The Design and Evolution of SCC
Creating a comprehensive cloud-based contact center solution with an extensive range of features
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) offers distinctive features, and what truly sets it apart in the industry is the unwavering commitment to the vision.
The vision driving SCC
When people inquire about what sets a product apart, they often hear broad statements like, “Our product does XYZ, which others don’t do, or don’t do as well as we do.”
However, gaining a comprehensive understanding of what contact centers and debt collection companies need and the true benefits from working with SCC requires a deeper engagement with the vision rather than just examining the advantages.
Truly successful products in the marketplace, regardless of their nature, possess a survival value that goes beyond their specific functionalities.
Consider the iPhone, for instance. Throughout the history of smartphones, many equally feature-rich and potentially ‘better’ smartphones have been released. Yet the iPhone prevails and continues to thrive for three main reasons:
- The entire ecosystem maintains logical consistency and cohesiveness.
- Default behaviors are meticulously researched to minimize the need for user configurations.
- Any additions are seamlessly integrated to align with the design and operational principles.
Likewise, the vision guiding SCC encompasses five core principles:
- Proper Automation: SCC prioritizes automation where it makes sense, streamlining processes and tasks.
- Futureproofing: SCC is designed to adapt and evolve with emerging industry trends and technologies.
- Ease of Integration: SCC seamlessly integrates into a customer’s existing business operations, minimizing disruption.
- Ability to Extend: SCC offers flexibility for expansion and customization, accommodating evolving needs.
- Longevity: SCC is built to endure, providing lasting value to all of our customers.
While SCC boasts numerous unique features for call center software solutions, its most compelling advantages, setting it apart in the industry, are a direct result of how we’ve translated this vision into reality.
The Origin
The fundamental concept underpinning the ACD model in SCC is the automation of everything that can be automated.
Anyone who had experience with predictive dialers in the ’90s would understand that there was little that was genuinely predictive about them. In those early days, there was resistance from predictive dialer managers, whose role was to monitor and fine-tune the dialer. This approach seemed nonsensical. Human analysis and reactions couldn’t keep agents busy or prevent spikes in abandoned calls with the required speed and efficiency.
As the business expanded, remaining committed to this principle was important.
An intelligent machine armed with the right data and rules could solve problems far more effectively than a human being.
A Comprehensive Cloud Contact Center Solution
Today, the platform has evolved into a complete multimedia and multisession ACD, equipped with robust scripting, data management, and reporting capabilities. We’ve automated every aspect of real-time platform operation that can be automated. For instance:
Agents are automatically reassigned to handle different projects in response to fluctuating demand, provided they possess the necessary skills and adhere to the operational rules of the business.
Blending functionality operates across the entire estate. This means that, as long as you have an adequate resource pool, the system will autonomously ensure that service levels are maintained. It will also allocate agents to outbound tasks and other activities during periods of reduced inbound demand.
In situations where there is an extreme load, queue behaviors adjust automatically. For instance, the system might offer callbacks if the anticipated average customer wait time is deemed unacceptable.
SCC automatically…
- Optimizes the utilization of agent time.
- Minimizes customer wait times.
- Provides customers with choices when wait times are extended.
A solid grounding in design
Below are several fundamental design principles utilized throughout this process:
An ACD/dialer should continuously monitor and respond in real-time to optimize resource allocation efficiently. If supervisors need to manually adjust settings or redeploy resources for optimal performance, the design is flawed.
SCC comprehensively captures and manages all system elements. The system treats all agents uniformly, regardless of whether they are human agents in the call center, remote agents, chatbots, IVR bots, or external parties. This consistent treatment ensures that all agents exhibit uniform behaviors and possess the same capabilities.
Similarly, media types, whether voice, video, chat, social media or email, are processed consistently within the system. Regardless of the medium, SCC routes, queues, and handles them uniformly. This standardized approach allows the ACD to effectively manage complex scenarios, such as load balancing, blending, and real-time skills matching.
Design with a focus on clear separation of responsibilities is exemplified by the data management component, Softdial Campaign Manager™. It serves as the exclusive interface for accessing the customer’s business data and provides APIs for other services to retrieve and update data in a controlled manner. This streamlines database communication, leading to enhanced data throughput. Moreover, this approach ensures that only a single application is responsible for maintaining data integrity and managing roll forward recovery in the event of a failover, simplifying data management processes.
Designing for multiplexing in a real-time system with intricate interactions is a challenging task. Some essential behaviors in contact centers inherently involve maintaining state information. The key to achieving a solution that performs effectively, whether for 10 users or 10,000, is the development of an API ecosystem that supports multiplexing along the inherent fault-lines within a large-scale contact center environment.
SCC effortlessly optimizes the utilization of agents’ and supervisors’ time.
The real-time management of resources ensures optimal contact center performance under continuously changing conditions.
A solitary point of contact minimizes conflicts and maximizes efficiency.
SCC is crafted for utmost scalability without any decline in performance.
The core DNA of SCC
As an organized ACD API ecosystem, we’ve preserved our DNA by continually improving and adhering to effective design principles.
The DNA of SCC is centered around the core API, which is crafted with the following principles in consideration:
- Request-Response Model: All communications are treated as requests that can either succeed or fail, often within a timeframe beyond user control.
- Client-Server Paradigm: The API serves both individual resource handlers and aggregate behavior providers.
- Efficiency: API messages are kept as compact as feasible.
- Non-Blocking: Core applications can process API messages without causing blockages, ensuring high throughput and scalability.
- Multiplexing for Scalability: The system now effectively multiplexes core services, allowing it to scale linearly in the cloud, making it highly scalable and adaptable to varying workloads.
- Robust Handling of Resource Failures: The software suite has been enhanced to comprehensively handle resource failures, enabling it to autonomously recover and maintain operational integrity, effectively making it self-healing.
The APIs were initially crafted with the intention of enabling third parties to handle intricate interactions required for developing line-of-business services while keeping application complexity in check.
Take, for instance, the CTI server, which primarily focuses on managing media session lifetimes and executing instructions from the controller regarding actions on these media sessions. It doesn’t need to be knowledgeable about constructs such as queues and campaigns.
The diverse interfaces offered by the core API are designed to maintain a clear separation of responsibilities.
These APIs were not only intended for external use; they were also leveraged internally to build the comprehensive suite of services that constitutes SCC today.
Line-of-business services that have a singular primary function can be developed relatively swiftly, with a strong emphasis on robustness and the capacity for multiplexing to achieve scalability.
How is the deployment of this contact center API ecosystem and suite of applications accomplished?
The deployment model for the SCC platform is based on extensive experience in delivering contact center technology at scale, particularly in collaboration with service providers and larger end customers.
- Provider Lock-In: When you use a specific cloud provider’s container infrastructure, you can become locked into that provider. Switching providers can be costly and complex.
- Efficiency Concerns: Containers add an additional layer of indirection in a virtualization infrastructure. For large-scale deployments, deploying services directly to the OS can be more efficient and cost-effective in terms of subscriber costs from your cloud service provider.
SCC service orchestration offers:
- Flexibility for service providers without extensive effort.
- Efficient scaling for large-scale operations.
- Cost minimization for service delivery.
The deployment process is swift, and routine tasks are straightforward and fast to accomplish.
SCC provides users with the freedom and management capabilities typically associated with an on-premises platform, but it’s delivered as cloud infrastructure.