Our year in review

Creativity during a crisis

This year the covid-19 crisis put us all to the test. At Inisoft, our primary focus has been on:

• Supporting increased pressures placed on our existing clients’ contact center services, and
• Implementing efficient solutions for new clients who saw sudden spikes in demand because of the pandemic.

It’s important to note that most of our new clients this year provide essential services in healthcare insurance, government labor and social security departments, and humanitarian aid organizations. Those are sectors that respond to people’s money worries, healthcare policy queries, and employment payment queries: issues that covid-19 put pressure on.

Pressure reveals vulnerabilities. But it also compels us to find solutions to problems.  So, we’ve brought new talent into our teams to help us transform vulnerabilities into strengths, to collaborate with our people and help us continue to provide neat, powerful solutions to our clients.

Inisoft is growing. And our flagship software solution, Syntelate XA is growing, too. We’ve passed several key milestones on our technology roadmap, and they’re related to key changes in the contact center industry.

It’s a good feeling to be discussing some big positives at the end of what has been a traumatic year.

So, let’s take a look at a selection of those milestones.

Mobile XA for remote working

First, we unveiled our new smartphone app for Syntelate XA. Back in 2019, our Dev team at Inisoft started working on a solution to deliver the power of our omni-channel unified agent desktop on mobile devices.

By January 2020, Mobile XA was born. Our Head, Oonagh McBride and our Syntelate Integration Manager Fraser Cochrane, pictured below, launched Mobile XA at Avaya ENGAGE 2020, in Phoenix, Arizona on February 8.

Our first client to go live with Mobile XA was guard.me International Insurance, one of the world’s largest insurance providers in education.

They needed a contact center agent desktop solution that provided desktop-standard functionality but on a smartphone, because guard.me agents don’t use desktop PCs.

Mobile XA integrates with guard.me’s customer relationship management system, and calls can be recorded for training purposes. Calls can be dispositioned just as easily and with the same level of detail as our desktop solution.

The guard.me project whetted our appetite for further development of our Mobile XA platform. An app is what the contact center space has been building up to for some years. We’re excited to be ahead of the curve on this.

Robotics module

This technology milestone has been reached with another new client, Avon. They are our first client using the Syntelate XA robotics module, which integrates with their green screen application.

Knowledge base

Also for Avon, we implemented an AI-enabled knowledge base which we connected to the agents’ Syntelate XA desktop, making the agent user journey seamless. Another end-user consideration was geography. With one team in South Africa and the other in the UK, we opted for a cloud solution. The cloud grants the same, effortless user experience to both teams.

With this self-service tool, Avon sales representatives can find information far more quickly than with their previous system. This helps improve the quality of their business activity while decreasing their need to spend time seeking answers from other teams.

AI and automation robotics technologies are maturing. We’re seeing how they can help solutions engineers automate workflows for semi-structured information, which is an exciting space to be developing in.

Bilingual agent desktop

And now, from machine language to human language: internationalization is another major area for software generally, but especially for SaaS solutions like Syntelate XA. Internationalization is a process of providing software in different languages and dialects, and this will be a key strand of our roadmap in 2021.

We’ve provided a bilingual Syntelate XA desktop to the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Solidarity in Quebec, Canada. The agent desktop and dashboards interfaces switch between English and French depending on the language setting of the customer and agent.

The cloud helps us connect with global clients whose customers speak more than one language and who sometimes want to choose from multiple dialects.

Where next?

Having welcomed new talent to our teams to support our product roadmap and guide the quality of our services, we’re set on a trajectory of growth. The continuing significance of the cloud for delivering contact center solutions will play a key role for us in 2021, not only because that’s where the industry continues to expand, but also because we saw this year that homeworking does in fact work for our sector. That means we expect to see more activity with Mobile XA. Finally, we can see that AI and automation will play a central role in our language processing projects and in the continual development of our self-service solutions.

We’re in a good position for embracing 2021. I hope that like me, you too are anticipating better times next year for all of us.