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Cloud Contact Center Roundup [Customer Inter@ction Solutions](Customer Inter@ction Solutions Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Starting this year CUSTOMER magazine will publish monthly roundups of a select product category. These roundups will essentially be like mini-buyers' guides. They will include the names and URLs of companies that offer solutions in a particular category, and then provide a brief write-up of what each company provides in terms of solutions in that space. So, if you are looking for a solution or have an offering in one of the featured roundup categories, this is a resource to find what you're looking for or highlight what you can deliver. This issue's roundup focuses on cloud contact center solutions. To find the focus of CUSTOMER'S future roundups, see our editorial calendar at: http://images.tmcnet.com/mkt/mediaki t/Customer_Ed_Cal .pdf. Altitude Software www. altitude, com Altitude Cloud Contact Center offers a complete contact center solution on the cloud with cost-effective options for every business need. It is suitable for a small or large operation, an outsourcer or in-house contact center, and providing inbound or outbound service. The solution was designed to speed up operations, while simplifying the management complexity, increasing productivity, reducing operational efforts, and, ultimately, raise customer satisfaction levels. This modular solution unifies all touch points throughout the organization, in outbound, inbound, and blending, regardless of the channel used for contact - voice, e-mail, SMS/MMS, fax, messaging or web. Aspect www.aspect.com Zipwire is a pure cloud, Saas-based contaa center solution from Aspea with a feature set offering simplicity in provisioning, support and on-going operations. It is designed to get a contaa center up and running in hours. Delivered through Aspeas Voxeo cloud and telco infrastructure, Zipwire can be deployed with the company's cloud network while providing a scalable, hosted solution that's flexible enough to quickly adapt as business needs change. Aspea Hosted gives customers choices in implementing Aspeas Unified IP contaa center solution with both cloud and hybrid deployment options delivered through a managed, secure data center with resilience built in. Customer environments are fully supported through initial implementation and custom configuration, user training, and ongoing monitoring and maintenance. Aspea also offers pre-deployed, managed solutions using Voxeo Prophecy and CXP platforms, that will get IVR and multi-channel self-service applications up and running with little up-front cost, low IT overhead, and the capacity to grow to thousands of lines as demand warrants. Avaya www.avaya.com Avayas partner-hosted Customer Experience Management solution targets cloud service providers, system integrators, and Avaya distributors who offer contaa center as a service to enterprises. The cloudbased solution enables CSPs to provide all the benefits of Avayas CPEbased contaa center features, but end users pay via a monthly utility pricing model. The solution Is suitable for end customers with up to 2,500 simultaneous contaa center agents. Based on virtualized Avaya Aura software, CSPs and Sis can address multiple segments without managing multiple platforms and solutions from multiple vendors. Additionally, third-party apps and virtualized Avaya apps, including multichannel interaction and routing, call recording, and reporting and self-service capabilities applications sitting in front of the agent-assisted contaa center service, are easily delivered, managed and continually updated via the cloud. For simplified management, Avaya Contaa Center Control Manager delivers multi-tenant administration through its roles-based access management suite, while real-time and historical cradle-to-grave contaa center reporting for multi-tenant environment utilizes "ANAV" from IT Navigator, which was acquired by Avaya in Oaober 2013. Calabrio Inc. www. calabrio, com Calabrio ONE Workforce Optimization Suite provides intuitive and flexible workforce optimization software for managed cloud service providers looking for an intelligent framework for cloudbased customer interaction management, operations and administration offerings. Calabrio ONE combines workforce optimization software into one comprehensive and integrated suite that's easy to implement, use and maintain. The produa suite includes advanced call recording, quality management, workforce management, performance dashboards and speech, text and desktop analytics. The software suite is built in an intuitive Web 2.0 framework that provides a flexible user environment that is ideally suited for the key advantages provided by a hosted service, such as streamlined management, reduced deployment times and lower costs. The deployment speed, scalability, agility and redundancy offered by Calabrio ONE complements the intelligent capabilities that end users expea from a cloud-based offering. The software integrates seamlessly into service providers' cloud platforms, requires minimal training, and