Latest News
Datapoint launches Katalyst COREcentre in the Cloud for Contact Optimised customer service - 25 January 2012
Stand 229, Cloud Expo Europe 2012, 25 – 26 January, London Olympia
Customer centric organisations can now reap the benefits of a fully managed and securely hosted contact optimised contact centre, with Katalyst COREcentre in the Cloud from Datapoint, which launches at Cloud Expo Europe 2012 today. Deployed in conjunction with Datapoint’s critical infrastructure delivery partner, Telehouse, Katalyst COREcentre is a fully configurable contact centre, supplied on a secure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) basis.
Katalyst COREcentre delivers all the capabilities of a world-class contact centre, without the CAPEX cost, risk and effort of operating it directly, enabling managers to focus resources upon customers. Available for an affordable monthly cost, Katalyst COREcentre is suited to contact centres with up to 500 seats. Organisations will benefit from reduced operational expenditure support costs and an overall lower total cost of ownership than on-premise infrastructure. Katalyst COREcentre is deployed to users as a private cloud solution, over a secure, resilient wide area network from the Telehouse London data centre.
“Businesses are focusing on the customer service function now more than ever as it becomes critical to deliver a high level of satisfaction and retain profitable customers, and prove itself as a strategic asset to business, comments Gordon Young, General Manager of Katalyst at Datapoint. “Shifting customer service operations to the cloud with Katalyst COREcentre enables contact centres to deliver optimal performance, cost effectively, while coping with the complex inter-dependencies of multiple systems and applications, multiple data silos and broken business processes.”
At the heart of Katalyst COREcentre is Datapoint’s flagship performance management tool, Katalyst, which encompasses the whole contact centre operation, giving managers a complete and detailed overview of every agent, team, campaign, system and application. Katalyst supports business change and enables the contact centre to adapt to different pressures, new campaigns and business goals, while optimising customer contact and maximising capacity.
The contact centre infrastructure underpinning Katalyst COREcentre has been specially created by Datapoint to provide best-in-class functionality by combining the best contact centre technologies from leading providers, including computer-telephony integration, dialler for outbound calls, customer relationship management functionality and an intuitive agent interface.
Katalyst COREcentre is supported by Datapoint’s managed services, which combines over 40 years experience in systems integration with unparalleled contact centre and telecommunications industry knowledge. Through the private wide area network hosted by Telehouse, users will benefit from back-up and business continuity with 100 per cent system availability.
Katalyst COREcentre is available from Datapoint now.
The psychology of interacting with call centres - 17 January 2012
Datapoint have recently comissioned leading psychologist Donna Dawson to investigate what customers think when they interact with call centres. In her enlighting podcast, Donna shares her unique psychology based perspective on Contact-Optimisation.
During the podcast, Donna has compared getting help from a call-centre as being comparable to a hurdler attempting to jump over a number of hurdles on a track before he can reach the Finish Line. Those hurdles are both technical hurdles and operator hurdles.
What's driving call centre activity?
According to recent research, the number of calls to call-centres is growing at a rate of 20% every year. This surge is partly due to the growing number of tasks covered by call-centres: mortgages and credit cards, current accounts, flight bookings, mobile phone and software support, as well as internal company functions such as help desks, sales support and retail support.
The surge is also partly due to customers calling “on the move”, from mobile phones. However, at the same time there has been a sharp increase in the rate of customers giving up on their calls: from 5% in 2003, to just over 13% in 2010. That rate gets even higher when customers have to pick their way through multiple options and messages. And once connected, the “resolution rate” for their calls is only 50% - maybe as high as 70% if a more senior level of help is involved in the call – but well behind the call-centre industry’s own target of an 85% resolution rate.
So what do customers think about your call centre? Find out by listening to the podcast now.
