications. They had a preference for a hosted contact center service with steady operating costs rather than a traditional premise-based system that required a large upfront capital investment. With a hosted system, they wouldn’t be burdened with the costs of specialized IT staff and the unpredictable system maintenance of an on-premise contact center. They would be free to focus on their core business and their customers.

Market Demands a Better Service Solution

The primary alternative to premise-based systems had been outsourcing, in which a third party provides and manages the entire contact center platform and operation, sometimes including staffing. While this freed up the enterprise from the burdens of system maintenance, it did not provide them with adequate control of contact center service quality, or with the flexibility to change or scale their operations as their requirements changed. Demand grew for a different model that provided more administrative and management control and more operational flexibility.

Intelleca watched as a number of managed services providers attempted to satisfy this demand by using traditional contact center platforms to provide hosted contact center offerings. But these platforms were designed for single sites and single tenants and did not lend themselves to being shared among multiple tenants, let alone multiple sites across a vast geographical range. In addition, they still required the customer to forecast and commit to specific platform sizes. Once configured, the platforms did not easily or cost effectively scale up. Like outsourcing, this solution also proved to be less than optimal for both parties. Several managed services providers actually abandoned the market, and the market opportunity remained unsatisfied.

Selecting the Right System Platform

Intelleca realized that the key to a successful hosted CCOD business was to use an IP based contact center platform that supported multiple virtual tenant users by design, that provided tenant self- administration, and that was easily scaleable. The CosmoCall Universe contact center platform was the only solution that met all of these criteria, so Intelleca selected it as the platform for its new CCOD business. It would provide Intelleca with the economies of scale it needed to offer its customers affordable rates, while generating sufficiently high operating margins and ROI to sustain and grow its business.

Intelleca’s CCOD offering was more robust than the alternative offerings in the South African Market, giving them strong differentiation. It provided hosted tenants with all of the core enterprise contact center components including ACD, IVR, Dialer, and multimedia customer communications and recording on a single unified system. It enabled tenants to locate their agents anywhere geographically, yet it provided them with full supervisory visibility and monitoring capabilities, centralized administrative control, and uniform performance reporting for all agents. Enterprises now had full and direct control of their contact center operations, without the problems, risks and costs of a premise-based system, or the limitations of an outsourcer.

Business Growth and Enhanced Customer Relationship

Intelleca signed up and deployed the Medical Insurance provider Telemed as its first hosted CCOD customer. And after several of months of operation that confirmed the advantages of its new CCOD business model, Intelleca deployed a subsidiary of a global publishing company as its second customer. Its third customer is a global brand management company.

In addition to providing an entirely new hosted contact center service for South African enterprises, Intelleca’s new business model fundamentally changed and enhanced the nature of its customer relationships. With three year CCOD customer contracts, Intelleca now creates strategic long term customer relationships that weren’t possible when it sold only one-off systems and products. These-long term relationships generate significant opportunities to grow its existing customer business, capture repeat business, and provide visibility to new related business opportunities with the customer. Finally, the secure and predictable recurring revenue streams generated by the new CCOD business provide stability for Intelleca, and support an aggressive growth strategy.