Efficiency, IT, SaaS, Strategy
 

This morning I spoke with Vin Deschamps and Bruce Dresser, CEO and CMO receptively of Echopass. Echopass is an enterprise grade, SLA backed provider of highly flexible, customized call and contact center capabilities that are delivered as SaaS services.

In their set up, a customer contact agent has either a soft phone or a SIP hardphone, Echopass handles everything from when a customer makes a call through to the call being delivered to the agent. Contact can come in via multiple channels, PSTN voice, fax, email, IM, web etc etc. Echopass also has the ability to route agent calls to a number of services. An example of the utility of this would be where a customer requrested a Skype call and it could be routed, within Echopass’ datacentre, directly to Skype. The schematic below details the chunk of work that Echopass takes out of the organisation’s responsibility;

Echopass includes the business process rules into its offering so that they can offer an enhanced service – rather than a customer enquiry being delivered to the next available agent, Echopass allows the organisation to set up a rules that govern which agents get which calls. Echopass also integrates with CRM, further providing an enhanced and aggregative offering.

I queried Echopass’ strategy, saying that I saw some real logic to them partnering with a provider of outsourced call centre personnel. Echopass however tends to focus on customers who demand the very best contact centre service and Vin told me that they’re seeing a number of organisations move away from the outsourced call centre approach siting concerns over corporate image as the main issue.

Echopass’ offering strikes me as something that the networks (ie Telcos) should really be dong themselves – they already own the pipes, in some cases sell CRM, and this offering would add huge amount of value (as well as build stickiness) to their larger customers. Echopass however have first mover advantage, and the agility that comes from not having the baggage of existing revenue streams to protect.
Echopass sent me this case study, detailing the benefits that American Express achieved from moving to their offering. The benefits found by Amex seem impressive, specifically;
  • Reduced telco costs between Philippines and US call centers using VoIP
  • Handle dramatic fluctuations in seasonal staffing requirements across multiple sites quickly and easily
  • Improved workflow and customer service through comprehensive new reporting and management tools
  • Ability to document meeting internal SLA for handling 85% of calls through IVR
  • Scalable hosted infrastructure in place to meet anticipated doubling of operation within a year
Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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