INTERVIEW Bart Delgado - Akixi
“Do you know how many emailed sales enquiries you get every day and what your response
times and success rates are for each of these?” Bart Delgado, MD of Akixi
Now is the
Time to
Accelerate
Software as a Service vendor Akixi, welcomes the Digital
Transformations that organisations have implemented
but says the benefits they can bring now need to be
accelerated in terms of increased productivity and
customer service excellence. Comms Business asks
Managing Director Bart Delgado how this can be done
Productivity, the ratio of
output to inputs used in a
business process, is often
seen as a key to business
growth. It is a crucial factor in
the performance of organisations
and nations and it is often said by
economists that the productivity
of UK businesses should be
improved.
Until very recently, digital
transformations (DX) have been
almost entirely focussed on the
need to develop a customer led
business strategy that would lead
to the achievement of customer
service excellence. But this focus
has shifted as in mid-2018 analyst
rm IDC, the early headline
advocate of the DX mantra,
announced that organisations
were now prioritising productivity
over service excellence – albeit
these two aims are now actually
pretty much neck and neck on the
DX shopping list.
Of course, you can have both
– the two objectives are both
highly valid and certainly not
mutually exclusive. Neither need
their achievement be intolerably
complex, expensive nor restricted
to large enterprises.
e technologies sitting
behind business transformations
are today aordable and available
to everyone; they provide the tools
to be able to dierentiate both
product and service oerings and
improve productivity.
For people that ask how
our product can improve their
productivity and customer service
levels we can quickly point to
three feature illustrations to
assure them we are really in this
game – no matter what size their
business is.
How many calls to the
organisation were not answered
nor had return calls made to the
caller? If the business can’t answer
then they are just throwing
productivity in to the wind and
losing income. All the eort put
in to marketing their products
Bart Delgado,
Managing
Director of Akixi
EXPERIENCE Premier Cloud & MPP’s from SOS
01403 224450 www.soscommunications.co.uk
44 | Comms Business Magazine | February 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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and services to generate business
is wasted. To establish how much
resource and income is wasted just
multiply the lost calls by a typical
conversion rate and an average
order value. Do it daily, weekly
and monthly and you get a big
number.
Scenario two - which
promotional sales campaigns
are the most eective for the
organisation? How do they
assess each? Applications such as
Akixi can, if a dierent, discrete
phone number is assigned to each
campaign, measure the success
and rate each accordingly. You
can see which contact channel
was the busiest, which channel
was most productive in terms of
sales.
irdly, imagine a wallboard
that indicated response times for
call answering. Is that the only
form of contact measured? Today
we are in a digital age; many
customers like to do everything
on their phone and that means
not just call you. ey like
messaging and they like chat. Do
you know how many emailed
sales enquiries you get every day
and what your response times and
success rates are for each of these?
Omni-channel experiences
such as these have become
the norm for a generation of
customers which leads us on
to another question – is your
business open at the right times of
the day?
Unless a business can see the
frequency of contact and time
patterns for each how do they
know what further business
productivity and income is being
ushed down the toilet?
Customer service excellence
can only be assessed by customers.
Customers want their calls,
emails, chats etc answered and
dealt with in a timely manner.
Business productivity can
always be improved and these
three illustrative scenarios should
be givens for any organisation.
/www.soscommunications.co.uk
/www.commsbusiness.co.uk