From Start-Up to Standard: How Omningage Emerged from the Cloud

From start-up to standard: How Omningage emerged from the cloud – Daniel Solomon (MD Omningage)

A Scottish tale…..

On May 12^th, Ahmad (Omningage CTO) and I took part in a networking event for the cloud technology industry in AWS’s Development Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was jointly hosted by SVL, the UK’s longest serving contact centre partner, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We were excited to share the story of how Omningage started, more or less from nothing, two years ago. In that time, we designed, built and brought to market an application which our customers describe as “an unrivalled and innovative agent and supervisor desktop with fully functioning reporting and insight suite”.

SVL themselves stated, “Their (Omningage’s) outstanding omni-channel desktop was the best in the market, adding a crucial bespoke and intuitive portal to Amazon Connect that put agent’s needs first and enhanced the user-experience.”

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow….

How did we do it? By telling our story, could this benefit you?

We can divide the story into a number of parts….

Getting the strategy right

Our first thoughts were about trends in the contact centre market. We saw that the onset of Covid had driven people to work from home. It was very obvious that on-premises contact centres were struggling to operate in a remote working scenario, while for the few cloud-based contact centres, it was more or less business as usual.

Even in late 2019, when we first started exploring this, our research into IT related costs indicated clearly that Cloud was a less risky and more cost-effective business model. Early 2020 showed there would be clear need for companies to accelerate the adoption of cloud.

We saw that Amazon Connect was an excellent platform as a service. It could be deployed in a very short space of time and handle voice calls and chats. We also saw that there were opportunities to add value to this platform and symbiotically turn it, with a revolutionary desktop in Omningage Connect, into a world beating proposition.

Risk and Investment

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint hearted, so I had been told!

Ahmad was able to recruit a team of very talented developers in his home town of Lahore, Pakistan. However, building and equipping a development centre, which would involve buying, importing and installing hardware, was both prohibitively expensive and would take too long to implement.

Once again, the solution lay with AWS.

Ahmad took the expression “serverless” literally! Every piece of code that is written, every test article that is spun up, every character of documentation produced is all stored on the Cloud, mostly on AWS.

Ahmad says, “Our developers previously would be spending 50% of their time spinning up hardware instances and dealing with networking and security issues. Now, they are spending ALL their time coding, and they are happier for it!”

As a result, Omningage does not own any servers, we only pay for the services we consume (unless we can use an AWS Free Tier!). Other than the first month’s rental deposit for the office, we didn’t have any upfront expenses at all. This reduced the downside of our investment to the minimum possible.

Working with, not working for or against, the customer

Paul Arden was a Executive Creative Director of the advertising agents Saatchi and Saatchi in their heydey in the 1980s. He wrote a book based on his experiences entitled “It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be.”  In it, he recommended that advertising firms should work with their corporate clients to co-create storyboards for TV ads, instead of presenting a complete pitch. In this way, they could include their client’s ideas in the final product.

We have adopted a similar philosophy and applied it to designing our software, starting with agent and supervisor desktops for Amazon Connect, but now moving into reporting, analytics and dashboarding.

William Carson, Ascensos’s Director of Market Engagement, wrote “The SVL and Omningage team quickly delivered a bespoke and agile service that gives our client a fantastic end-product.”

Laura Scott, Dialect Communication’s COO had this to say: “Omningage have worked in collaboration with us to ensure we deliver a solution that is fit for purpose, working hand in hand to understand requirements and guide us through the process of implementing a brand-new platform and solution.”

Where possible, Omningage’s philosophy is to use the power and flexibility of AWS and Amazon Connect to work with our customers to deliver the functionality they want, integrating the Omningage / Amazon Connect combination with other AWS services such as Amazon Lex, Contact Lens, Transcribe and Comprehend. We have also developed connectors to easily integrate with other 3^rd party applications, such as CRM systems and other databases and communication systems, to provide users with a truly omnichannel experience.

The wrap up

Our entire team leveraged the power and flexibility of AWS and Amazon Connect to build and launch a customer ready product in under two years. Our partnership with AWS means we can deploy it anywhere in the world at very short notice.

“Ask the customer” is our central philosophy when it comes to deciding the direction of our roadmap.

If you’re looking for a cloud-based contact centre vendor who will go every step of the way with you on your journey, then look no further! Contact your cloud partner or us today!

 

 

Daniel Solomon is Managing Director at Omningage