64% of employees agree blocking out noise increases their productivity.(1)

Today, work happens everywhere — in busy open-plan offices and contact centers, at home, even coffee shops. This flexibility is great for business and people, but with it comes a new challenge: noise. Distraction caused by noise reduces productivity and well-being and, in contact centers, detracts from a positive customer experience.

Studies show that it takes 23 minutes to recover from distraction(3) and over 58% of employees are distracted multiple times each day.(2) That represents a significant impact on your customers’ businesses you can easily help avert through proven noise reduction strategies and products.

Managing Noise: In the Contact Center

In the contact center, noise remains the biggest complaint among employees(4) and can negatively impact customer satisfaction.(3) But managing noise effectively can raise productivity,2 improve customer experiences(5) and impact the bottom line.(1) Plantronics creates technologies that manage noise to help contact centers be more effective and businesses be more successful.

Customer Service Representative (CSR) - Needs to handle urgent requests from customers quickly and efficiently. Key challenge: Hearing and being heard by customers.

Help Desk Support - Manages intense, often lengthy, customer calls. Key challenge: Wearing headset all day (comfort, battery issues).

Supervisor - Supports CSRs with call assistance and training. Key challenge: Background noise and audio quality on escalated calls.

High-Level Support - Guides and supports CSRs on most challenging calls. Key challenge: Mobility within office to help with urgent situations. 

How do you handle these challenges within your business? 

Contact Center Solutions

Plantronics engineers solutions that help people manage the noise around them so they can be more effective — no matter where they work. Together, we can help your customers reduce distractions caused by noise so their businesses can thrive.The all-day comfort and superior sound quality of our headsets empowers contact center workers to provide exceptional service. Explore how you can provide a better customer experience, and empower your staff with better products, newer technology, and smarter workplace design. The EncorePro series is a great option, delivering the all-new generation communications technology for customer service centers and offices, designed for the future, and built on experience. The EncorePro series is available in South Africa through authorized distributors. More information about solutions available in your local area are available at www.plantronics.com/za 

Plantronics is an audio pioneer and a global leader in the communications industry. We create intelligent and adaptive solutions that support our customers’ most important needs: experiencing and facilitating simple and clear communications while enjoying distraction-free environments.  Our solutions are used worldwide by consumers and businesses alike, and are an optimal choice for open office environments. From Unified Communications and customer service ecosystems, to data analytics and Bluetooth headsets, Plantronics delivers high-quality communications solutions that our customers count on today, while relentlessly innovating on behalf of their future. For more information visit www.plantronics.com/za 

1 Oxford Economics, “When the walls come down – the evolution of the workplace.” 2 Plantronics Noise in the Workplace Global Study, 2017. 3 The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress Study from the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, 2008. 4 Plantronics Persona Research, 2017. 1 Oxford Economics, “When the walls come down—the evolution of the workplace.” 5 Dimensional Research for ZenDesk, Customer Service and business results: A survey of customer service from mid-size companies, 2013.

Onsoft is proud to announce the development and release of the Onsoft Reporter. This is an exciting addition to the hugely successful BMC Track-It and BMC FootPrints product range. The Onsoft Reporter adds depth and functionality to the extensive reporting capabilities of both solutions. The additional reporting functionality is achieved by mining the large amounts of data stored in the respective solutions databases. 

Custom developed pdf reports that include your company logo and contact details are also available on request. In addition to reporting, the Onsoft Reporter includes capabilities to produce enhanced, custom designed management dashboards that seamlessly integrate into BMC Track-It and BMC FootPrints.

The Onsoft Reporter also includes a powerful "ticket manager" module that facilitates the integration of tickets between different help desk solutions. This module is responsible for tracking incidents between the different help desk solutions.

The core features of the Onsoft Integration Package include

• Introduces a responsive, draggable management dashboard and
• Enhances help desk reporting,Supports bi-directional integration between the various help desk solutions
• Custome developed pdf reporting for both BMC solutions

Responsive Dashboards

Our flagship products, BMC Track-It and BMC FootPrints ship with management dashboards. We have specifically designed the Onsoft Reporter to enhance the functionality available in these dashboards. Before you install the Onsoft Reporter, one of our qualified consultants will work with you and map a reporting package in accordance with your business requirements. These dashboard designs are flexible and will be configured by the consultant in accordance with each organisation's specific business needs.

Reporting.

