Collab
Delivering Unified Business Communications

Since the turn of the century, businesses in the telecommunications arena have witnessed the gradual shift from private branch exchange (PBX) to robust cloud-based systems to handle inbound and outbound calls. Despite the benefits of modern technologies, many firms are still hesitant to employ them in their operations. This is because of the lack of standard solutions in the market that allow telecommunication organisations to consolidate all of their communication avenues within a single pane of glass.

Addressing this gap with its comprehensive portfolio of multimedia contact center offerings and an extensive global partner network is Portgual-based Collab. “Our contact center solutions have the ability to seamlessly integrate with our client’s telecommunications infrastructure and are built with a deep understanding of industry trends and the most pressing customer requirements,” says Pedro Quintas, founder and CEO at Collab.

Collab was founded in 2003 by Quintas and his team, with a core mission to help its customers align with the shift from PBX to session initiation protocol (SIP) in the contact center industry. Unlike its contemporaries that started transitioning out of their legacy deployments after the transition, Collab was ready with a marketable product to assist its clients in quickly adapting to the evolving marketplace. At the same time, the company started developing a partner network with leading telecommunication giants in Europe and the world at large to help newer businesses recognise the significance of building a flexible infrastructure that allows agents to opt for the channel that best-suit their customer interaction approach.

Currently, Collab offers a 360° contact center solution— OneContact CC—that combines multiple communication channels including voice, video, email, social media, and various messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype, and more). According to Quintas, the overall business landscape has been heading toward a remote working approach for a decade; the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this shift, which has caused numerous organisations to reassess their telecommunication infrastructure and find the right balance between digital and traditional communication. He further mentions that in the current ‘pandemic-struck’ ecosystem, firms are focusing on three key areas concerning their contact centers: cloud-readiness, advanced speech analytics, and digital transformation.

With respect to cloud-readiness, Collab assists its clients strengthen their communication channels to support work from home agents. Further, the company uses AI-powered speech analytics to enhance call-quality monitoring. The technology examines calls and assesses both the agent and customer’s tone; transcripts voice into text to extract relevant information such as intents expressed through keyword trends or areas that need improvement. The results are indexed, searchable and can be used to improve customer experience and identify selling opportunities.

“As the pandemic has made it difficult for supervisors to manage their teams and their work, our AI enables advanced supervision automation replaces the traditional process, vastly improving efficiencies and customer experience,” states Quintas. Similarly, Collab’s OneContact Flows assist clients in designing customised customer flows between contact centers and customers as well as managing their interactive voice response technology to deliver a highly engaging and effective customer journey. Collab also help clients with their digital transformation endeavours, thereby enabling the use of seamless media-rich integrations to boost the speed and efficiency of remote handled processes.

Alternatively, Collab has developed unique offerings such as its OneContact Gamification and Workforce Optimization solutions to enhance the engagement and collaboration of agents within contact centers. And while the company’s gamification is used by its largest customers to garner increased agent motivation and customer engagement, Collab’s workforce optimization is combined with advanced speech analytics to provide a guided call monitoring. “Instead of randomly listening to 10 percent of all recordings, we scan all interactions and categorise them on certain KPIs (sentiment, keywords, and others) to help the supervisor detect problematic instances,” adds Quintas. Collab’s algorithms play a vital role in its guided call monitoring as it automatically notifies managers to trigger words or sentiments, allowing the timely transference of calls to specialised agents that handle complicated customer interactions.

At the heart of Collab’s portfolio is its Nubitalk Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), which can be deployed like a public or partner cloud environment for clients that have high call volumes. “Nubitalk enables businesses to configure their contact center deployments and easily move them from public to private cloud or vice-versa within 30 minutes,” extols Quintas. This feature is a huge value-addition for Collab’s larger clients who may have to move their telecommunications infrastructure to other countries due to regulatory mandates and geopolitical tensions. With such unmatched capabilities, Nubitalk has helped Collab ignite several success stories with leading Telcos like SFR in France and Lumen Technologies in Latin America, among several others.

Further highlighting the benefits of Collab’s portfolio is its success story with the Vodafone Group. In this instance, the telecommunication company was planning to transition their legacy infrastructure to a more sophisticated network with an aim to enhance their internal operations and customer service. Initially relying on the traditional Genesee Technologies’ telecom offerings, the client struggled to manage agents and service quality due to the high number of outsourced call centers. With Collab, Vodafone Group was able to manage all their contact centers from a single system that leveraged the same KPIs, recording analysis, and quality monitoring, thereby driving unparalleled cost optimisation in their operations. Moreover, the client was able to explore new business models in contracting outsourced operations as they could ensure that the level of service they offered were guaranteed to be impeccable.

Looking ahead, Collab plans to engage and collaborate with newer partners, which will facilitate the delivery of its solutions to newer regions and bring in more innovative and mature customers under its footprint. “We look forward to signing new partners because our vision is to reach a level where our customers drive innovations in our portfolio and bring benefits to us,” concludes Quintas.