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An ever-increasing proportion of consumers look for digital touchpoints when it comes to communication, and they want choice in the way they interact with organisations. Although voice still accounts for most customer interactions, contact centres are increasingly expected to provide non-voice channels such as Webchat, email and SMS to meet customer demand.

What is the difference between a “Multichannel” and “Omnichannel” contact centre?

If you’re looking to expand the capabilities of your call centre with non-voice channels, you must understand the difference between a multichannel solution and an omnichannel solution so you choose the right technology for your business operations.

What is a multichannel contact centre?

A multichannel contact centre provides basic flexibility by offering more than one method of communication such as phone, text and email. A multichannel solution gives customers a choice of channels, they often operate independently. A customer’s interaction history on one channel isn’t visible on others, which leads to fragmented customer service and frustration.

What is an omnichannel contact centre?

An omnichannel contact centre solution also offers a choice of channels, but with the crucial difference that converged communications are all in one place. Think of a customer service team where agents have a complete view of a customer’s interactions across all channels. If a customer starts a conversation via chat and then calls, the agent can pick up right where they left off.

While multichannel contact centres offer a basic level of flexibility, they often fall short in providing a truly seamless and personalised customer experience. The limitations of multichannel can lead to frustration for both customers and agents.

Omnichannel contact centres may require a higher initial investment, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. By providing a seamless, personalised customer experience, omnichannel can significantly improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency and give businesses a competitive edge.

5 considerations when choosing an omnichannel engagement software

With that in mind, here are five things you must look out for when considering a new omnichannel contact centre solution.

Security and Integration

It goes without saying that your next omnichannel engagement software needs to be super secure, but what does that mean in practice?

• Ensure the software complies with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
• Look for certifications like ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials to verify the software’s security.
• Assess the software’s ability to integrate with your existing systems, such as CRM and payment gateways.

Flexibility and Scalability

Businesses change – so choose an omnichannel solution that can adapt to your needs and scale as your business grows.

• Can the software be customised to meet your specific business needs and workflows?
• Can the software handle increased call volumes and support future growth?
• Does the software offer the necessary features, such as routing, IVR, and reporting, to meet your requirements?

Insights and Reporting

Effective reporting is crucial for understanding customer behaviour and optimising your operations – so what should you look out for when considering omnichannel software?

• Can the software provide real-time data on key metrics like call volume, average handling time and customer satisfaction?
• Can you create custom dashboards to visualise the data that matters most to your business?
• Does the software leverage AI to analyse call recordings and identify trends?

Ease of Use

Omnichannel solutions with a user-friendly interface can improve agent efficiency and reduce training costs.

• Is the software intuitive and easy to navigate for both agents and supervisors?
• Does the provider offer comprehensive training and support resources?
• Does the software provide tools like knowledge bases, scripting and screen sharing to enhance agent productivity?

Compliance

Effective omnichannel software should help you meet regulatory requirements and provide tools for compliance.

• Does the software help you meet industry-specific regulations, such as those related to telemarketing or debt collection?
• Are there features like call recording, scripting, and “Do Not Call” list integration to ensure compliance?

Additional Considerations

• Hidden Costs – Be aware of potential hidden costs, such as fees for additional features or demos.
• Support – Evaluate the quality and responsiveness of the provider’s support services.
• Expertise – Choose a provider with deep expertise in contact centre solutions.
• Accreditations – Verify the provider’s compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Why Choose MaxContact?

MaxContact is a powerful omnichannel contact centre solution offering a full range of contact options, from voice and email to SMS, webchat and even WhatsApp.
This is a fully converged service that puts all customer interactions in one place for seamless communication. For more information on our omnichannel solution, book a demo, or download our omnichannel brochure.

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Many businesses are now operating remote or semi-remote (hybrid) working models. With that in mind, here are five top tips for running a remote contact centre.

1. Have your morning meeting everyday

When you’re not all working in the same building, regular scheduled communication with your team becomes even more important. Luckily, tools like Zoom or Teams allow everyone to get together and talk at least once a day.

Morning meetings give you a chance to update your team on any changes to the campaign or market that may affect their day, find out about any issues they have, and deliver feedback on performance. It’s an essential way to keep your team motivated and performing at their best, wherever they’re located.

2. Trust your reports and dashboards

A remote contact centre team makes it more difficult to gauge how well (or badly) things are going at any time. In these circumstances, reports and dashboards are even more indispensable. Build specific dashboards to monitor agent, team and campaign performance, as well as one to give you an overview of everything. Most importantly, trust what they say.

Then, act on what they’re telling you. Somebody’s figures don’t look right? Dip test a few of their call recordings or do some live coaching. Sales figures looking down across the board? Get in touch with some of your team and find out why they’re struggling.

