In this interview with Carlos Martinez, Managing Director for Enghouse Interactive SPALAT (Spain, Portugal, Africa & LATAM), he explains the strengths of Enghouse Interactive and its evolution in the market in recent years. He also discusses the organisation's objectives following acquisitions, such as the purchase of Altitude Software. These objectives, as Martinez recalls in this talk, are "to offer our customers products and solutions that allow them to improve their customer experience, improving their loyalty, increasing their revenues and being more efficient and, therefore, reducing their operating costs".
Question: What is Enghouse Interactive's current strategy in the market and how does it follow the guidelines of the parent company Enghouse in the market?
Martínez: Our strategy is to provide products and solutions that allow our customers to improve their customer experience, identifying insights that allow them to increase their revenues and facilitating self-service models oriented continuously and progressively towards cost efficiency.
To this end, we have the most complete portfolio in the market, offering multichannel collaborative contact centre solutions in cloud, on-premises or hybrid models, depending on the operational and financial needs of each of our clients at any given time.
Specifically, our solutions are focused on managing customer interactions according to the parameters mentioned above, through solutions developed for different sectors and verticals such as: collections, insurance, health, banking, retail, among others.
For example, we have solutions such as collection virtual agent, which is a set of our perfectly integrated products, specially chosen to optimise portfolio recovery in companies in the debt collection sector, automating the collection of small debts and allowing agents to become true negotiators with large debts. This allows us to reduce labour costs, improve customer experience and increase revenues.
Another example is our videoconferencing platform (Vidyo), ideal for telemedicine consultations, telebanking, online classes or simply customer service. We have recently incorporated facial and voice biometrics technology, something very innovative in these markets, which we are sure will provide significant added value in terms of security.
Question: The company acquired Altitude Software last year to increase its penetration in the Latin American market; what results are being achieved after this acquisition?
Martínez: The integration of Altitude Software was a success, as we were able to achieve it within three months, providing the highest quality service to our customers and partners, guaranteeing our quality standards and committing ourselves to the continuous evolution of all our products.
This is precisely one of the characteristics that differentiates Enghouse from other companies. We are committed to our customers and partners to evolve all acquired products, as has been the case with Altitude, through a continuous improvement of their functionalities by integrating them with technologies previously developed or acquired by our company.
Internally, we also overcame the challenge of integrating the Altitude and Enghouse teams as one, by re-organising the different areas and taking care of people.
In terms of results, we met expectations by achieving results in our FY21 (ended in October) and for FY22 we have set aggressive targets in line with Enghouse Interactive's standard requirements (double digit growth).
Question: Apart from this purchase, what have been other important moments addressed by the company in recent years, and how have they affected the company's performance?
Martínez: The pandemic has been a moment that we have successfully faced from different points of view:
Internally, we have been at home every day providing service to our customers and partners, ensuring that our customers could continue to carry out their daily activities without any negative impact.
We enabled our customers, through the different technologies provided by Enghouse, to continue servicing their customers remotely in record time (only several days) and without additional costs.
In addition to the business component, we believe that we have played an important role during these last two years, enabling the continuity of the global economy, even during the healthcare crisis.
Question: Enghouse is promoting its solution for all-in-one contact centres, how is it being accepted by companies and what do they value most about the functionalities it allows to incorporate into the contact centre?
Martínez: Our Enghouse CCaaS solution is having a great acceptance in the market because it allows our customers to have an all-in-one service in the cloud, in a totally flexible, secure and adaptable way to our customers. We allow our customers to have all our omnichannel technology with artificial intelligence without barriers to entry so that they can innovate and improve their services.
In addition, our service also has the ability to integrate with Microsoft Teams, which allows our customers to seamlessly integrate their corporate solution with the contact centre.
Question: How does Enghouse Interactive use AI to improve the experience of contact centre workers and, therefore, that of end customers?
Martínez: During their interactions with a customer, or the customer himself when accessing a self-service channel (IVR, voicebot or chatbot).
I would like to highlight four differentiating features of our dynamic, AI-based knowledge base that make it a powerful tool for optimising the operation:
- Self-learning: the knowledge base automatically improves based on how it is used. Each interaction continues to refine and improve the relevance of the content.
- Knowledge integration: links deeply with content to enable tighter integration with telephony systems, CRMs and other applications.
- Global tool: allows you to translate content into more than 25 languages to serve your customers in their native language and provide a more personalised experience.
- Access control: allows you to restrict parts of the content to agents and experts only and make the rest available to customers through self-service.
Question: The business world has its eyes fixed on cloud solutions, it is a trend and a necessity for any company today, although some progress has been made before. What solutions does Enghouse offer in this aspect?
Martínez: All our contact centre, collaboration and video solutions work in the cloud, and most of them are also on-premises. This allows our customers to decide which option to choose at any given time. We also offer hybrid environments (cloud + on-premises) sharing the same solution.
Now, we are offering our customers the possibility of migrating their current on-premises solutions to the cloud. That is, we are offering them to have the same solution, keeping all the functionalities and data, but now in a cloud environment, adding the inherent additional services. This will allow them to save time in long migrations with third parties, continue guaranteeing the security of their information, have a much more flexible and scalable solution, and reduce costs since they would only pay for the agents active at any given time.
Question: What are the company's main objectives in the countries where it will be operating this year?
Carlos Martínez: Latin America is a strategic area for Enghouse Interactive, so our efforts are focused on consolidating the businesses developed so far and making them grow significantly and sustainably over time.
In addition to what has already been mentioned (that Enghouse guarantees the evolution and continuous improvement of all acquired products), a characteristic that clearly differentiates us from our competitors is that we adapt our global strategy to local needs, requirements and trends; beyond the obvious, serving our clients in their language and time zone, we adapt our products, solutions and business models locally. It is true that this approach may reduce our internal efficiency as a multinational company, but we firmly believe that it is very relevant for our customers and partners, as no one else is offering it in the market.
Technologically speaking, we are focused on enabling customers in all regions to decide at all times whether they require our products and solutions in the cloud, on-premises or in hybrid environments. We are continuously improving and incorporating cutting-edge tools, such as artificial intelligence solutions, big data, speech recognition and security through facial and voice biometrics technology.
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