It has become clear in recent years that customers primarily prefer businesses with omni-channel experiences. Instead of thinking of a desktop, a mobile, a tablet, or an Apple Watch experience, omni-channel experience follows a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling, and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and unified customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out. All omni-channel experiences use multiple channels, but not all multi-channel experiences are omni-channel. Even if a business has an amazing mobile marketing, social media campaigns, and well-designed website, they all need to work together to really be considered omni-channel.
Thus, in most of the multi-channel cases, the customer still lacks a smooth experience across each of these channels. Therefore, to enable enterprises to engage with their customers seamlessly, Interlink Network Systems Inc. has specifically designed and developed TxContact, an omni-channel Contact Center Platform. This platform solves unique and specific problems and provides the best quality customer service. With TxContact, companies can engage with customers over Voice, Chat, Email, Skype, WebRTC, SMS, and/or Social media. Also, users can track and correlate every transaction over any channel using a Unified CRM and Unique customer ID.
As a tree requires pruning to grow with fresh branches, a business needs to cut off time-consuming manual tasks to focus on what matters the most. For instance, one of the major healthcare solution providers in the US used to invest a considerable amount of time to interact with the insurance agents to manually feed the patients’ medical records and needed to wait for a long time (up to 40 minutes) in the queue for them. Interlink automated their process and developed a revolutionary dialer which automatically inputs patients’ data and extensively reduced call times by about 5 to 8 times. It is a highly scalable, standards-based IVR module that helps Contact Centers to automate routine questions and answers. Consequently, it drives down call volumes, operational costs and improves agent productivity. Interlink’s client was stunned by the reduction in overall call time that this new automated solution delivered.
A Relentless Journey Manifested to Success
Founded by an industry leader—Prem Puthur (Founder, Chairman & CEO), Interlink Network Systems is the product of his prior experiences in contact centers. Sharing his industry insights, Prem asserts, “Contact centers have undergone a sea of changes over the past two decades. They are not mere contact centers for business stakeholders, but one of the largest drivers of the business world today.” He has seen this evolution during their early tenure at AT&T Bell Labs and discovered the huge potential in the contact center. In 1998, Prem’s colleague at AT&T Bell Labs—Sharath Shetty (Co-Founder & MD of Telenetix (P) Ltd.) joined the success journey of Interlink. Previously, Sharath had mostly worked on leading-edge technologies, overseeing the development of niche products in computer telephony and healthcare area.
In 1999, Prem and Sharath with their dedicated team members started working on telephony applications at Interlink and developed customized IVRs and Voice Recorders for the medical transcription industry. Further, the company advanced these products into TxIVR and TxRecorder for the contact center industry and also integrated leading technologies like T1/E1 and computer telephony technologies like Avaya, Dialogic, Audiocodes, & NMS. Further, the team of Interlink built its comprehensive and most successful omni-channel platform—TxContact in 2009-2011 when the company moved its suite of telephony products into voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP).
The Rise of Telenetix (P) Ltd
Today, Prem and Sharath are leading Interlink with their extensive years of experience in the industry. The foundation of Telenetix in 2004 was an addition to the success of Interlink. This newly established R&D offspring of Interlink is a world-class technology center, empowering the software design and development capabilities of Interlink. “Our research and development division Telenetix is located in Manipal, India and is best known for its magic of hiring from the local rural population and creating highly skilled technology professionals out of them,” shares Sharath. The leading duo of Interlink has fostered a culture that supports individual growth and education. Interlink employees also get a chance to study further with a sponsorship where an employee with 5 years of experience at Interlink gets an opportunity to pursue an online MS program in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (US). Likewise, in eight years, they can opt-in for an online MBA program at Edinburgh Business School (UK).
An All-in-one Omni-channel Experience with TxContact
With its six intelligent and robust modules including TxSmartQ, TxIVR, TxRecord, TxDialer, TxTalk, & TxVirtualGuide, TxContact streamlines all the functions of a contact center with a very high level of efficiency, resulting in significant cost savings and higher operating margins. These additional modules with impeccable features are specifically designed to cater to the customers’ discrete and sophisticated requirements. TxTalk handles voice calls, live chats, emails, and social media channels, in addition to supporting the standard SIP features to enhance customer engagement. It enables agents to engage with customers across communication channels like PSTN, Skype, WebRTC, IM, SMS, Email and Social Media through a single User Interface, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and better agent efficiency. Simultaneously, the TxRecord module offers robust VOIP call recording with a full-fledged recording system. The TxVirtualGuide module further drastically cuts training costs to enable new agents to work faster. In addition, the computer telephony integration (CTI) connects TxContact’s modules to multiple software systems. Today, coupled with high flexibility, these modules have attracted global giants including Sutherland Global Services and PraxAir, Inc. and clients across the US, Canada, Africa, the Middle East, and South-Asia.
Accelerating Ahead with Innovations and a Legacy of Affordable Solutions
“The key challenge is not just about engineering a resilient product, but also keeping the overall costs low while meeting clients’ sophisticated & discrete requirements,” shares Prem while explaining the benefits of Interlink products.The team of Interlink achieves quality as well as economy by making sure that the underlying technology is customizable, robust and developed in house to reduce the dependence on third-party components. Unlike large enterprises that stitch together the products through mergers or acquisitions, Interlink develops its offerings in-house and delivers affordable products.
One of Interlink’s most significant and differentiating strengths, is that their products are optimized to work on lower-end hardware including mini-computers. Considering the comparison with other open source products, the TxContact platform requires less number of servers for large deployments. Thus, in addition to saving costs, the solutions from the hut of Interlink save space, power, and produce better turnaround time when integrated with third-party applications. For instance, TxContact supports easy integration with various on-demand CRMs such as Connectwise, Microsoft Dynamic CRM, Salesforce, Oracle Engagement Cloud, Sugar CRM, VTiger and Siebel among others.
In the coming days, Prem and Sharath are all set to further strengthen Interlink’s market position as a leader in customer service solutions while concentrating on R&D and innovation. Prem shares, “While its first application-to-application (A2A) in-voice product is all set to hit the road, developing advanced signal processing & analytics programs and employing AI in its innovations are the next ones in the pipeline.” Additionally, the team from Interlink has shared some insights in its future product offerings. They aim to develop intelligence from the leftover but important data from a contact center, as it generates a huge amount of voice and metadata and only a small portion is converted into actionable information. Better utilization of this data will lead to better customer service interactions which is something their flagship omni-channel product TxContact, delivers to its customers worldwide.
Find out more and set up a demo at their website www.ilinknet.com