enables end users to realize the value of workforce optimization and customer interaction analytics without having to manage the infrastructure themselves. Citrix www.gotoassist. com Citrix GoToAssist is a cloud-based, integrated support solution that offers contaa centers and IT support professionals a combination of easy-to-use service desk management, remote support, and IT monitoring. With access to key support functions from one interface, GoToAssist provides the funaionality to maintain uptimes for people and devices. Mobile support is also offered to and from devices at no additional cost. For users on Android devices, GoToAssist now offers its SeelT live camera streaming feature so customers can quickly show their issue to a support technician. GoToAssist also offers chat, enabling initiation of chat and service requests from different customer contaa points including social, web, community, and self-service sites. Live chat sessions can be seamlessly transitioned into full screen-sharing and remote control sessions to resolve more complex problems. For larger contaa center operations, GoToAssist offers additional functionality such as advanced administration, reporting and integration features. Purchase and a 30-day free trial is available from die Citrix GoToAssist website. Comcast Business http://business. Comcast, com Comcast Business VoiceEdge is a cloud-based, hosted voice solution offering a frill suite of unified communications and mobility features, a predictable monthly cost and HD-quality voice service, allowing todays contaa centers to communicate more efficiendy. Business VoiceEdge is fully managed by Comcast, and eliminates the need for expensive on-site equipment such as PBXs and key systems. Business VoiceEdge delivers unlimited nationwide calling, and Polycom phones at no additional charge. It also allows work lines to integrate with mobile devices, home office or other locations to have calls follow or push/pull between devices without having to disconnea and then reconnea the call; voicemail-to-e-mail; a downloadable client that enables dick-to-dial and service management from within Microsoft Oudook, Interna Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox; the ability to redirea calls to back-up numbers during power outages or other on-site issues to keep business operating; and on-net calling between sites using extensions for a unified calling experience, add new locations quickly, and share call handling across offices. Furstperson Inc. www.furstperson. com Furstperson has solutions for larger enterprise firms (FurstPerson Enterprise), small/medium sized firms (Furstperson Express), and interview products. FurstPerson Enterprise provides hiring managers with an integrated talent selection platform that includes FurstPersoris assessment library, which consists of personality, problem solving, written communication, and technical ability tests; interactive simulations for supervisor, sales, service, chat, and home agent jobs; integrated reports and dashboards, and workflow management tools. Also included is a closed-loop analytics module, FurstPerson Analytics, providing a data-based feedback loop that delivers hiring intelligence and business results. FurstPerson Express provides hiring managers at small/medium sized firms with pre-selected assessments including simulations, problem solving tests, and personality tests and the ability to create custom, on-demand hiring profiles. FurstPerson Express offers hiring managers a selection of options based on job, budget, and desired candidate experience. FurstPerson's SmartGuide is an end-to-end behavioral interview toolkit that includes audio and in-person interview deliver)'. SmartGuide includes an interview question library, the ability to add personalized content, questions that are based on candidate assessment results, and the ability to rate the rater to improve interview accuracy. Genesys www.genesyslab. com!products!genesys-cloud!overview, aspx Genesys Cloud delivers customer interactions to the right channel with intelligent routing, which through easily configurable business rules tunes the customer experience. It allows users to more rapidly create the most effective, high-value customer experience, while reducing infrastructure costs, demands on IT resources, and security concerns. Genesys Cloud utilizes the Genesys Customer Experience Platform to power optimal customer experiences, which are consistent, personalized and journey appropriate across all touchpoints, channels and interactions. This offering includes contact center, workforce optimization, proactive customer communications, self-service, and mobile marketing. Genesys Customer Experience Platform, along with recendy integrated capabilities previously offered by Angel and SoundBite, is now fitlly available in the cloud. This includes intelligent routing capabilities that allow users to tune the experience they deliver, including optimal resource assignment. Open integration with existing systems also protects legacy investments.With Genesys, users can increase operational efficiency with self-service provisioning for iterative