Message from General Manager, Solutions

Since its inception, Wateen has been striving to develop solutions that provide unprecedented satisfaction to its customers by offering innovative and cutting edge technology solutions. We do not just offer a product to our customer but an opportunity to invent and complement our efforts. Wateen's aim is to become the number one systems integrator and solutions provider. The Hosted Contact Center is just the first step in this direction and many more hosted platforms and applications will be launched in the not too distant future.
Technology options are expanding beyond expensive premise-based systems to include functionally-rich, on-demand solutions that do not require large up-front investments and can be provisioned on a monthly basis with relatively little risk. The new generation of hosted contact centers such as Wateen's Hosted Contact Center solution includes most systems and applications required to operate and manage a world-class contact center. Users can now select high quality, functionally-rich, on-demand solutions for contact center infrastructure, dialling, recording, quality management, workforce management, email response management, knowledge management, customer service and support and mush more. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center solution will alter market dynamics and redefine the rules for contact center investments.
What is Wateen's Hosted Contact Center?
Wateen's Hosted Contact Center (HCC) is contact center equipped with complete multimedia capabilities and is managed and centrally operated by the Service Provider (Wateen) at its own facilities. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center solution includes a suite of services that can be introduced all at once or incrementally.
Amongst these services are:
Virtual Call Center:
Calls are routed to contact center agents regardless of their location, a service especially appealing to businesses with branch offices or home agents.
Network routing with computer telephony integration (CTI):
Network-based automatic call distribution (ACD) is combined with CTI services.
Network interactive voice response (IVR):
IVR functionality is located in the network to provide information to callers or to collect information from callers before they speak with a live agent.
Web chat and collaboration:
Enables contact center agents to respond immediately to customer questions, using your web site along with text chat or real-time web collaboration.
E-mail management:
Provides a comprehensive solution for managing large volumes of customer e-mail inquiries submitted to company mailboxes or websites.
Blended outbound dialling:
Provides a combination of outbound dialling modes which complements the powerful inbound call-handling capability of the Wateen's Hosted Contact Center Hosted platform. Campaigns can be built to use predictive, progressive, or preview dialling, which is integrated with inbound calls and compliant with contact center service levels to offer a powerful blended solution.
Remote agent support:
Extends the Wateen's Contact Center Hosted environment by providing CTI, contact distribution, and reporting capabilities to remote agents in branch offices or at home.
Intelligent call routing:
Calls are routed between contact centers based on call context information (dialed number and caller ID), agent availability, and customer information from databases. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center contains the components shown in figure 1. All reside at Wateen's facility, except for call center agent PCs, and a quality-of-service (QoS)-enabled network. (see figure 1).
Wateen's Hosted Contact Center provides a strong network infrastructure that drives performance, security, availability, and reliability which is critical to all levels of the contact center architecture. A strong network infrastructure is the foundation that enables IP telephony and contact center applications to perform efficiently and reliably in supporting contact center agents regardless of their location. (see figure 2).
Why Wateen's Hosted Contact Center Solution?
Small and mid-size businesses as well as larger enterprises are moving forward to take advantage of hosted benefits: low up-front investment, minimal IT resources requirements, subscription pricing and robust feature suites. Enterprises of all sizes are on the move to build the contact center of the future: one requiring flexibility, scalability and ease of provisioning. Hosted Contact Center technology holds the promise of revolutionising the industry because now there's a viable alternative to the limitations of premise-based systems. With hosted contact center solutions, enterprises today are realising the power and freedom associated with lower TCO, increased ROI and the chance to finally concentrate on serving customers and generating new revenue.
WATEEN's Hosted Contact Center platform meets the toughest security and industry standards. WATEEN's Hosted Contact Center offers its customers, low operating costs and a short time to market, both of which are vital to their profits and business continuity.
WATEEN's Hosted Contact Center is on-demand and uses software as a service. It is a cost effective alternative to premise-based offering. Hosted Contact Center solutions have been around in the contact center arena for more than 20 years. What's different is that Wateen's Hosted Contact Center is functionally compelling and able to compete effectively with premise based offerings. End users who want to use Wateen's HCC by financial constraints do not have to sacrifice service quality or functionality.
Frost & Sullivan's conducted a recent end-user research on the factors that motivate the adoption of a hosted contact center solution. The results clearly demonstrate that the primary drivers for companies to choose a hosted contact center solution include ease of implementation, no capital investment and pay-us-you-go pricing. These are followed by reduced system maintenance and access to the latest technology.