You also need to make sure your agents have access to relevant data. Wherever they’re working, set up report schedules to automatically send hourly and daily figures via email. Build team specific dashboards so they can see in real time the metrics that define their own performance. Leaderboards are a great way to keep healthy competition going, too.

3. Monitor regularly, and pass direct feedback over

It’s very easy to start feeling anonymous when working in a remote contact centre, and that’s when bad habits can set in. The ability to remotely monitor and coach your agents is crucial, because it gives them a sense of being properly and proactively managed.

Functionality such as whisper coaching also allows you to pass feedback directly to the agent and can even help you train staff in real time regardless of their location.

4. Make sure your IT is up to scratch!

There are steps you can take to ensure you don’t face any technical issues when your workforce is working fully or partly from home.

• • Make sure your team has working laptops/PCs, and operating systems and software are up to date.
• • If you need to use a VPN to access certain applications, DON’T go for the cheapest option. Do your research and get a proper solution as this may need to be used for all of your voice traffic.
• • Ensure your IT team can access agents’ PCs remotely to troubleshoot any issues.
• • If you use OneDrive or similar, make sure your agents have permission to see what they need and are trained on how to use it.
• • If you don’t have any internal IT now is the time to bring in an ITMS partner. There are loads out there to choose from.
• • It may also be time to upgrade your systems, as you rely a lot more on technology in a hybrid world. If you’re using an Open-source Dialler or Contact Centre you should definitely look at upgrading to something more resilient and feature rich.

5. Make sure your policies are nailed down – and adhered to

Now is the time to dust off policies on remote working and data security, and make sure they’re suitable for your current circumstances. Get everyone to read them again. The really crucial ones are:

• • Working from home – what do you expect of your staff when working from home?
• • Information security – how do your policies protect your customers’ data? Think about issues like working from unsecured WiFi networks and making sure devices are locked.
• • Acceptable use – you may well be issuing your staff with company laptops or PCs, so what do your policies say about what they can and can’t do with these devices?
• • Password policy – are your staff regularly changing passwords in line with your password policy? This has never been more important with many systems now open to the public internet.
• • Phishing policy – make sure your employees know how to check if a communication is genuine, and what to do if they have doubts.

Why MaxContact

MaxContact is a super-secure cloud-based contact centre solution which makes working from anywhere easy. Our powerful analytics and reporting platform lets managers stay on top of team and individual performance, whether agents are in the office or at home. For more information on MaxContact, please contact our team.

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Industry regulator Ofcom produces regulations around what contact centres can and can’t do when it comes to automatic dialling.

The regulations can be confusing, having undergone numerous iterations over many years. On top of that, there is no single source of truth – there isn’t even a complete version of all the regulations in one place.

With that in mind, we’ve produced a no-nonsense guide to all current regulations surrounding the use of automatic calling equipment (ACS), with links to accompanying Ofcom and ICO literature.

It’s important that you know these regulations, because neither Ofcom or the ICO accept ignorance as a defence. The penalty for transgression can be severe: over £3,000,000 in fines were handed out in 2018.

For reference:

ACS = Dialler software

Abandoned call = dropped call

Connect = Live call passed to an agent

Silent calls

There are three main causes of silent calls:

1) false positives

2) abandon calls (with no message)

3) agents receiving calls and not speaking or being on mute, which is a reasonably significant cause.

Silent Calls (Page 4)

The 3% drop rate myth

In 2010 Ofcom said companies “should ensure their abandoned call rate is less than 3% of all live calls.”  

That seemed clear enough. If dropped (or abandoned) calls were less than 3% of your total, you were safe. Or so many of us thought.

But as it turned out, this was a misinterpretation. Ofcom has since clarified that 3% was meant as a measuring stick and the actual target is 0%. In other words, you can attract regulator scrutiny with any percentage of dropped calls.  

Despite Ofcom’s clarification, many people in the industry still think the 3% rule applies – and some even run their diallers with 3% in mind. We have even seen suppliers of dialler equipment advertise the 3% rule as compliant.  

It isn’t. This is why we developed our un-droppable algorithm, which helps contact centres stick to 0% dropped calls even in blended environments.

Reference – see Section A4.12

Drop call calculation

Knowing how to calculate the drop call rate accurately is essential if you want to remain compliant, and there are still quite a few systems that get it wrong. They either use the wrong formula or, knowingly or otherwise, add inbound and manual dial connects into the equation to artificially reduce the drop call rate.  

The correct formula is:

Drop rate = Drops/(Drops + Connects)

It’s worth checking Ofcom’s guidance (see Section A3.8) on calculating the drop call rate. It has examples with AMD both on and off.

15 second minimum ring time

This rule stipulates that you have to call a number for a minimum of 15s before disconnecting as a no answer.  

