Scopus Technology, Inc. has announced Scopus Telecom Central, its customer care solution developed exclusively for the international telecommunications market. According to Ori Sasson, chairman and CEO of Scopus, “The trillion-dollar worldwide telecommunications industry is engulfed in change and rapid growth. The international dynamics of the past several years — deregulation, new competition, privatization, advances in technology and service bundling — have resulted in a fierce battle for marketshare. High-quality customer service is emerging as the single greatest opportunity for differentiation in the telecom marketplace.”

Telecom Central is a configurable, out-of-the-box call center and customer support product that is designed to provide a 360-degree view of the customer by integrating information from across the enterprise — from sales, marketing, quality assurance, customer service and support, billing and provisioning. It consists of the following integrated applications modules.

• SupportTEAM: A customer service and support application that tracks and resolves customer inquiries, supports defect tracking and change measurement processes, accepts telephone, fax, e-mail or Internet communications, and links problems resolution to existing knowledgebases.

• SalesTEAM: A sales and marketing application that automates the sales process by leveraging information obtained from marketing campaigns into successful sales programs while it tracks sales data to optimize future marketing efforts.

• TeleTEAM: Scopus’ computer-telephony integration (CTI) product that features voice/data synchronization, dynamic intelligent routing, virtual call queue management and integration to CTI middleware.

• Scopus DataBridge: A realtime API-to-API bridge that puts mission-critical information in the hands of the call center agent by leveraging existing infrastructure and data sources, and can be batch-processed for faster processing time.

• Contracts: Sets up and maintains service level agreements that are used to determine a customer’s entitlement to support agents, allowing agents to verify and keep track of service agreements, including agreements with third-party service providers.

• SmartScript: Script creation and management that automates workflow and makes upsell/cross-sell recommendations based on predetermined rules.

• Integration Modules: Through integration to legacy billing systems, Telecom Central accepts and completes service orders to reduce error and simplify the billing process.

• Telecom Accelerator: Telecom Central provides templates for business rules, queries and tasks, with integration to churn management and provisioning systems.

Telecom Central is designed to support a wide variety of computing environments, including UNIX and Windows NT for servers; Windows 95, Windows NT, Macintosh and UNIX for PCs; UNIX and Windows operating systems; and all major database and hardware platforms. Telecom Central is based on Scopus’ meta data architecture, which store application components — layouts, objects, properties, workflow and logic — as objects in a database, resulting in customized applications without programming. Scopus also announced it has signed 12 new telecommunications firms. Its newest clients include: Omnitel, the second-largest cellular network provider in Italy, which will establish one of the largest call center operations in Europe for customer service and support; L.A. Cellular, one of the largest U.S. cellular providers, which will implement a 900-agent call center that will operate 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; BellSouth, which has selected Scopus to support the sales and service of communications products to its large corpo-rate accounts; and MFS Worldcom, a provider of a full range of cellular and long-distance services, which will deploy Scopus technology to more than 2,000 customer service representatives. For more information, call 510-597-5800.