Donna Dawson
Donna Dawson is a psychologist specialising in Personality and Behaviour, who has gained her credentials at the prestigious target Brandeis University (Massachusetts, USA), Manchester University (England), and Goldsmiths College, University of London. She covers a wide variety of subject mater to explain how a person’s behaviour and choices reflect back on their personality, including money habits, food choices, colour preference, and other lifestyle choices.
Donna has her ‘own show’ on LBC Radio, and she is often invited to take part in various debates and discussions on a range of social issues on both national television and radio, including frequent appearances on 'This Morning', BBLB ("Big Brother's Little Brother"), Channel Five News, BBC World News, BBC News 24, London Tonight and SKY News, ‘The Heaven and Earth Show’, ‘The Wright Stuff’, BBC Radio ‘Five Live’, and BBC Radio Wales.
Listen to the podcast now to find out what customers really think of call centres.
Datapoint Katalyst receives industry support - 10 November 2011
The recent Datapoint Katalyst launch was a great success and we’ve received lots of positive press reviews. Some of the things being said are:
‘Katalyst gives business executives a real-time, cohesive view of overall performance and aligns the contact centre’s processes and strategy with the objectives of the business’. – Callcentrehelper.com
‘Managers can now transform their contact centre through sustainable and controlled improvements to operational models, whilst reducing risk and driving growth’. – Oneweekmedia.co.uk
Katalyst has been two years in development but it’s being hailed as revolutionising contact optimisation and addressing the strategic importance of the contact centre. A recent survey from ContactBabel discovered that while 72% of large organisations viewed their contact centre as a strategic asset, the majority (79%) felt that with the right support, the contact centre could provide senior management with more insight around sub-optimal processes elsewhere in the organisation than at present.
With Katalyst, organisations can identify optimisation areas where cost can be eliminated, meaning a payback of under 12 months, making Katalyst "FREE" while consistently providing enterprises with a differentiated, more profitable, and satisfying service experience.
You can read more about Katalyst and how it can help you drive contact centre optimisation here.
Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide investigates technology's role in contact centre performance - 21 October 2011
The new UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide from ContactBabel is now available for download.
A subsection of the report called Contact Centre Strategy investigates the strategic decisions and issues facing contact centres can be download here. Sponsored by Datapoint, this chapter looks at how technology is often the root cause in preventing contact centres reaching their full potential in improving customer satisfaction and customer experience.
Launch of Datapoint Katalyst to turn contact centres into highly prized business assets - 11 October 2011
Leading light in contact centre and unified communications systems integration announces new product to address contact centre issues
For years, contact centre managers have been under pressure from their Executive Board to demonstrate the contribution of the contact centre to the business, justifying its position as an important strategic asset. With the launch of Katalyst on Tuesday 11th October at Beaufort House, London, this elusive goal is in sight. Backed by Datapoint’s 43 years experience in transforming contact centre operations worldwide, Katalyst enables contact centre managers to optimise contact centre operations to drive efficiencies in the contact centre and align them to the business. To date, Datapoint has been recognised as a leading communications systems integrator.
Katalyst combines Datapoint’s contact centre simulation engine with the market’s only contact centre indexing system, enabling managers to transform their contact centre through sustainable and controlled improvements to operational models, whilst reducing risk and driving growth. Through the automated delivery of decision influencing data derived from customer interactions, scenario building and the planning, balancing and tuning of resource and asset requirements, Katalyst delivers a single, coherent view into the contact centre whilst ensuring full compliance and ongoing effectiveness. In return, businesses benefit from significantly improved customer service, reduced operating costs with improved revenues along with visibility of valuable business intelligence for critical decision making.
“Operation models are poorly understood and consistently experience pressures from inefficiencies and bottlenecks,” comments Gordon Young, General Manager of Katalyst. “As a result, any form of transformation project impacts every corner of the business. Katalyst gives business executives a real-time, cohesive view of overall performance and aligns the contact centre’s processes and strategy with the objectives of the business. This ensures that managers can make decisions based upon hard facts rather than subjective data.”
