Call Center Studio: How AloTech built an intelligent call center software at scale with Google Cloud
About Call Center Studio
Founded in 2012 in Turkey, where it is known as AloTech, Call Center Studio offers customers a powerful multi-channel, scalable software as a service solution that enables them to seamlessly migrate, integrate AI, and serve fluctuating customer demand.
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Contact usCall Center Studio uses Google Kubernetes Engine to power a highly scalable, reliable, AI-powered contact center solution for clients worldwide.
Results
- Provides a low latency, reliable call center solution across multiple global network regions with Google Cloud
- Enables developers to focus on building the best product they can, with managed infrastructure services
- Mines 100 terabytes of data for fast business intelligence insights with BigQuery
Processes 2 million minutes of audio per day
A successful business needs more than a great product, it needs a great relationship with its customers. But high-quality customer service requires extra staff, time, and money, which means that when margins are tight, companies are forced to make hard decisions. That’s where Call Center Studio comes in, providing businesses and organizations of all kinds with a cloud-based, AI-powered contact center software that dramatically lowers the costs for world-class customer service without compromising quality.
“When we first started in 2012, we felt that the call center industry was too reliant on the older, telecommunications-based industry. It’s a 60-year-old industry, and there are a lot of high-cost, high-maintenance legacy platforms still being used,” says Idris Avci, CTO and founding partner at Call Center Studio. “Our goal was to digitize these technologies and bring all the benefits of the cloud to our clients.”
Call centers are vital for customer relations, helping organizations keep their customers loyal and build up relationships over time. But in 2012 the existing call center solutions required lots of investment in expensive hardware and armies of customer service agents to be viable. Call Center Studio, founded that year in Turkey, aimed to change that. It was the first call center platform to be based entirely on Google Cloud. Not only did this mean that it could rapidly scale the number of queries it was handling and process calls faster, it also enabled its clients to set up their own service within ten minutes of signing up. That simplicity, combined with the very highest standards of service, has helped the company grow rapidly over the last few years.
Today, the Call Center Studio platform is used by more than 600 companies in 34 countries across the world. And, it’s not only the number of its clients that have grown but also the size of them. Call Center Studio services enterprise-level organizations as well as SMEs. But expanding to new clients in different continents brought new regulatory and technical challenges. If Call Center Studio wanted to maintain its reputation for high quality, low latency service, it needed an infrastructure that could handle high levels of traffic on a global scale. That’s why it chose Google Cloud.
“For a global expansion, we needed a global solution,” says Avci. “We process communications in real-time, so we need to be able to deliver low latency to our customers wherever they are. The connectivity options we have with Google Cloud are the best we have seen.”
A cloud-based call center platform
Call centers are mission-critical components for most organizations. When building Call Center Studio, availability of the platform and continuity were major priorities for Avci and his team, as both are key to their operations and customer satisfaction. But a reliable service is just the start. Call Center Studio had to achieve the highest standards of quality to make its mark in a crowded field. Low latency was another key feature of the platform, allowing clients to deal with their customers quickly and smoothly. Avci also wanted his team to move quickly as they developed and perfected the platform. “It’s no use having a good idea and then spending months trying to build it,” he says. “By that time the competition has moved past you. Speed of development was, and continues to be, very important for us.”
Google Cloud has been in Call Center Studio’s DNA from the start. Avci first prototyped the platform in 2012 with Google App Engine. “We knew even back then that we wanted a serverless Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution because we could focus on developing our product instead of managing infrastructure,” he explains. “It was the best serverless option around.”
But even the best PaaS solutions can only stretch so far. As the company began to take on clients in different regions, regulatory and technical limitations posed a challenge. Avci and his team realized they needed a new kind of architecture to be able to continue delivering the levels of service Call Center Studio was known for.
“For a global expansion, we needed a global solution. We process communications in real-time, so we need to be able to deliver low latency to our customers wherever they are. The connectivity options we have with Google Cloud are the best we have seen.”
—Idris Avci, CTO and founding partner, Call Center StudioMicroservices for maximum growth
After evaluating its options, Call Center Studio chose to remain with Google Cloud because of its superior global network and the ease with which developers could work. The company designed a new infrastructure based around microservices running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.
