By building your own customer experience with Communication APIs, you can improve customer satisfaction and increase productivity.
In today’s rapidly changing digital economy, businesses face increasing challenges in improving customer experience (CX) and engagement. Recognising CX as key to business growth and a competitive advantage, companies are swiftly adapting their digital strategies to prioritise improving customer and employee experiences across various regions and systems, all whilst doing this in a more agile and scalable way.
And the key to achieving this?
Taking contact centre operations to the next level with a bespoke, cloud-based full-stack solution.
Embracing cloud technologies is now essential for streamlining contact centre infrastructure, enhancing experiences, and boosting operational efficiency. Recently, our innovative and comprehensive contact centre solution garnered significant recognition, clinching us the prestigious 2023 Competitive Strategy Leadership Award in the Southeast Asian cloud contact centre services industry by Frost & Sullivan.
This accolade is a testament to our commitment to building customer experience solutions that solve real-world enterprise CX challenges.
In this article, we will explore some of these pain points in detail and discuss what makes Toku uniquely positioned to address them.
Let’s dive in.
Complexity in contact centre operations
The world of contact centres is fraught with complex challenges, particularly for large and multinational businesses. These complexities stem from a multitude of factors, significantly impacting the efficiency and effectiveness of operations.
Agents based in different locations
One of the key challenges in contemporary contact centre operations is supporting agents who are servicing multiple markets from different locations. The complexity arises from empowering dispersed agents in hybrid work arrangements to provide consistent and efficient service regardless of their location. An enterprise could also have agents who are based in-house or in BPOs – or both, and both scenarios need to be served equally well by a unified cloud contact centre platform.
Channel proliferation
Another critical aspect is how the channels people use to connect with businesses have diversified, expanding beyond traditional calls and emails to include social media and other digital platforms. This fragmentation has left many enterprises unsure of how to deliver a more streamlined, consistent CX no matter which channel a customer chooses to use.
Multiple vendors
Dealing with multiple vendors is another significant source of complexity in contact centre operations. In many centres, it’s all too common to have a different provider for different parts of the stack – including the underlying telephony network that supports their communications.
When you have several different systems from different providers, it often leads to a fragmented, poorly integrated infrastructure.
Regulation complexity
Another related challenge for contact centres operating across multiple markets is adhering to different regulatory standards. Each market has its own set of rules and compliance requirements for data handling, privacy policies, and customer interaction standards, making it essential for contact centres to be well-versed and up-to-date with these differing regulations.
Navigating this regulatory maze with the help of a dedicated team of experts who understand the rules on the ground is crucial for maintaining the integrity and reputation of the contact centre, and its associated brand.
How Toku cuts through enterprise complexity
This is why we have always adopted a ‘consulting-first approach’ where we prioritise deeply understanding the organisation’s complex operations in order to tailor a bespoke solution that fits their needs.
For example, operating in the diverse and dynamic Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, means enterprises have to deal with the fragmented telecommunications landscape, which complicates consistent service delivery and customer support across different countries. The telco regulatory complexity is a formidable barrier, with each country having its own compliance and regulatory requirements.
We consult closely with enterprises to navigate this complexity. Our dedicated regional hubs and local compliance teams offer deep insights into cultural and regulatory nuances. This ensures that enterprises can expand their contact centre solutions seamlessly across the APAC region, meeting local standards without compromising on global operational efficiency.
Speaking of our consulting expertise, one of the key reasons we recently acquired Activeo APAC – a leading customer engagement firm in Singapore supporting more than 150 enterprises on digital transformation projects – was to bolster our consulting capabilities.
This strategic move has added significant consulting expertise and large-scale enterprise project delivery capabilities to our business, substantially enhancing our ability to serve enterprises with complex CX and customer engagement needs.
The consulting-first approach is one part of our strategy.
The second part lies in how we build our products.
For example, we chose to build our Toku Contact Centre solution so that it is highly adaptable to customer needs.
It’s also capable of integrating with our range of embeddable communication solutions, including:
Perhaps what makes it so unique though, is that we use our own robust, native, enterprise-grade telephony network as the backbone for our platform. This essential feature addresses the challenge of vendor complexity head-on, as it enables us to provide a fully integrated, customisable and localised contact centre platform.
Frost & Sullivan acknowledges that the company has successfully positioned itself as an enterprise-focused cloud contact center service provider. Toku is uniquely positioned as a disruptive services provider in Asia-Pacific, offering clients a complete and localized omnichannel contact center platform powered by its telephony network.
— Sherrel Sonia Roche, Industry Principal, ICT Research
This is in fact, one of the reasons Frost & Sullivan recognised us for The Southeast Asian Cloud Contact Center Services Industry Excellence in Best Practices award. If you’d like to read the full report on this prestigious recognition, check it out here:
Rising to the challenge: A real-world success story in meeting customer expectations
A key challenge businesses face is the need to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations in the region.
A prime example of this is our collaboration with Gojek, where we helped enhance their customer care operations. Gojek introduced an innovative ‘Passenger Lost & Found’ feature in their app, utilising Toku’s embeddable communication solutions to connect their riders with their drivers after a lost item is reported.
This enabled passengers to recover lost property while maintaining the privacy of their contact details, significantly improving the customer experience, while enabling Gojek to resolve over 50% of lost and found cases through their interactive voice response flow and solve 90% of such cases without the need for direct contact centre agent intervention.
Unlike many other players in the industry that offer off-the-shelf, discrete point solutions, our ability to deeply understand the complex enterprise requirements and customise a bespoke solution that fit Gojek’s needs as they expanded regionally, has set us apart as a disruptive leader in the field. By offering a full suite of products with dedicated consulting expertise, we aim to be the one-stop-shop for enterprises trying to improve their customer experience in the region.
Why being a one-stop-shop provider is a game changer
As we offer a comprehensive range of services, including professional consulting, advanced technology, implementation, and ongoing support, we see our vision aligning closely with the principles of Customer Experience (CX) as-a-Service (CXaaS). In CXaaS, the goal is to combine CX strategy, data integration, automation and employee expertise in one, complete package that enterprise brands can use to deploy large scale customer experience projects quickly.
Adopting the role of an end-to-end CXaaS provider, we are poised to significantly simplify the complexities associated with enterprise-level customer experience. This strategic positioning not only enhances our capabilities but also establishes us as innovators in the realm of cloud communications and customer engagement across the Asia-Pacific region.