By Clara Wicht, Senior Product & Marketing Manager, Telviva

Building a solution that enables businesses of all sizes to access the true power of a multi-channel communications platform requires agility on the part of the platform itself and its developers, an acute understanding, and adherence to the concept of interoperability. 

If you imagine a unified communication and collaboration platform’s offerings as a series of blocks across a page, from the most simple on the left to more complex and advanced solutions in each box to the right, you get a picture of a spectrum of different solutions belonging to the same suite, or ecosystem, if you will. 

However, to bring a multi-channel platform to life, there needs to be an integration layer seamlessly connecting each of these solutions. This connection is not merely cosmetic, rather it must allow the free flow of real-time information between them, so that no matter where a line of communication is picked up, and by whom, the user has a full bird’s eye view of the customer being spoken to, the context across different platforms and timeframes, and how to resolve the query. 

The solution then, especially from a South African and African perspective, is a customer-led organisation with the requisite tech capability to deliver the appropriate technical solutions, developing a platform that works as an interoperable ecosystem. This has a number of advantages, such as its cost effectiveness as the licensing and development of the solution happens in rands. It also has the advantage of a degree of agility that’s just not possible with international incumbents. In other words, if a business in South Africa identifies a unique opportunity and need, the responsiveness from a local development team is worth its weight in gold. 

While this may appear hypothetical, the exciting news is that it is not, and this bodes well for South African innovation taking centre stage, including globally. A customer-first mindset enables internal development teams to keep optimising the Telviva One platform for a true omnichannel experience. The latest addition to the Telviva suite is Telviva Engage, a multi-channel inbound, real-time communication platform. Telviva Engage is a many-to-many engagement tool between teams and third parties, which has been designed to enable teams to operate more efficiently. The magic lies in how it is plugged into the existing Telviva One platform offering a seamless layer of interoperability. 

Telviva Engage aggregates multiple engagement channels into a single interface, Telviva One. These could be web chat, browser-based voice calls, WhatsApp channel integration and any other third-party chat solution. ChatBots can be implemented to introduce automation, preset phrases can be used by the business users, the chat transcript is saved and can be provided to the customer, and a single agent interface and admin portal is available for supervisors. Importantly, Telviva Engage integrates with CRMs and business process systems.

In essence, by innovating locally, we have addressed the challenge where businesses believe they cannot access a multi-channel solution and improve their digital journey and customer satisfaction if they are not an enterprise with large budgets. In other words, it bridges the gap of inclusivity to improve customer experience and offers an additional real-time engagement channel for any customer-facing team in a business. 

Telviva Engage offers the option to seamlessly upgrade your current chat engagement to a browser-based voice engagement with the click of a button. Think about your customers - there always comes a time when a problem needs to be dealt with over a call and so a business must be able to switch to voice instantly, without breaking contact and starting a new engagement.

If one were to use a sporting analogy: imagine having some of the most skilled players in the world in various positions. But if they all speak different languages and have never trained as a team with a single vision and philosophy, they may show moments of individual flair, but they’re unlikely to achieve the objective of winning a league. Similarly, the key to enabling better quality conversations is by enabling real-time, multichannel communication that integrates seamlessly, with a single objective, and that’s a vastly superior customer experience.