In early 2021, Call Center Studio was ready to start migrating to the new infrastructure. Given the critical nature of call center services, however, the company could not afford any downtime or outages. The solution was to spread the migration out over two stages to ensure a smooth transition and to minimize disruption for clients. Almost 60% of the migration of microservices was completed in six months. The first stage involved the re-architecting of the existing processes into microservices. The second stage, which is due to finish by the end of 2022, will migrate these microservices from Google App Engine to GKE clusters, the core of the new infrastructure. “Google Kubernetes Engine will be really important for us,” says Avci. “It will mean we can run high volume loads with very low maintenance.”
In addition to the main microservices, Call Center Studio uses a number of third-party tools that require connectors running on Google Compute Engine virtual machines. The platform also provides users with real-time monitoring dashboards that rely heavily on the Google Cloud Pub/Sub messaging service. This service sends out push notifications informing supervisors of their agents’ status, in real-time. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Load Balancing ensures that all the components can autoscale quickly and efficiently without a heavy management burden.
“With BigQuery we don’t have to spend a lot of time processing our data. Instead, we utilize machine learning capabilities to gain insights into what our customers want and provide them with improved workforce management and forecasting capabilities. It saves us a lot of time.”
—Idris Avci, CTO and founding partner, Call Center StudioArtificial intelligence for enhanced customer service
One of the advantages of a cloud-based infrastructure over an on-premises stack is the ability to use powerful AI tools without having the upfront costs of buying and configuring lots of servers. But for Call Center Studio, Google Cloud provides much more than its infrastructure. The company uses a range of tools from the Google Cloud suite of AI tools to power its audio processing and chatbot services, including Vertex AI, Text-to-Speech, Natural Language AI, and Dialogflow. These allow the platform to deliver self-service processes that automatically hear, understand, and respond to customer queries at speed and at scale, allowing customer service agents to focus their attention on the most complex tasks. One of Call Center Studio’s clients, for example, a leading logistics company, is now responding to 65% of its customer queries via its bots. This efficiency not only saves agents time, it frees them up for more value-added processes.
Meanwhile, the company’s team of data scientists rely on BigQuery for powerful business intelligence analytics at speed. “With BigQuery we don’t have to spend a lot of time processing our data. Instead, we utilize machine learning capabilities to gain insights into what our customers want and provide them with improved workforce management and forecasting capabilities,” says Avci. “It saves us a lot of time.”
Scaling up at speed
Call Center Studio now has an infrastructure that can scale as quickly as the company is growing. For the last three years, the company has been doubling the amount of audio it processes, currently 2 million minutes every day. In addition, while speech has been Call Center Studio’s main focus, chat-based interactions over a variety of platforms and social media have been the fastest-growing part of the company’s portfolio in recent years, with more than a million messages processed a day.
But this isn’t the only kind of growth Call Center Studio has to deal with. As so many of its clients are retailers, the company sees natural spikes in usage over holiday periods or Black Friday. It needs to be able to scale up on demand without compromising quality or reliability. With global load balancing in Google Cloud, Call Center Studio can scale up on demand for its customers wherever they are.
“Google Cloud comes with a robust network with a global reach and that is a huge win for us,” says Avci. “We can provide real-time voice services to customers anywhere in the world with very low latency.”
Call Center Studio has worked hard to make sure that its platform stays as reliable as before. In fact, with more of its infrastructure coming on to GKE clusters, it has been able to deliver above and beyond its service level agreement, moving from 99.9% uptime to 99.99%.
Google Cloud provides a simple, easy-to-use environment for developers to work in without the management overheads of a more traditional monolithic infrastructure. That means they can focus their time and resources on coming up with new ideas and iterating through different builds as quickly as possible. That translates to more mature features for clients, such as self-service bots. The same is true of the business intelligence unit, where data scientists can analyze 100 terabytes of data for deeper, faster insights with BigQuery, helping Call Center Studio and its customers to grow even faster. For us now, our main objective is global expansion,” says Avci. “We’re excited to see how Google Cloud will develop its services and help us continue our journey.”
“Google Cloud comes with a robust network with a global reach and that is a huge win for us. We can provide real-time voice services to customers anywhere in the world with very low latency.”
—Idris Avci, CTO and founding partner, Call Center StudioTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Call Center Studio
Founded in 2012 in Turkey, where it is known as AloTech, Call Center Studio offers customers a powerful multi-channel, scalable software as a service solution that enables them to seamlessly migrate, integrate AI, and serve fluctuating customer demand.