improvements, and to enable the high-quality design of applications using best practices. HP www.hp.com HP Customer Engagement as a Service combines HP's enterprise cloud expertise with technology from Avaya to provide clients a fast path to transition their legacy contact centers to a flexible and secure platform. Hosted in a virtual private cloud environment, HP CEaaS provides organizations with a scalable solution allowing them to retain their own customer service agents or utilize HP's global support and resources and focus on managing customer relationships. Organizations can use these services to add valuable capabilities such as sodal media, marketing campaign automation, mobile integration and customer analytics, into a single contact center platform. This service is designed to enable organizations to break free from legacy contact center technology and bring new multi-channel customer experience capabilities to customers quickly and cost-effectively. Intelemedia Communications Inc. ww. intelemedia, com For both inbound customer care and inbound sales, Intelemedia's Leaders Choice combines a cloud-based call management platform with call center resources. Clients utilizing multiple outsourced call center partners benefit from a unified platform encompassing performance-based call routing, call recording, web-based order entry/ scripting, centralized and unified reporting, and professional management of the entire process. That includes access to the best available agents across the country's top call centers for each and every customer call, with analytic and reporting tools allowing managing the network a simple task. Delivering client calls in real-time to the highest performing agents in the network results in increased sales conversion and order-sizes. A higher percentage of client calls can be handled by the highest performing agents, resulting in a higher percentage of calls being resolved. It offers users improved save and retention rates by routing calls to the highest specific skills among multiple call centers. Dynamic intelligent routing among multiple centers means that calls are answered more quickly which reduces abandonment rates. And actionable intelligence means that management can make faster and more informed decisions. Interactive Intelligence Communicadons-as-a-SeMce is a set of cloud-based contact center and unified communications applicadons fix mid-size to large organizations. Interactive Intelligence CaaS offers customers maximum reliability and security through customer data isolation, proactive monitoring, a 24/7 NOC, an option to keep all voice traffic within the customer's network, and a number of certifications, `mduding SOX, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, JITC, SSAE-i6 SOC2, and PCI DSS Securit Standards compliance. Interactive Intelligence CaaS also of&rs maximum return on investment with a bmad set of applications for business users and agents all delivered by a single vendor. It also offers several cloud deployment choices and the ability to migrate from the cloud to on-premises. For organizations with between 10 and 50 contact center agents, Interactive Intelligence offers CaaS Small Center. This cloud-based contact center solution gives smaller organizations easy to understand service and pricing packages, along with simple deployment, configuration and management. CaaS Small Center minimizes risk through a free product test drive, a guarantee to be up and running within 15 days, a dedicated implementation manager, on-demand training, and no long-term contract commitment. LiveOps www.liveops.com LiveOps Engage is an integrated agent desktop application that unifies interactions across social, mobile and traditional voice/text contact center channels. The single-screen interface of LiveOps Engage provides a complete view of the customer and his or her interaction history across all channels in one place, and enables agents to engage faster and more effectively in whichever channel the customer prefers or requires. LiveOps Management Applications provide visibility into contact center performance and the power to make changes in minutes instead of months - without help from IT. LiveOps Platform As a Service enables seamless operation between LiveOps Cloud Contact Center and leading CRM solutions such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sugar CRM, providing agents with the data they need to perform successful customer interactions. LiveOps for Salesforce is a native telephony application for Salesforce that leverages Open CT1 for seamless CRM integration, providing sales, marketing, and service agents access anywhere, on any device, and from any browser to provide instant contact center deployment and eliminating plug-ins. NICE www.nice.com NICE Systems' cloud-based Workforce Optimization suite offers full enterprise grade capabilities as well as hybrid deployment models. The offering includes recording, quality management, data and voice analytics, workforce management, performance management, incentive compensation management, and voice of the customer. These solutions are offered as hosted or as SaaS