The BMC Help desk solutions include extensive reporting and reporting capabilities. The Onsoft Reporter is designed to enhance these capabilities by focusing on business metrics reporting not available in the BMC product suite and offering custom designed pdf report functionality. 

Help Desk Ticket Integration

The Onsoft Reporter enables our consultants to configure BMC Track-It and BMC FootPrints to integrate with different help desk solutions. This powerful feature ensures that tickets sent from BMC Track-It and BMC FootPrints to competitors help desk are received and processed correctly.

For example, one of our customers uses the Onsoft Reporter to facilitate 2-way integration between their solution and JD Edwards, utilised by a third-party supplier. In this instance, by simply assigning a ticket to their 3rd party in FootPrints, the Onsoft Reporter generates a ticket on the 3rd party providers system and then transmits the resulting reference number back to FootPrints.

The Onsoft Reporter is designed to be highly configurable down to the field level. This enables our consultants to customise the solution to fit individual customer requirements. Whether you want to transmit a single value or a full array to the 3rd party solution, our Onsoft Reporter can scale to address your business needs.

PDF Integration

The Onsoft development team has extensive experience designing and coding complex PDF reports that are commonly unavailable in both BMC Track-It and BMC FootPrints. They have the knowledge and ability to design extremely complex reporting requests.

 Development Mandate

Our development mandate is to extend the capability of our products beyond the advertised base functionality while focusing on reporting and 3rd party integration. All development is subject to strict point to point data validation and securing data in transit.

Evaluate Our ServicesPut us to the test and discuss your additional requirements with me or Ryan Danvers (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ). Go and have a look at our work by browsing to examples of the development studio.

Kind Regards
Mark Saacks

Managing Director
+27 21 447 6106
Onsoft (Pty) Ltd
Suite A5, Waverley Court, Koetzee Road
Mowbray
7700

SovTech, a software development company and startup incubator based in Johannesburg, has launched a new branch to their business, SovTech Services, aimed at simplifying the procurement of digital services by companies in Africa.

The SovTech Services platform offers a diverse range of premium tech services that can be conveniently purchased online. “The Services platform has everything you need to propel your business into the stratosphere, and at a price that’s probably better than what’s out there in the market.” Says Jamie Chennells, SovTech’s CTO and head of SovTech Services. The main areas of focus of the services offered include Web & Mobile, IT & Business, Digital Marketing and UX/UI Design.The SovTech Services platform is a first in South Africa, as there are no other platforms locally that offer such a diverse range of digital services that can be immediately purchased online, with a predetermined pipeline to success that can be deployed in a matter of hours. “In the past 4 years through dealing with a wide variety of clients we’ve been able to streamline a set of digital products that every company needs.” says Chennells. The platform also allows the entire process, from consultation and purchase to final delivery of the digital service to take place within its walls.

This has obvious advantages over email in that there is a centralised communication stream for document transfer and objective management to take place, in which multiple parties from each side can engage. SovTech has partnered with different businesses with whom they’ve worked with extensively in the past to fulfill key and specialist roles. They don’t mark prices up in any way, and work with their clients as if they were on their clients’ teams. “We’re doing our best to remove the fear of purchasing these sorts of products via free online consultations across the spectrum of products,and we’re cherry picking the best providers to partner with along the way. Forus, the joy is in being able to work with our clients’ other service providers andknow that things are being done properly.” says Chennells.

SovTech’s goals areto have the top 10 providers of each Digital Service on their platform, and letthe client-focused review system help new users decide on who they would like their next digital project to be completed by.The team behind the platform has a number of helpful features on the horizon,the most notable of which is a chatbot aimed at empowering business ownersand people in key positions with the right knowledge on which they can actand perform their jobs more successfully. Through communication with thechatbot, users should be able to understand where they can best direct theirfocus in order to improve their competitiveness in the market. SovTech’s CEO, Gerald Neves, reveals the reason SovTech decided to launch the new platform, “More often than not we deal with clients that have burnttheir fingers through engagements with sub-par digital service providers. Our Services Platform aims to reduce the number of such instances, in a simple but effective manner, and raise the standard of digital service consumption in South Africa on a broad scale.”SovTech believes that technology will revolutionise businesses in Africa across every industry.

The introduction of the Services Platform complements SovTech’s vision to uplift social and economic value on a pan-African scale,through helping businesses achieve their goals using software.