Steve Morrell, Principal Analyst at ContactBabel adds: “Even in 2011, 51% of contact centres state that their senior management see them as an operational cost centre rather than a strategic asset, despite their vital importance to the customer experience. The complexity of contact centres is growing each year, with multimedia channels such as email, text chat and social media being forecast to grow strongly, along with pressure to improve customer satisfaction while maintaining efficiency. In such a dynamic and complex environment, an ability to measure and predict how solutions and business processes will impact upon each others’ cost and performance would be a powerful tool in managing cost while improving service and performance.”
Katalyst combines next generation analytics and modelling, together with real-time prediction functionality. The software is ideally suited to contact centres with 200 - 10,000 seats and can be configured to overlay any technology infrastructure.
About Datapoint
Datapoint is a communication systems integrator for businesses. It specialises in providing contact centre, unified communication and IP telephony systems for enterprises, supported by the most comprehensive services portfolio in the industry. Differentiating Datapoint is its unparalleled understanding of voice communication – and its ability to integrate, implement and service communication applications that underpin its customers’ business processes.
The company is an Avaya Platinum Business Partner and an accredited partner of, amongst others, Corebridge, Genesys, Nexidia, NICE, Nuance, Polycom, Presence, Sipera and Verint. Datapoint serves more than 550 customers operating from 5,000 locations from 40 different countries in conjunction with the ‘Intelligent Communications Alliance’ which it founded. Headquartered in London, the company has 10 offices in Europe and the Middle East.
Editorial contacts
Rob Forbes / Robin Campbell-Burt
Spreckley Partners Ltd
T: 020 7388 9988
M: 07525 264252 (on the day)
E: datapoint@spreckley.co.uk
New Look Interactive "The Point" Magazine - 10 October 2011
We’re pleased to announce the launch of our redesigned specialist magazine – The Point. This new online version uses interactive technology to bring you up-to-the-minute news, research and product information that will inspire you to make the most of your contact centre investments.
This Autumn issue explores Datapoint Katalyst, the first in a series of new solutions from Datapoint. It is a unique Datapoint solution that empowers business leaders and the contact centre by providing an all-in-one contact optimisation solution that addresses many of the vital business and technology issues today. We also look at how Voice Biometrics is already raising the bar on contact centre security, explore how ‘Contact Centre on Demand’ can help business deliver enterprise-class solutions without breaking the bank, and hear our partners’ views on how contact centre technology can help drive business success.
Read and download your copy now.
New Datapoint white paper exploring how SIP trunks and SBCs can revolutionise your business - 21 July 2011
We all know that things have been hard recently and that no matter what you do some of your customers will not be happy. But how do you make sure that you address their concerns quickly to ensure they are happy and remain a loyal customer?
A new white paper from Datapoint and ACME Packet explores how you can improve your customers’ experience, increase the productivity of your employees and even minimise your operating costs through Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks and Session Border Controls (SBCs).
Download your copy of Facing New Challenges and see how you can use these technologies to truly revolutionise your business and achieve your goals.
Datapoint underpins O2’s customer service strategy - 15 June 2011
£10 million managed service contract to create virtual, multi-channel IP contact centre, centralising over 80 million calls & SMS messages
Datapoint, a leading communication systemsintegrator for businesses announced today a £10 million, five year managed services contract with O2,a leading communications company for consumers and businesses. Datapoint has created a virtual, multi-channel contact centre linking all of O2’s UK core contact centres. It provides O2 customers with a fast, efficient service via phone and SMS messages and, in the future, will offer the ability to integrate other communication channels such as social media.
Datapoint, with its expertise in enterprise communication and customer service systems, will be integral to supporting O2’s customer experience for implementation of O2’s strategy by developing new communication channels. Providing the communication framework, Datapoint has created a virtual, IP-based contact centre for O2 in the UK for the first time. This links 6,000 agents in O2’s six contact centres across: Warrington, Leeds, Bury, Rotherham, Manchester and Glasgow, managing over 80 million phone calls each year.