to provide customers greater flexibility, lower upfront costs, and faster implementation. The suite offers customers such benefits as deployment for contact centers, back offices, blanches and retail; easier access to the latest versions of the software; ability to focus on business operations rather than monitoring and maintaining enterprise-grade software; and support for hybrid integrations of on-premises and cloud-based applications. ShoreTel www. shoreteL com!solutions!cloud services ShoreTel Sky Contact Center is fully integrated with the ShoreTel Sky enterprise phone service. Any user profile can have a hosted contact center agent license added to it, allowing any employee to become part of the contact center. Capabilities include out-of-the-box integration with leading CRM applications, including Salesforce.com. Incoming calls automatically open records. Agent functions are embedded di- rectly in the web application, enabling agents to transfer calls and screens to other agents. Built-in call recording includes agent evaluation forms to track performance. Prioritized skill routing assigns priority by queue and by agent - maximizing routing flexibility. Each queue can have separate service levels, hold treatment (music, announcements, estimated wait time, position in queue, or ringing), and routing algorithm for finding available agents (round robin, fewest calls, or most idle). Agent features include whisper announcements, screen pop, and click-to-dial. Supervisors have web access to all administrative functions, including live dashboards, reports, and configuration. Real-time dashboards include current ACD activity (connected, queued, abandoned, and available agent counts) as well as current status by agent. Web reports are configurable by queue and date range. Call detail can be searched by queue, agent, direction, caller ID, recorded flag, duration, and date/time range. SkyCreek Corp. www. skycreek. com SkyCreek, a multi-channel cloud contact provider specializing in front-line customer interactions, offers an array of capabilities including appointment reminders, preemptive service notifications, post transaction surveys and sentiment analysis of employeecustomer interactions. At the heart of its custom IVR, SMS and e-mail contact management solutions is the cloud contact application, Interact. Interact is a full-stack contact management platform that is fully redundant, operating out of two geographically dispersed calling centers in Chicago and Reston, Va., and Is fully SSAE-16 compliant, with a record of99.9999% uptime. SkyCreek assigns a dedicated account manager to every client contact program it supports, each averaging more than 15 years of contact management experience. It says that allows SkyCreek to offer quality customer service; highly responsive change management; and to ensure that customer contact programs are optimized for performance, cost efficiency and overall quality. It also offers pay-per-result pricing and service level agreements on contracts. Spanlink Communications Inc. www. spanlink. com Spanlinks portfolio of Cisco Powered Cloud Services span the entire Cisco Collaboration portfolio. With Spanlink Cloud Services, organizations gain affordable access to the latest business voice, HD video, contact center technologies and managed services - all in a predictable monthly subscription. Spanlinks Cloud Services Portfolio includes unified communications as a service, including Voice over IR voice messaging, instant messaging, presence, and desktop and mobile telepresence. The Spanlink Contact Center as a Service allows organizations to provide better, secure, and flexible customer service. It empowers customers to interact with businesses through the communication channel of their choice. It allows businesses to expand or tailor contact center feature capabilities as needed, such as speech analytics, reporting, intelligent call routing and quality monitoring tools. And it allows for the ramp-up and scale down of agent capacity as needed. TelePresence as a Service, meanwhile, allows access to HD business video capabilities from SIPand H.323-compliant video endpoints. And it has multipoint functionality that allows three or more parties to dial into secure rendezvous rooms. Spanlinks OnGuard as a Service is a 24x7 managed services platform that offers monitoring, management and maintenance support of Cisco UC and Contact Center solutions. SPLICE Software www. splicesofiware. com The SPLICE Dialog Suite is comprised of four integrated cloudbased modules: Dialog Controller, Dialog Builder, Dialog Director, and Dialog Dashboard. Created to enhance and support contact center communications, the Dialog Suite makes having real, meaningful conversations simple, fast and easy. The primary support function of the Dialog Suite is ensuring that customer notifications, specifically proactive notifications and customer engagement programs, can be deployed in a timely manner for businesses. By being able to quickly deploy communications through the cloud, companies can scale campaigns up or down depending on their need. The Dialog Controller allows businesses to