The rule was introduced to prevent the practice of “pinging”, whereby diallers would ring a number for 1 second to try and generate a missed call. The next day agents would dial all the numbers found to be “live”. You can imagine how annoying this was for customers.

The only contentious point around the 15s minimum ring revolves around preview calls, which are automated but in every other way are the same as a manual call. Manual calls are not restricted to the 15s minimum. Because of this, whether or not you need to adhere to the minimum ring time rule on preview calls is open to interpretation. The Ofcom wording is in Section A2.15.

Rotating CLI

Not long ago, there was a trend for calling line identification (CLI) calls to display local numbers. The system would present a Manchester number when calling a Manchester number, a Newcastle number when calling a Newcastle number, and so on.  

This was primarily done to increase connect rates, and it worked pretty well. It also rotated the numbers, so people didn’t recognise you.  

But because Ofcom and the ICO base complaints on the CLI, it was seen as a way of avoiding investigation because contact centres were presenting 150+ different numbers. So complaints to a single number were low even when complaints about the call centre as a whole might have been very high.  

Ofcom acted, and carriers are no longer allowed to automatically rotate numbers, so the practice is vastly reduced. But you can still present different numbers if you have a valid reason. For example, a well-established car dealership with branches around the UK, but a central call centre, can present a local dealer’s number.

For more, see the Ofcom regulations, Section A1.20 – A1.23

Answer Machine Detection (AMD)

There’s a lot of controversy around AMD use. Ofcom now makes firms take false positive rates into consideration when calculating drop rates (though it has suggested it may drop this).  

This is because inadequate systems with poor AMD were causing silent calls on false positives. In other words, when the system thought a live person was an answering machine, no message played and the call was not passed to an agent (see below on leaving a message).  

But AMD use is not banned, and it can play an essential role in the productivity of contact centres. In fact, it can increase efficiency by 100% in some cases, but it must be used correctly.

For more, see Section 4.41 of the regulations.

Two second CPA rule

CPA stands for Call Progress Analysis and is part of the AMD function. Two seconds is the amount of time your CPA is given to determine whether the called party is an answering machine or a live person.  

Many providers say two seconds is not enough and, as a result, AMD can’t be used compliantly. They’re wrong. In our case, if we can’t determine whether the answered call is an answering machine or not, we pass the call through to an agent and play it safe.  

If your current system “holds” onto the call longer than two seconds you are non-compliant, which is why you often get recommended to turn AMD off rather than the vendor resolving the problem.

For more, see Section A2.19 of the regulations.

Leaving messages

In a silent call, someone answers the phone only to be met with silence from the other end. Needless to say, Ofcom is not in favour of silent calls.

It’s recommended that an answerphone message is left, so false positives would no longer result in silent calls. The problem here is the huge proliferation of answer phone messages, but Ofcom’s number one priority is to tackle silent calls. It all comes down to the contact centre: you have to make the choice.  

For more, see Section A1.6, A2.16

Drop call message

When dialling predictively you are calling more people than you have agents, which can occasionally result in dropped calls. Instead of silent calls, Ofcom insists a drop call message is played to the consumer. It also offers guidelines on what the message should and shouldn’t say.

For more, see Section A1.14 of the regulations.

False positive

In the context of AMD, a false positive occurs when the system detects an answer machine even though a person has answered the phone. This results in silent calls and complaints from consumers.  

The recommendation from Ofcom here is to play an answer machine message. Consumers will hang up, but at least they won’t experience a silent call that can be at best annoying and at worst frightening.  

See Section A1.6 – 1.8 of the regulations.

Call blocking from carriers

This is a relatively new addition to Ofcom’s plan to tackle nuisance and silent calls. What it means is that carriers – or more accurately termination endpoint carriers – can block you if they think you are making nuisance calls to their clients. This isn’t the carrier you are using to make calls, it’s EE, Vodafone, BT or Telefonica (o2).

Carriers now have a shared database of nuisance callers. It’s possible that if one blocks you, they all will.  

This is an automated response to perceived nuisance calling, based on two main factors:

1. Connect rate or ASR (Answer Seizure Ratio)

If your connect rate to Vodafone (for example) is low – i.e. people aren’t answering the phone –  then Vodafone will interpret this as people not wanting to talk to you.

2. ACD (Average call duration)

Taking Vodafone again as an example, if call duration length is low Vodafone might view this as clients not wanting to speak to you. “Low” typically means less than 30 seconds. Leaving an answer machine message can help, as it increases the average call duration.

These factors will often result in an automatic calling block to Vodafone numbers from your CLI.

The only way to get around this is to change your number. You should also make a complaint to the termination carrier if you think they have blocked you by mistake.

