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Avaya Tweaks Contact Center ExpressBy DAVID SIMS TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist Avaya announces enhancements for medium-sized businesses to Contact Center. Avaya Inc., a vendor of business communication applications, systems and services, has announced enhancements to Avaya Contact Center Express that "will enable medium-sized businesses to use intelligent communications to better serve their customers," according to company officials. "We know that medium-sized contact centers want to benefit from the same IP telephony, multi-channel and agent empowerment capabilities as larger enterprises -- but need solutions that are much easier and more cost effective to deploy," said Eileen Rudden, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Communications Applications Division, Avaya, explaining the targeting of the mid-market. Rudden added that the features added to Contact Center Express are designed to lower contact center costs for their mid-size business target. The software enhancements to Avaya Contact Center Express, which is tightly integrated with Microsoft applications, include a new Microsoft CRM connector that identifies incoming calls received by the contact center and provides an appropriate "pop up" with customer history on an agent's screen. The Microsoft CRM connector also enables agents to click a button on their Microsoft CRM screen to place outgoing calls. Contact Center Express now also handles and routes instant messages from customers using Microsoft Messenger for another channel of contact. Other enhancements include simplified management tools, easier e-mail handling and spell-checking, greater customization capabilities and more detailed reporting. This reporter was anxious for that spell-check enhancement. Contact Center Express has always been aimed squarely at the mid-size business market. Its multi-channel features of inbound and outbound voice, e-mail, web chat and Microsoft Messenger for instant messaging, packaged with Avaya's IP telephony and contact center routing and reporting and priced from $425 per concurrent agent for voice to $1000 per concurrent agent for all channels is a classic mid-market offering. It's where the action's going to be over the next few years, too. The global market for contact center technology is expected to grow to $5.1 billion by 2008, with the most growth over the next five years in the mid-market in contact centers with up to 250 agents, according to Datamonitor. The latest version of Contact Center Express will be featured at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference at Booth 818, in Minneapolis starting tomorrow and running through the end of the week. Avaya's also showing off its suite of IP telephony solutions for small and medium businesses, including Avaya IP Office with Microsoft CRM. ----- David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100005&nm=David%20 Sims |