Going hosted: ezispeak

This article appeared in the May issue of CRN as part of the main feature "Cloud telephony move stuck on hold"

A cloud-based contact centre was the right solution for interpretation company ezispeak. The firm aims to disrupt the way interpreting services are sold and delivered within Australia. It provides an instant phone and video-based ‘interpreting on demand’ service that overcomes the costly logistical challenges and delays previously incurred by services relying on face-to-face interviews.

Its clients include employment services, health services and commercial organisations. Chief executive Rebecca Haynes says she was determined to create a technology company that would change the way the market accesses and uses interpreting services.

The foundation of ezispeak’s on-demand service is Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Centre (CIC). The hosted platform allows ezispeak to manage all inbound calls, automates multimedia queuing and routing processes, and includes comprehensive reporting that is helping ezispeak management to continually improve the customer experience.

Ezispeak’s main technology partner is contact centre specialist QPC, which is “responsible for our ongoing infrastructure management,” Haynes says.

According to Haynes, the move to CIC was all about scalability, flexibility and redundancy. “We plan to grow quickly so it didn’t make sense for us to have dedicated on-site infrastructure. The risks associated with on-premise solutions have major commercial implications in the event something goes wrong. We wanted to be in the cloud and de-risk our business and our customers’ businesses.”

“I had worked with CIC in a prior role, so I had a sound level of understanding of the platform and for the potential of CIC in the broader market. In fact, it was one of the core reasons for founding ezispeak, to take that type of vision and rebuild the way interpreting services are delivered.”

She says alternative products were evaluated but they would have had to spend around three to five times the capital to achieve a similar or not as great result. “This cost-saving technology also underpins our commercial model, enabling us to pass these savings onto our clients.”

Whenever a client phones ezispeak with an interpreting requirement, the cloud-based CIC solution is used to quickly assess the caller’s need and the language required, and then to route the call to the most appropriate agent. Because ezispeak employs a virtual workforce model, all of its professional interpreters work from remote facilities. Therefore, call routing frequently involves assigning the call to a language professional, irrespective of their geographical location.

At present, voice calls form the major part of ezispeak’s business, but Haynes expects demand for video services to increase rapidly in the coming years. 

“Our model is to be a true on-demand interpreting service. Predictions from some of Australia’s most prominent executive leaders, such as Google’s Nick Leeder and MYOB’s Tim Reed, [suggest] that within the next decade, voice calls will be as obsolete as a posted letter, with audio visual interactions driving mass market consumption. So, regardless of how the language request comes in, we will offer clients the same fast access to a professional interpreter.”