Short Message Service (SMS)

• Altitude Software (www.altitude.com) now offers the Fast ROI Initiative that ensures partners and customers can pre-determine the return when considering Altitude uCI solutions for new technology investments. The initiative provides ROI assessment tools and methodologies, helping decision-makers build a business case and understand the potential business value of an Altitude uCI solution.
  
  
• Altitude Software (News - Alert) is also making available a new online tool to provide an early estimate of the financial benefits arising from deploying Altitude uCI solutions to address new business needs. These tools and methodologies cover five operational areas mapped on top of Altitude uCI’s main customer interaction channel functionalities, namely voice inbound, voice outbound, IVR, email and Web collaboration.
  
  
• Enhancements to Aspect (News - Alert)’s (www.aspect.com) contact center-oriented unified communications application are now available. The new features – accessed through the Aspect Unified IP 6.6.1 platform product – include enabling customer interaction with contact center agents through Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communicator and over the Web with click-to-IM. Customers can incorporate the IM address for the companies that they do business with as part of their “buddy lists” and can interact with the contact center via IM. IM routing also offers an auto attendant capability, or interactive messaging response, allowing the contact center to fully automate and script a response to an incoming instant message and/or intelligently route the customer to an IM-based agent.
  Hybrid integration between the Aspect platform and Tellme (News - Alert)’s on-demand voice portal platform helps companies leverage network-based services. These include proactive customer contact, post-call surveys, automated appointment reminders, notifications, and business continuity with on-demand self service.
  
  
• InVision Software (News - Alert)’s (www.invisionwfm.com) InVision Enterprise WFM 4.7 features several program enhancements that make optimized staff planning more reliable. It lets users enter local laws and individual contract regulations into the system. They can save time and calculate working times by making use of the 40 new functions available for integrated time management. It also has an Absence Planner feature, which facilitates long-term staff planning and provides an overview of all scheduled absences in the selected monthly view of a given planning unit.
  
  
• LiveVox (News - Alert) (www.livevox.com) has released Agent@Ready, a feature that reduces abandoned calls associated with hosted-broadcast blasters and robo callers. With Agent@Ready, LiveVox procures local direct inward dial numbers for clients at no additional charge. This allows organizations to tap their agents into to the LiveVox ACD, which drives the hosted dialer’s powerful call pacing and routing features that improves the calling efficiency.
  
  





• Nexidia (News - Alert) (www.nexidia.com) has come out with the Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) 8.0. It has new first call resolution analysis tools that are fully integrated into existing customer transaction data and which leverage Nexidia’s speech analytics to provide deep insight into the most critical metric impacting operations costs and customer experience. ESI (News - Alert) 8.0 can now analyze calls by individual speaker – agent or customer – providing more relevant results. It has the ESI Forensic Search tools, which provide easy ways to query, report on and visualize that data; the user can view a speaker-separated player showing tracks, results, cross-talk, and non-talk. ESI 8.0 also has expanded scalability with the lowest total cost of ownership. While asingle server can process more than 20,000 hours of audio per day, with ESI 8.0 customers can now integrate multiple servers together to provide practically unlimited capacity.
  
  
• RightAnswers (News - Alert) (www.rightanswers.com) has launched the “RightAnswers Enterprise Gateway,” an add-on component to the company’s Unified Knowledge Suite. Designed to maximize search capabilities across an organization, the new tool provides users with more resources to find answers to their support issues. The new tool integrates with enterprise search systems to provide a single point of access to organizational knowledge, IT solutions and support. The integration delivers several benefits such as faster resolution to support issues, more satisfied users and reduced calls to the help desk. Enterprises can now seamlessly extend content from the RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Suite to the rest of their enterprise.
  
  
• The Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals (RCCSP) ( www.the-resource-center.com) has expanded its next generation contact center training curriculum with the addition of COPC’s (www.copc.com) Global Best Practices Training for Customer Service Providers (CSP (News - Alert)). The four-and-a-half day course takes place Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, 2009, at the Hartland Plaza Center in Austin, Texas. The program registration fee is $3,795. Attendees can earn the prestigious COPC (News - Alert) CSP “registered coordinator” status.
  
  
• Participants will learn about operational practices used in high performance customer contact centers, common operational pitfalls and how to avoid them, and high performance benchmarks and how to set targets for service levels, quality objectives and unit costs. They will also be taught how to optimize operational performance and balance service, quality and cost and improve operational capabilities that achieve higher levels of client and end-user satisfaction while reducing costs. They will obtain the requirements for implementing the COPC-2000 CSP “gold standard” in a customer service organization
  
  
• Siemens Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) (www.siemens-enterprise.com) has made unified communications more affordable and practical for small-midsized businesses and their contact centers. The OpenScape Office UC application suite scales so that organizations of up to 384 users can access voice and conferencing services, presence, mobility, voicemail, messaging, and contact center capabilities. As OpenScape Office now operates on Siemens (News - Alert)’ HiPath 3000 platform, UC can now be deployed through a simple software upgrade across not only IP but also TDM and analog environments. This gives Siemens’ customers more flexibility in migrating to UC. That means SMBs can upgrade to UC even they do not have IP, which avoids CAPEX costs.
  OpenScape Office is also now available on HiPath OpenOffice ME. This is an all-in-one unified communications appliance that provides a high-quality toolset that can enable organizations of 20 to 150 workers to benefit from productivity, mobility and collaboration features that are typically only affordable for much larger organizations.
  
  
• Syntellect (News - Alert) (www.syntellect.com) new VoiceXML Studio 7.2 accelerates creating of VoiceXML-based voice solutions by 50 percent or more. It is also tightly integrated with the Syntellect Communications Portal, providing developers with a comprehensive VoiceXML (News - Alert) offering. It supports VoiceXML 2.1 and 2.0 specifications and has a graphical programming environment that eliminates the need for manual coding and generates VoiceXML suitable for high-performance applications. Java, XML and Web Services capabilities allow developers to integrate easily with existing software applications and leverage prior investments in software and solution development. An integrated debugger streamlines development and testing time while sdvanced database controls enable business process and transaction automation.
  
  
• In what will be a series of new products VXi Corporation (www.vxicorp.com) has launched two new headsets aimed at contact centers, the Passport 21 and the VXi Tria. With a lightweight design, the VXi Passport 21V binaural single-wire headset incorporates the sound quality and durability of the Passport 20 and has a single-wire design, which allows for greater range of motion. VXi Tria V’s monaural design allows an ear free to hear other conversations. It provides clear and consistent communications with its quality audio receiver. It is also compatible with Passport V-series amplifiers and direct-connect cords. Both models have noise-canceling microphones filters out unwanted background noise and gooseneck mic tubes that ensures consistent, proper, and kink-free microphone placement.

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