As part of the contract, Datapoint has not only implemented the virtual contact centre but will now provide a 24 hours a day, seven days a week managed service to eliminate any bottlenecks before they impact customers. A key element will be the provision of consultancy services to help O2 shape its customer contact and managementstrategy.This includes quarterly ‘Customer Service Innovation Workshops’. In the workshops, Datapoint will support O2 to evaluate new communication technologies for the virtual contact centre such as natural language speech recognition. This will help O2 to improve customer service in the future by increasing the use of such technologies to give customers a greater choice of communication channels.
Jim Kent, CEO of Datapoint said, “O2 is investing in what is one of the largest and most complex, virtual IP contact centres in Europe as part of its vision to differentiate the customer experience. Our team has spent over 3,000 man days to implement the IP contact centre which enables O2 to be even more agile in communicating and rolling out new services to its customers.”
Gareth Turpin, head of Strategy and Operations, Sales & Service, O2 added, “Datapoint’s communication and customer service infrastructure will help us double the number of our customer ‘fans’ by the end of 2011 as we step up service for our customers regardless of which channel they communicate with us – whether it’s via the phone one day or Facebook the other.”
Datapoint’s dedicated, ten-strong services team will monitor and manage what is one of Europe’s largest IP contact centre installations. The open-standards based system will provide business continuity across two data centresand integrate the following: Nectar proactive monitoring and managed services software; existing Genesys call routing, workforce management and customer interaction management systems; Avaya interactive voice response and switching; Qfiniti voice and data recording; HP and Sun enterprise servers; NetApp storage; and an Oracle database.
In the future, the system can integrate Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to further increase flexibility.
Also, other European contact centres and communication channels can be integrated easily to enhance customer service (from SMS to social media with Twitter and Facebook; webchat; and instant messaging). This is part of O2’s vision to give customers a greater choice of channels with which to communicate with O2.
For more information please contact:
Daniel Bausor
Famous4 Communications
+44(0)7701 094980
dbausor@famous4comms.co.uk
Neil Pattie
Famous4 Communications
+44 (0)7784 086530
npattie@famous4comms.co.uk
Voice Authentication in Real World Contact Centres - 13 June 2011
We were honoured to take a leadership role, both as a sponsor and presenter, at this year’s Opus Research’s Voice Biometrics Conference (VBC), held in Amsterdam. Our head of business development, David Marshall, was joined by Datapoint’s Principal Consultant, Jason Beever, in a discussion about how core voice biometric technologies have matured well past the “emerging” stage.
It also gave us the opportunity to share with the attendees our award-winning TD Waterhouse implementation that let’s its clients use their voices, rather than PINs, passwords or “challenge questions” for identification and verification.
As a very brief outline – we leveraged our experience in contact centre automation, IVR design, speech processing and business process management into a service, which now saves TDW’s client’s time without sacrificing security. Because it shortens the time it takes to authenticate a caller, TDW has realised a positive ROI on its implementation.
Our experience with TDW reinforces the general trend Opus Research has observed in the market for voice-based authentication. Momentum is definitely building for voice biometrics-based solutions and, as a system integrator, we’ve demonstrated that we can incorporate voice-based authentication into existing customer care call flows and IVR dialogs.
Opus Research actually estimates that there are already 6.5 million registered voiceprints supporting caller authentication and transaction authorisation around the world. We expect the use of a person’s voice for authentication and authorisation (like a signature) to accelerate further as mobile phones take on a larger rule in electronic commerce and personal communications.
Think You Know Video, Think Again - 07 June 2011
In May Datapoint joined voices with Polycom so customers could take a fresh look at video conferencing.
The event was very popular with those attending discovering that video has most definitely matured. With full HD quality and surround sound right on the desktop, they could see for themselves just how viable video conferencing is today compared to the alternative of spending hours travelling to meetings.