Return on investment evaluations are most often based on a number of tangible and intangible benefits. While hosted contact center solutions bring a number of benefits to the table, their impact on cost reduction contributes most effectively towards creation of a compelling business case.
Cost-justification in the form of clear-cut ROI metrics is an integral part of the technology investment process. A clear understanding of the Total cost of Ownership (TCO) of technology investments is essential in the current business environment. TCO analysis helps eliminate hidden costs and surprises and helps assess investments from both short as well as long term perspectives contact center solution costing takes into account costs associated with the following essential components.
-- Software Costs
-- Hardware Costs
-- Implementation Costs
-- Ongoing Expenditures (Maintenances, upgrades etc)
-- Subscription Costs for Hosted Solutions
-- IT Staff Costs
The table in figure 4 illustrates a TCO model for a 100 seat contact center and comparison of costs associated with premise based and hosted models over five years.
Figure 5 provides a graphical display of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model associated with premises based and hosted contact center solutions over one to five year period. As illustrated in the figures below, hosted contact center solutions help eliminate high costs for maintenance and upgrades associated with premise based solutions. Staffing and implementation costs are also significantly reduced.
Wateen's Hosted Contact Center allows organisations to start small and grow, general benefits are:
-- Low start-up cost, small initial cash outlay
-- Low total cost of ownership
-- Small monthly payments that come out of the operating budget instead of the capital budget
-- Wateen's responsibility for system installation, implementation and ongoing maintenance
-- Rapid implementation; users are up and running quickly with full-featured implementation
-- Cost effective and feature-rich support for SMEs
-- Many browser-based offerings that require little on-site technology
-- Investment protection
-- Ongoing technology refresh without disruption to the operating environment
-- Few in-house technical resources required to support the applications
-- Ease of scaling up and down
-- No network costs or application expertise required to support multiple sites and at-home agents
-- Standardised functionality and best practices easily implemented across departments or an enterprise
-- Ease of transition from a premise-based implementation, with minimal financial or system impact
-- Simplification of contingency planning requirements
Wateen Hosted Contact Center Offers Compelling Benefits for BPO Companies:
Wateen's Hosted Contact Center is as feature-rich as the leading premise-based offerings. It is predicated that in the near future 20% to 30% of all new contact center seats will be hosted.
There are many factors driving this trend, including:
1. Availability of functionally rich, competitive hosted contact center offerings
2. Viability of internet Protocol (IP) that is altering the dynamics of contact centers
3. Growing need for flexible, multi-site solutions that can easily and cost effectively span the globe
4. Minimising unnecessary financial risks for the company and its management
5. Avoidance of large capital investments and start-up cots
6. Need for technology investment protection to ensure that solutions remain current without undergoing costly and time consuming upgrades
7. Shrinking technical resources in corporations
8. Low priority assigned to contact center technology requirements by corporate IT
9. Desire of contact center managers to side-step irrelevant technology standard being set by IT for premise-based systems
Benefits for SMEs:
Budgetary constraints coupled with insufficient in house-contact center resources and expertise has been the principal impediment to implementing premise-based solutions in SMEs. Small and midsize companies want top-of-the-line, competitive contact center solutions, but many of the vendors selling premise-based systems have been reluctant scale their solutions down, as it is not cost effective. As a result, SMEs have often had to compromise on functionality to avoid paying inordinately high fees for systems that scales well beyond their needs. Wateen's Hosted Contact center service will allow SMEs to avoid high start-up and implementation costs by renting our contact center systems on a month-to-month basis. They also benefit from the contact center expertise and support that comes with each of the applications they implements.
Benefits for large enterprises:
The principal attractions of Wateen's Hosted Contact Center offering for large enterprises and institutions of higher education are: lower total cost of ownership; rapid deployment that requires few in-house technical resources; ability to "pay as you go" within a limited operating budget and minimal impact on capital budget; and investment protection. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center solution eliminates the need for costly and disruptive system upgrades. Additionally, for companies that have multiple sites (whether owned by the company or out sources), employ at-home agents, or want to centrally manage their contact center operation, Wateen's Hosted Contact Center offering is the solution.
Benefits for Government Agencies:
Government agencies often struggle to obtain funding for necessary projects, particularly those involving large up-front capital investments that attract public scrutiny and sometimes require the public's approval. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center will prove an excellent way to keep contact center-related government projects within tight budgetary constraints. Additionally Wateen's HCC will provide the various agencies with the resource and expertise to succeed.
Wateen's Hosted Contact Center Functionality
The categories of Wateen's Hosted Center functionality are:
1. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center will offer routing and queuing capabilities for calls and sometimes emails and chats. Generally includes interactive voice response (IVR), basic web-self service and may also include dialling functionality.
2. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center will offer infrastructure functionality through the Wateen telecom network.
3. Provides a combination of outbound dialling modes which complements the powerful inbound call-handling capability of the Wateen Hosted Contact Center platform. Campaigns can be built to use predictive, progressive or preview dialling, which is integrated with inbound calls and compliant with contact center service levels to offer a powerful blended solution.
4. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center will provide IVR/Speech recognition services via a network cloud," eliminating the need for end user to install and maintain their own IVR hardware.
5. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center offers an ability to record a random sample or 100% of contact center calls. Recording can be done remotely through the network or placing a server at the customer site. This will provide the ability to perform agent evaluations and quality assurance.
6. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center will also offer Work Force Management solution that helps contact centers forecast transaction volume (calls, emails and chat sessions) and then determines how many agents are required to ensure timely customer service. Workforce managements will be integrated with Wateen's HCC solution.
7. Web Chat and Collaboration will enable contact center agents to respond immediately to customer questions, using your website along with text chat or real-time Web collaboration.
8. Wateen's Hosted contact Center will offer analytics capabilities for contact centers. Adoption of these capabilities is relatively new for contact centers and more common in other enterprises.
9. Wateen's Hosted Contact Center provides a comprehensive solution for managing large volumes of customer e-mail inquiries submitted to company mailboxes or websites.
Value Added Features:
Voice Recording:
The content and quality of customer interactions are often unknown. In contact centers, where communications serve as the sole business drives, competent and cost-effective service is crucial to differentiate from competitors. Call recording and quality monitoring fill the knowledge gap of "what is really going on" by monitoring business communications to gather a valuable data resource. Learning about the service level and core competencies, the primary goals of "quality monitoring," provides supervisors and agents with essential guidance and helps to fine tune an organization's Communication skills. With Wateen's hosted contact center value added service companies may also analyse the content of recorded calls through keyword spotting or by searching for specific customer complaints or the latest trends.
Workforce Management:
Wateen's Work Force Management tool is a superior-quality management solution for contact centers; a powerful yet uniquely easy-to-use solution. It enables you to immediately create forecasts for the next few days and much further ahead. This means you rapidly attain an optimal utilisation of your contact center's resources and gain better balance in your staffing. It also contributes to employee satisfaction and helps reduce staff turnover. And because the scheduling is optimised automatically, your minimise the risk of both overstuffing and understaffing, irrespective of changes in service demands. At an early stage it provides you with forecasts that show how you can greatly diminish costs. Or in other words, how much money you can save while dramatically improving customer service or raising sales targets.
Screen Capture / Monitoring:
Our screen capture module automatically initiates recording when an agent presses any previously defined function or when a particular error message, screen pop or application appears on the desktop. The product may be installed easily through a user-friendly configuration wizard without sophisticated integration with CTI or other data interfaces. This feature results in a tremendous cost savings by avoiding professional set-up charges. You can also record and analyse interactions occurring on the desktop, especially those related to specific programs, products or customers.
For further information, please contact:
Hosted Contact Center - Product Manager 4th floor New Auriga Center, Main Boulevard, Gulberg II, Lahore. Tel: + 92-42- 111-928-336, [email protected]

=======================================================================================================================================

Cost Comparison Premise versus Hosted                                                 figure 4

=======================================================================================================================================

Contdct Center Solution              Year 1                Year 2               Year 3                Year 4                 Year 5

100 agents                    Premise      Hosted   Premise     Hosted   Premise     Hosted    Premise     Hosted    Premise     Hosted

=======================================================================================================================================

Hardware                     $52,000

Software                    $192,000

Implementation              $196,000     $24,000

Maintenance and Upgrades                            $48,000              $48,000               $48,000                $48000

Subscription Costs                      $144,000              $144,000             $144,000              $144,000              $144,000

IT Staff Costs              $100,000     $25,0O0   $100,000    $25,000  $100,000    $25,000   $100,000    $25,000   $100,000    $25,000

Total Cost                  $540,000    $193,000   $148,000   $169,000  $148,000   $169,000   $148,000   $169,000   $148,000   $169,000

N-year TCO                                                              $836,000   $531,000                       $1,132,000   $869,000

N-year % cost savings                         64%                                        36%                                        23%

=======================================================================================================================================