"The migration to the cloud is usually easier than thought!"
Interview with Berkan Denkci, VP of Sales Central Europe at Enghouse AG
"Our central vision is to always offer the most current solutions in our sector that meet the market standard," sums up Berkan Denkci, VP of Sales Central Europe at Enghouse AG, the mission of his company, which offers diverse contact center services worldwide. He discussed the issues that are currently of particular concern to his customers and why migration to the cloud opens up many opportunities in an interview with Wirtschaftsforum.
Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Denkci, for over 35 years, Enghouse has been engaged as a skilled provider of contact center solutions in the market. At what point do you specifically support your customers?
Berkan Denkci: Thanks to our strong growth and numerous acquisitions, through which we have been able to open up new tools and software environments around the world in recent years, we now offer a very comprehensive portfolio in the market, ranging from classic on-premise areas to hybrid implementations and complete cloud solutions. To also support the ongoing optimization of conversations in each contact center, we also provide appropriate quality management suites, reporting tools, and clear dashboards, from which effective recommendations for action can be quickly derived. Of course, AI plays a central role in all these topics nowadays, setting important impulses for further innovations.
Wirtschaftsforum: Right now, the migration of on-premise solutions to the cloud is high on the agenda for many companies – even though this step is still often avoided due to the associated effort.
Berkan Denkci: Our experience shows: It's usually much easier than initially thought. In our day-to-day business, we continually see that Heads of Contact Center are somewhat anxious about the impending changes – however, through comprehensive consulting, in which we incorporate our entire expertise, we can usually quickly and effectively alleviate these concerns. The benefits that result from migrating to the cloud for most applications are very powerful and simplify processes in many areas. Especially in the e-commerce segment, for example, omnichannel solutions are becoming increasingly important, where the various inbound and outbound channels as well as connections to social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, are cohesively bundled in a comprehensive environment – this can be much simpler to implement in the cloud, for instance.
Wirtschaftsforum: What are the additional advantages of the cloud?
Berkan Denkci: The topic of training also plays an important role in this context, not least because of the massive changes brought about by the pandemic when remote work solutions were prioritized and subsequently maintained across nearly all companies. Today, employees no longer have to be summoned to a training center for further education, but can undergo their training in their usual environment at a low threshold – this is a great advantage especially against the background of rapid further innovation steps. All these approaches are united by the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for them – what represents a viable solution for one customer can be significantly over- or undersized for another company.
Wirtschaftsforum: How do you find the right balance?
Berkan Denkci: The keyword is customization. We accompany our customers from the analysis of their existing environment, through the design of a holistic solution and its consistent implementation, to the go-live and of course beyond, in the context of permanent maintenance and the implementation of further iterative improvements when a corresponding need arises. In addition to working with large, globally operating corporations with a very complex contact center infrastructure, we also work a lot with start-ups as well as smaller and medium-sized enterprises, which do not need an all-round solution, or for whom such a solution would be completely uneconomical. Therefore, it is first necessary to precisely identify what the respective company actually needs for a stringent and positive customer communication, and then decide based on the subsequent pricing whether the targeted goal is also economically viable. What is certain: Often the costs can be significantly minimized with corresponding cloud solutions.
Wirtschaftsforum: At it, Enghouse supports customers all over the world with its global operations. How significant are the local differences in everyday life actually?
Berkan Denkci: The individual focal points can indeed vary across different countries – in the DACH region, for instance, an important focus is on our outbound dialer ELSBETH. However, our cloud solutions CCAAS and CxENGAGE are essentially designed for global implementation. Especially in Europe, the issue of GDPR plays a crucial role, within which our uncompromising legal compliance is a compelling argument in the market: Our nodes remain fundamentally local. At the same time, the particularly strict regulatory provisions from Germany exert a strong normative effect beyond the DACH region: Because a solution that is legally compliant here is highly likely to be so in most other markets as well.