Exclusive Interview: Arpit Vashishtha, Ameyo

What are the current trends in the contact center technologies space? 

Contact centers are going to play a pivotal role in the post-pandemic world as we (Ameyo) believes they are the last line of human-to-human interaction between brands and consumers.

One of the emerging trends in the shift to cloud contact center technologies, given most businesses, are focusing on cost optimization. We are also seeing businesses turn towards engagement channels that their customers might already be very familiar/comfortable with, such as Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger. While chatbots have all but become the new normal to handle generic customer queries, what’s interesting to see is people still value human-to-human interactions for a more personalized experience. Also, video as the new interaction channel is a win-win for enterprises to maximize high net worth sales while working remotely.

How are you helping organizations to reimagine the customer experience?

Our focus is to provide a customer service experience that resonates with our customer-first culture. We provide seamless customer experiences for every Agent–Customer interaction. In effect, we enable businesses to define moments of truth and forge stronger relationships with their customers. Our integrated omnichannel cloud contact centers empower businesses to surpass customer’s ever-evolving expectations.

We are now heading towards digital transformation with an omnichannel contact center software where we try to deliver all digital and voice channels in one platform. With a mix of channels like email, voice, video chat, social media, in-app chat, etc., we ensure that brands can deliver differentiated customer experiences every single time.

What did you do differently to sustain growth last year?

Things were slightly uncertain, to begin with, given it was difficult to anticipate how the market would respond. But we continued to focus on creating products and solutions that provide value to our customers. Our efforts towards analyzing what products will become important and what will be the futuristic demands started paying off. As a result, we have continued on our growth path and improved our profitability.

During the middle of the pandemic, the first thing we realized was that the contact center is a critical function and it attained more importance, especially during the lockdown. We realized that there was an enormous surge in the volume of interactions, and enterprises were trying to transform quickly to serve their customers, though working remotely came with some substantial challenges. In the initial days, we launched an enterprise-grade mobile application for a mobile contact center. We saw good traction especially from verticals like lending, BFSI, and Edu-Tech and we moved over 20,000 users within a span of two to three weeks across geographies.

The other thing that worked for us was that we are geographically diversified. When the pandemic was at its peak in Asia, our operations in Africa and the Middle East were relatively insulated from the impact. So we had enough buffer for each geography at any point in time.

Why organizations should choose Ameyo over the competition?

It’s a large market and there is ample opportunity for many players, especially niche ones. From Ameyo’s perspective, in terms of the value-to-price ratio, we stand out clearly with a great proposition. Our prime focus is on delivering an end-to-end customer engagement platform with all digital and voice channels integrated into one single application. Further, we provide smooth integrations with enterprise-grade CRM applications that give additional flexibility to brands.

What kind of support are you getting from technology providers like Oracle? How strategic is your partnership with them?

Ours is a highly strategic partnership with Oracle. After evaluating numerous cloud providers, we chose to move our critical applications onto Oracle’s highly secure, second-generation cloud infrastructure. The Oracle Cloud technology team works with us as our trusted advisors. We found the whole package that Oracle Cloud offers to be extremely compelling - enterprise-class SLAs, a superior price-performance equation, advanced security, high availability and easy scalability, plus unique autonomous capabilities. By moving to OCI, we have realized 3X improvement in application performance, and 30% more cost savings.

What emerging technologies do you plan to use to fuel your next growth wave?

As customers demand more for less, they are increasingly turning to cloud and SaaS offerings, so it is becoming an aggressive market. Our product teams are fully geared up to meet these requirements and emerge as a strong player in the cloud contact center space. Some key initiatives we are planning in our upcoming product releases include faster search on a large number of tickets using Elastic Search, vertical-specific Video KYC solutions for securities, insurance, etc, common omnichannel software development kits for creating end applications such as Telemedicine, Sales CRM, etc. We will ensure the best customer experience by maintaining our value proposition of superior product with quality service.

Further, we are ensuring 360-degree IT governance for our users with application infrastructure management and plan to enhance this with features to identify, manage and monitor work-from-home and work-from-office separately.