Paul Brewer, Business Development Director, Datapoint summed the event up saying “We’ve always said that seeing is believing and those that attended can now appreciate the point. Many commented at how the technology exceeded expectations, both in terms of sound and image quality. Everyone agreed that there were occasions, back in their organisations, where video conferencing could be used to speed up decision processes, improve business continuity and reduce the need to physically travel for meetings.
Datapoint launches Managed Services portfolio to monitor voice & data within the call centre - 02 February 2011
New service to reduce part of the £7.6 billion loss due to poor voice quality in UK call centres
According to the Customer Experience Foundation, £7.6 billion is lost each year by businesses due to 79% of consumers experiencing poor voice quality. However, only one in six organisations have appropriate tools to monitor poor voice quality.
To address this issue, we've launched our Managed Services portfolio. The portfolio will help call centres and enterprise customers better manage both voice and data as well as tackle poor voice quality.
Tools designed to monitor and manage the voice components and traffic on the network have until recently been limited, both in terms of availability and effectiveness. At the core of our Managed Services portfolio is proactive, real-time monitoring and management of both voice and data traffic across multiple vendor networks to eliminate poor voice quality.
Datapoint answers research worry - 15 December 2010
A new report from the Customer Experience Foundation (CEF), commissioned by Empirix, confirms that today’s organisations still see poor voice quality as a major concern in optimising their customer contact experience.
Datapoint is actively addressing this issue for clients across EMEA and Globally. In a free white paper, we reveal how poor voice quality is always preventable.
Download your copy of 'Confine Bad Lines to the History Books' to find out more.
Datapoint signs Corebridge & Sipera to unified communication practice - 18 October 2010
Datapoint has announced the appointment of two vendors to address UC security and productivity.
Corebridge and Sipera are both key players in this space and will strengthen Datapoint's UC Practice - a key part of the company's shift to services.
Corebridge offers solutions that can save enterprise users 30 minutes to one hour per week. Its call recording and billing application is proving increasingly popular with specific verticals including the legal sector.
Sipera's security offering maintains the integrity and compliance of mission-critical communication in converged networks. It provides encryption and user authentication across VoIP, video and collaboration tools as well as adopting low-cost SIP trunks that protect against toll fraud.
These appointments follow Datapoint's recent signing of Polycom and Nectar.
Nectar expands international reach – with Datapoint - 14 September 2010
Nectar Services Corp has named Datapoint as its new channel partner and reseller.
Nectar specialises in managed services for the voice and data networks and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Juma Technology Corp (OTC:JUMT).
Datapoint has selected Nectar's Converged Management Platform (nectar/CMP) as the backbone of its Network Operations Centre (NOC) and the nucleus of the company's new managed services offering. Using nectar/CMP, Datapoint is able to help organisations minimise downtime before it impacts customer service or compliance.
Commenting on the appointment, Datapoint Chief Executive Jim Kent said:
"The enterprise communication systems market is relatively under-served in terms of managed services and is ripe for this kind of development. We see Nectar as the perfect vehicle to fill the void in the European marketplace and provide us with the capabilities we need to support our clients and drive new, recurring services revenue."
Anthony M. Servidio, CEO of parent-company Juma Technology, added:
"Both here in the states and abroad, our partners are driving Nectar adoption and rapidly accelerating our market share. We are very pleased to announce Datapoint as a new partner and look forward to having them deliver managed services solutions, powered by Nectar. Datapoint has built a highly successful business throughout Europe, making them an excellent ambassador for us in this region."
Datapoint white paper profiles post recession customers - 10 September 2010
How do you reassure and best serve customers that have lived through the economic turmoil of the past 24 months?
A new white paper from Datapoint, in conjunction with Contact Babel and Genesys, provides valuable insights.
'Five steps to serving the post recession customer' explores the new challenges you now face in customer contact and discusses how you must understand and fit with the psychology of post-recession customers if you’re to remain successful.
Download your copy now to find out what’s changed, how this affects your customers, what they need, and which technologies can give you a competitive edge.