Few things are more frustrating than having to provide
information again and again to the same company. Often, you may phone in
just to be told that the department you are dealing with is the wrong one
and you will need to be transferred, meaning you then have to repeat
everything once again. When you finally reach the correct person, you might
be told by the agent that he or she only deals with phone inquiries and has
no access to the e-mail you sent. Providing consistent communications media
across an enterprise has been a hallmark of Avaya since its inception, and
its Multimedia Contact Center continues that tradition. The Multimedia
Contact Center is designed to integrate self-service and assisted channels
such as e-mail, Web chat, Web collaboration and telephony applications with
inbound and outbound customer contact systems and enterprise data. This
channel and data integration will allow contact centers to improve their
operations with real-time and historic analysis of customer communications,
agent scripting capabilities and knowledge base management, to both give the
agent the customer information when it is needed as well as improve service,
marketing and customer segmentation. Lawrence Byrd, Avaya CRM Evangelist,
said the Multimedia Contact Center is designed to make it easier for
supervisors to understand what is going on in a distributed environment as
well as provide lower costs to integrate disparate systems. Byrd also said
that by providing a 360-degree view of activities and resources, the new
Operational Analyst application of the Multimedia Contact Center is designed
to help users segment their customers and understand their needs.
Based on open industry standards, the Interaction Center
component of the Multimedia Contact Center integrates into a multivendor
environment, supporting multiple communications switches, IVR systems and
database platform servers. The application interfaces with popular Web
browsers, agent clients and e-mail servers to support a variety of corporate
and home-based communications systems. Components of the Interaction Center
include: Avaya Outbound Contact Management, which provides automated,
software-based predictive telephone dialing capabilities; Avaya Telephony,
which provides voice service that intelligently routes telephone calls to
the best resource; Avaya Web, which adds click-to-talk as a new Web-based
sales and service option using IP telephony to provide voice communications
access over a single-line connection and supports Web chat, online
collaboration, call back functions, and access to Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ) and knowledge base self-service; Avaya Email, which provides e-mail
management capabilities including natural language content analysis; and
Avaya Agent, which is a desktop integration application that enables sales
and service representatives to view customer data, multiple communications
applications and a variety of systems from one screen.
For large enterprises and carriers, providing access to
directory information can eat up lots of time and resources. Offering a
solution to this problem, Phonetic Systems recently released Version 5.0 of
its Voice Search Engine Platform, which is used to facilitate applications
such as speech-driven auto-attendants, self-service password reset, speaker
verification and directory information centers. According to J.D. Howard,
CEO of Phonetic Systems, Version 5.0 of the Voice Search Engine Platform is
designed to facilitate business continuity, increase customer satisfaction
and reduce operating costs by leveraging speech to look at large amounts of
data in directories. Howard said major issues telcos have with voice access
to direc-tories are the ability to integrate into their ecosystem and can it
be done without 'weirding out' the caller. He said Version 5.0 addresses
these and other issues with a distributed architecture data model with open
APIs and is able to handle 'in network' carrier directory assistance. It
can also be used for enterprise call routing, virtual credit card,
conferencing, emergency broadcast messaging, paging and security systems, as
well as call center applications such as secure voice access, password
reset, business continuity coordination and information retrieval.
Phonetic Systems' Voice Search Engine technology is built
to search large and dynamic data sources containing thousands to millions of
records by breaking words down into basic units of speech called phonemes
and separating the speech recognition from the directory search, allowing
for increased flexibility and scalability of automated enterprise and
carrier directories.
The PhoneticOperator platform sits on the network like a
telephone set, but functions like a live operator, completing calls and
providing information without requiring any additional IT resources. Version
5.0 of the core Phonetic Systems technology platform has been enhanced to
address scalability in that it is now able to search more than 5,500,000
directory listings and over 1,000,000 grammar sizes in a single server
before needing to be subdivided. By keeping directories in a single server,
customers gain dramatically increased accuracy and overall system success
while they lower total cost of ownership by reducing the integration and
administration.
DirectoryAssistant and PhoneticOperator have been moved from
a single platform implementation to a modular, distributed approach to
automate the transfer of voice and data between the database, switch and
workstation. Version 5.0 also delivers improved automated analysis and
logging tools for ensuring superior levels of accuracy, supports VXML 2.0
and is SNMP-compliant.
Version 5.0 has improved proactive data tuning and filtering
to boost search performance. PhoneticOperator and DirectoryAssistant have
increased accuracy in identifying intended contacts and completing calls
regardless of connection and environmental factors from analog, digital,
wireless and/or VoIP interfaces.
With a background that began in developing accounting
software, ACCPAC International, Inc., a division of Computer Associates, has
an expertise of providing useful functionality to back-office programs
(according to Tom Crafton, vice president of eCRM, ACCPAC has half a million
registered clients worldwide and 5,000 solutions partners [VARs and
resellers]). With its expertise in back-office applications, and
understanding of how they work and their importance in business processes,
it should come as no surprise that the latest version of ACCPAC's CRM
offering, eCRM 5.0, strives for the CRM ideal of interoperability in all
enterprise programs. In addition, eCRM 5.0 is designed to open up Internet
and wireless CRM to the mid-market company through integration to the ACCPAC
Advantage Series for order entry, inventory control, accounts receivable and
accounts payable. The object-based, open architecture of eCRM 5.0 allows
access to any ODBC- compliant database and third-party software businesses
may be using. Crafton said eCRM 5.0 is 100 percent bi-directional, making it
simple to install and maintain the solutions for call center, marketing
automation, sales automation and customer care.
The reporting module has been enhanced to support reports
written from an ASP page or from external applications, which can then be
displayed on a Palm OS or Windows CE-based PDA. Graphical pipeline analysis
has been added, enabling users to see a graphical representation of their
sales pipelines and to drill down for details on individual stages of the
pipeline. Workflow designers also now have a graphical workflow tool that
allows administrators to set up the flow of business processes, such as
escalation and classification, with simple drag-and-drop icons.
End users of ACCPAC eCRM can create a personalized 'My
Home Page' to centrally display information most relevant to them in
managing their daily business, such as rules, pipelines, appointments,
streaming news and more.
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