speak to their customers with integrated customer permissions and preferences, corporate business rules and best practices. The Dialog Builder allows the deployment of custom communications through an easy to use interface, utilizing an international pool of professional linguists and voice talents. The Dialog Director manages the distribution and management of all campaigns, and the Dialog Dashboard provides for actionable data insights. The SPLICE Dialog Suite is delivered using a secure SaaS platform or an API and integrates directly with all client systems, requiring Little to no IT involvement. Sysaid Technologies www. sysaid. com SysAid is an all-in-one IT service management solution designed to help automate IT service management processes for help desk support, asset management, software licenses, hardware configurations, tasks and projects, mobile device management, and more. SysAid ITIL-certified software is available on a cloud (SaaS) platform or on-premises, in Free, Basic, Full, Enterprise, Education, and MSP editions. The administrator interface is available in 42 languages. A notable feature of the solution is IT Benchmark, a dynamic measurement tool that translates the raw data of IT activities into meaningful information, enabling administrators to analyze and evaluate their current IT statistics and compare individual statistics with thousands of other IT departments worldwide. SysAid also provides advanced business rules-based ticket routing by parsing incoming e-mails and setting field values in the service records accordingly. Other features include an end user portal, manager dashboard, remote control, IT knowledge base, patch management, ITIL Package (CMDB, priority matrix, change management, and Problem Management), SLA/SLM tools, live chat, monitoring tool, password services, multi-company support, and a report-building wizard to create customized reports. SysAid has been awarded with Pink Elephant's PinkVERIFY v3.1 status. Telax Hosted Call Center www.telax.com Telax Hosted Call Center provides the capabilities for its clients to create exceptional customer experiences by combining the software and services its clients require into one firm-fixed monthly fee. By leveraging a native cloud computing architecture, Telax delivers an advanced contact center solution with more functionality than traditional hardware at a fraction of the cost. Telax clients get a customizable, easy-to-use solution that delivers responsive, fullservice technical and operational support and includes best practice consulting and no long-term contracts. By simplifying the number of vendors its clients require in the customer care supply chain, Telax Hosted Call Center enables clients to provide the best service to their customers, valuable business intelligence to their executives, and a user friendly solution for their agents. TelStrat www. tels trat, com Engage Cloud from TelStrat is a complete call recording and WFO solution optimized for cloud deployments by contact center outsourcers, multi-tenant environments, and SaaS hosted providers. Modules for recording, agent evaluation, coaching and e-leaming, speech and desktop analytics, performance reporting, customer surveys, and workforce management web-based centralized management of all Engage Cloud capabilities and resources streamlines server and account configuration/control. Advanced security, including end-to-end 256-bit AES encryption, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL/HTTPS) Web connections, and watermarking are also part of the solution. There's full support for PCI DSS, Dodd-Frank, HIPAA, and other regulatory compliance programs, including desktop analytics-driven auto pause/resume. Tiered, secure client access and partitioned resources ensure subscriber privacy and data integrity across multi-tenant clouds. The solution supports a wide variety of disaster survivability/recovery deployments. Up to 1,000 channel per server scalability requires fewer servers to support subscribers, whether in small workgroups or those with thousands of seats. TelStrat's Engage Cloud is priced on a monthly subscription basis; conventional purchased licenses are also available. Monthly subscription cost only bills for number of active subscriber users. Monthly subscription licenses include free installation and configuration in the providers data center, 24/7/365 support, and require no up-front cost. TOA Technologies www. toatech. com ETAdirect from TOA Technologies is a cloud-based suite of field service management software. It collects and uses data about how each field employee works, which it then uses to create optimized routes/schedules. Using the data, it predicts exactly when appointments will happen and how long they will take. Organizations can inform customers - via call, text, e-mail, self-service portal - of exact appointment times, reducing inbound inquiries and freeing up the contact center to spend time on what matters. Additional functionality provides visibility to reschedule or create new appointments meeting customer preferences, all based on actual field workforce availability. Field service management