June 2002

Four New Products Through Which To Interact

• Altitude uCI Suite (Unified Customer Interaction)

• GoldMine Sales & Marketing 2002

• CosmoCom Launches NGIN

• Express AuthorFrom Simtrex

Altitude uCI Suite (Unified Customer Interaction)

The uCI platform is primarily composed of one server, the Assisted Server, which provides the core functionality of the suite. The Assisted Server is a highly scalable platform that functions as an assisted interaction dispatcher, supporting high volumes of voice calls, e-mail and Web interactions. It includes gateways to e-mail servers (supporting both POP3 and SMTP) and to major PABX platforms. The Assisted Server provides the core functionality for leveraging uCI, to manage campaigns for the assisted channel modules, or touch points, in the Altitude suite.

The uCI suite is comprised of several touch point managers, including Altitude Voice, Altitude IVR, Altitude Email and Altitude Collaborator. Altitude Voice provides a solution that synchronizes voice and data in contact center environments through computer-telephony integration (CTI). With optional dialing and recording functionality, it can automate tasks such as outbound dialing and voice recording for quality assurance. Altitude IVR enables customer self-service via voice menus and touch-tone phone controls. It can help optimize assisted service levels when used as an information collector upon which routing decisions can be made. Altitude Email offers automated message filtering and intelligent routing. When Altitude Email is implemented with Altitude Voice and Altitude Collaborator, uCI offers blended, intelligent routing of e-mail with other customer interaction types. Altitude Collaborator bridges the gap between self- and assisted-service by offering human collaborative assistance to customers on Web sites. Features of Collaborator include page pushing and pulling, co-browsing and collaborative form filling. Collaboration activities can be supported via either voice or Web chat.

An additional feature of the Altitude uCI solution is the Optimization Toolkit. Altitude provides four such applications: uRouter (intelligent routing capability), uSupervisor (managing and reporting function), uAgent Windows & Web (interface that allows the agent to control interactions from a single browser) and Development Toolkit (script developer).

www.altitude.com/+351-21-720-50-50/ 408-965-1700 in the U.S.

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GoldMine Sales & Marketing 2002

Integration of disparate channels and data is one of the goals of CRM, and FrontRange Solutions, Inc. has made great efforts to do so in its release of GoldMine FrontOffice 2002 with GoldMine Sales & Marketing 2002, which is designed to help small to mid-market organizations improve sales and marketing processes such as campaign design, execution and tracking, along with lead qualification, sales forecasting and cross-selling.

GoldMine Sales & Marketing includes enhanced integration and data sharing with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook, as well as Intuit QuickBooks Pro/Premier 2002. Through the tighter integration with Microsoft Outlook, GoldMine Sales & Marketing users can link every e-mail message to the customer contact, no matter if the e-mail was received in Outlook or GoldMine software's own E-mail Center. Companies that have standardized on Outlook can now integrate their existing e-mail messaging standard with their CRM database. When sending messages from Outlook, users can also send e-mail messages to any GoldMine Sales & Marketing contact and have the mail automatically linked to the contact's history in GoldMine. The integration with Microsoft Exchange allows support for real-time calendar and contact synchronization with the Exchange server, which provides real-time synchronization of new activities upon creation, as well as edits and updates to activities upon save. Support for real-time contact synchronization also means custom fields can be mapped to the Exchange custom fields.

Additional features of GoldMine Sales & Marketing include: integration with GoldMine Plus Accounting for QuickBooks Pro/Premier 2002, which enables data sharing between front- and back-office customer records; full integration with HEAT Service & Support, FrontRange's customer service and support software; an updated user interface, including re-designed toolbar icons, customizable work area background settings and onscreen indicators, which facilitate learning and navigation; one-button synchronization to simplify synchronization for remote users to stay up to date on key contact and calendar information; and Undocked Sites Installer, which provides administrators with the ability to set up, configure and install multiple undocked sites for remote users.

www.frontrange.com/800-776-7889

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CosmoCom Launches NGIN

Getting calls delivered to the right agent is of the utmost importance in providing superior service. Intelligent routing has been a feature of circuit-switched networks for some time, but offering it over IP networks has sometimes proved difficult. CosmoCom, Inc. recently introduced its Next Generation Intelligent Network (NGIN) offering, which is designed to deliver a variety of intelligent routing features to IP-based next-generation networks (NGNs).

With the NGIN solution, network operators can statically or dynamically route calls among different locations within their customers' multisite call center environment. This offering is available to contact centers connected directly to the carrier's Next Generation Network via IP or via access gateways, or indirectly via the legacy telephone network. The NGIN offering can be deployed on the same infrastructure as CosmoCom's Network-Based Call Center offering, enabling network operators to leverage a single platform for multiple service offerings.

Intelligent routing enables calls to be automatically directed to the appropriate location across a multisite contact center environment, thus telcos can offer ACD as network-based services as well as have the ability to let customers add hosted agents as well as traditional agents. For example, one of CosmoCom's European clients will be offering a global call center, which will allow them to deliver calls to any existing call center. The selection of the most appropriate location is typically based on interactive voice response (IVR) input from the caller. NGIN can be used for setting static pre-routing, based on static rules, such as time of day, time of week, percentage usage or dynamic pre-routing, which depends on having some information about the destination, such as how many agents are available and queue status. In legacy circuit-switched telephone networks, these services require a series of circuit switches, service control points (SCPs) and network-based IVR platforms.

Because the CosmoCom solution is IP-based, the intelligent routing features are fully enabled through software solutions and do not require circuit switch or SCP hardware. End users have more control over the design of pre-routing (using CosmoDesigner, which has a GUI for changing conditions and logic flows) and IVR prompts, which helps ease the burden on its IT staff.

www.cosmocom.com/631-940-4200

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Express AuthorFrom Simtrex

Simtrex's Express Author software is designed to give subject matter experts the ability to design their own simulations and reduce development time, as no programming skills are required. Using Express Author, subject matter experts can develop call simulations that integrate voice, data and time to replicate calls exactly as they occur in the end users' call center so that agents will handle them in a true-to-life situation. Using a simulated version of their systems, subject matter experts can design a call flow following the company's best practice standards. Express Author captures every action and automatically creates simulation lessons.
Express Author is included as part of the Version 4.0 release of Simtrex StarTrainer. The upgrade also provides new Web-based administrative capabilities, advanced screen capture technology and expanded script management functionality.

www.simtrex.com/678-589-9100

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