Unfortunately, as Ofcom makes clear, this blocking policy is actively encouraged:

Page 6 – Technical Measures (Ofcom forms Strategic Working Group)

Page 5 – Strategic Working Group (Ofcom confirms the SWG has blocked a large number of nuisance calls since its formation)

Page 4 Formal Blocking Directions

A new focus on blocking

Automatic System Recalls

You are not allowed to call previous dropped calls within 72 hours, or answer machines the same day (note: not 24 hours), unless you can guarantee an operator is present. Preview or manual dialling is fine. This is one of the reasons MaxContact has mixed-mode dialling, which means we can automatically move records from “predictive” to “preview” and back again.

Drop Calls – Section A2.9

Harassment

What exactly “harassment” means is not clearly defined and is open to interpretation. The term “a reasonable amount” is often used, but that’s unclear what that means in practice.  

This needs Ofcom clarification. It can boil down to the nature of the calls. Debt collectors have a valid reason for calling but how much is too much? We have seen agreements in place between the FCA and some contact centres that allow X calls per day but no more than Y times per week, for example.

Maximum attempts to a user

Again, this is not defined in the regulations and needs clarification. Common sense should be applied, and the strategy modified in line with the nature of the call.

DNC list

Do you need one? It’s not in the regulations, but it’s good practice to have one. There does need to be a way for people to remove themselves from calling lists either by speaking to an agent or more commonly now through self-service IVRs.

The mention of DNC lists is in Section A1.25 here.

TPS

If you are not checking Telephone Preference Service (TPS) you have a problem. The ICO has taken over this side of the regulations, and they are serious about enforcement. Many recent fines have been around TPS breaches, and non-compliance is easy to prove.  

If your third party data supplier says it screens against TPS, you have to ensure it really does. Spot check the data. If your supplier is not doing it, you’re still liable for due-diligence.

See Section A1.25, the TPS website and the ICO website

The good news

The good news is that, according to Ofcom statistics, consumer complaints are reducing:

But contact centres still need to do all they can to avoid falling foul of these rules, and potentially taking significant financial and reputational damage.

MaxContact is your friend here. Our sophisticated customer engagement solution will keep dropped calls to an absolute minimum (in fact, close to zero), while helping you remain compliant.  

If your contact centre is struggling with this or any other aspect surrounding regulations or compliance, or want to know how we turn new regulations to your advantage, please get in touch.

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Call centres are an important part of many UK industries, but a recent report from ContactBabel revealed which sectors employ the most contact centre call agents and the growing use of cloud contact centre technologies across the board.

The study, UK Contact Centres: 2019-2023, sheds some light on the way different UK industries make use of call centre technology to place outbound sales calls and to handle inbound customer support.

Nearly one in five call centre agents in the UK works in the finance sector, which is responsible for 18% of the entire workforce.

However, finance firms don’t have the most call centres in terms of overall numbers – that accolade is held by the retail and distribution sector, which operates 13% of all UK contact centres.

Several other sectors are also significant in the UK call centre industry, including telemarketing for obvious reasons, but also the services and public sectors, IT and telecommunications, and utility providers.

“Almost 4% of the UK’s working population are employed in contact centres,” the report states. “Average contact centre size is 125 agent positions, with outsourcers, utilities, communications and finance contact centres having a larger than average mean size.”

The rise of cloud call centre technologies

The survey asked respondents what cloud call centre technologies they already use, or plan to use within the next two years.

Call routing and call recording scored highest, with 45% and 37% already using these as cloud services and a further 15% and 16% planning to do so within two years.

IVR and speech recognition ranked as the third most popular cloud call centre technology; 30% already use this as a cloud call centre service, and a further 17% expect to do so in the next 24 months.

Completing the top five call centre cloud technologies were CRM/agent desktop and workforce management – and both are closing the gap on the top three substantially.

At present, 26% of respondents use cloud-based CRM and 19% use cloud-based call centre workforce management.

But the figures for the next two years are significantly higher – adding 27% and 24% to those totals respectively.

That would see cloud call centre CRM rank joint second alongside call recording, and behind only call routing as the most common contact centre cloud technology, while cloud workforce management would be just four percentage points behind cloud IVR/speech recognition.

Advantages of cloud call centres

Read our blog 5 Benefits of Cloud Contact Centres to find out why cloud call centres are a scalable solution with excellent access from all over the world.

Some of the direct advantages of cloud call centre technology include:

• > Remote access from any available internet connection.
• > Advanced IVR features including ‘golden ticket’ call routing for VIPs.
• > Instantly scalable capacity to meet demand on any given day.
• > Inherent cloud resilience and dependable Microsoft Azure interconnect.
• > Flexible pricing and ability to reduce billing immediately when demand drops.

Together these benefits give cloud call centres flexibility and reliability, along with the ability to use talented call centre agents based all over the world – all while ensuring you only get billed for the capacity you use on any given day.

MaxContact is a customer engagement technology company with a difference. Find out more about us, here.

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