technology can help call center representatives work better with the field workforce, giving the call center the visibility they need to keep customers informed and reduce time spent tracking down a tech. Verint Systems Inc. www.verint.com Verint's Impact 360 Workforce Optimization is a cloud-based solution suited for global contact centers of all sizes. It includes pay-as-you-go, SaaS models, offering the benefits of flexibility and on demand. The company's Impact 360 Workforce Optimization solutions offered through a cloud service includes call recording, quality monitoring, workforce management and voice of the customer analytics. Verint's solutions help enable organizations to capture customer feedback anytime from anywhere. Providing these technologies as a service in the cloud, rather than on premises, lowers the barrier to entry for many organizations. In addition, the flexibility to scale services up and down can make the technology more attractive to customers whose activity levels vary considerably throughout the year. XO Communications www.xo.com XO Contact Center on Demand is a cloud-based, virtual contact center solution that allows organizations to provide a more consistent, seamless and comprehensive customer experience that enriches satisfaction and builds loyalty while minimizing capital expense and reducing operational costs. With this solution, companies can reduce infrastructure costs, gain more flexibility and control over customer service operations, and better engage and interact with customers. XO Communications backs this up with its experience in hosted voice solutions and its own high-capacity nationwide network. With Contact Center on Demand, organizations eliminate the need to make any further investments in contact center equipment to support each agent and location. Instead, users enjoy simple, pay-as-you-go pricing per user. Without having to buy new equipment and systems, users can quickly add resources where and when they need them to support spikes in business operations or to help meet special project demands. They pay only for the resources they need, when they need them. XO Contact Center on Demand is designed to complement other XO VoIP services including XO IP Flex, XO IP Flex with VPN, Enterprise SIP, Interactive Voice Response and Hosted PBX. Zeacom/Enghouse http://enghouseinteractive.com/products.php Enghouse Interactive's Contact Center: Enterprise (formerly Syntellect CIM) is an adaptable, multi-channel platform. It provides flexible deployment options, on-premises, distributed across multiple sites or on a public cloud infrastructure. That includes private cloud, an on-premises deployment with the flexibility to centralize or distribute components across multiple sites; virtual private cloud, leverages a cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (i.e. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) environment to create an isolated and private section of the cloud; and hybrid cloud, which connects on-premises and public cloud Contact Center: Enterprise components, and other applications. Meanwhile, Zeacom Communications Center 7.0 features TouchPoint, a redesigned user interface for agents and supervisors, new campaign tools for Microsoft Lync users, and enhanced redundancy options. TouchPoint features a minimalist interface to encourage collaboration both inside and outside the contact center, and improve First-contact resolution. TouchPoint provides real-time information and context-aware functionality. Its lean, compact nature prevents desktop clutter for users who also work in CRM, other business applications. Also new is Outdial for Lync, which allows outbound campaigns, such as collections, outbound sales campaigns, appointment reminders; and ZCC Survey, which enables managers to capture customer feedback on email & web chat-based agent interactions, and voice automation. Zultys www.zultys.com Zultys Inc. presents MXvirtual, a fully integrated cloud-based unified communication solution. It integrates voice, video, data and mobility to optimize collaboration and communications for businesses of all sizes, and includes all the advanced features of the Zultys premises-based system including the Zultys Integrated Contact Center solution. Zultys' Integrated Contact Center software intelligently processes incoming calls to groups of agents based on administrator-defined rules and real-time conditions. When there are more callers than available agents, the system will either re-route callers or queue callers with customized in-queue messages and music that may be unique for each call group. Agents can be located anywhere in the world, allowing for flexibility and around the clock coverage, without the need to relocate key talent. Builtin SuperView software allows contact center supervisors to monitor real-time call statistics for multiple call groups, as well as easily manage agents and calls with the ability to barge-in, silent monitor, or whisper-thru to an agent on call. And for the supervisor's convenience all these functions can be accessed from a single SuperView window. (c) 2014 Technology Marketing Corporation |