NEC Unified and Microsoft's Tellme Team on Hosted Call Center Voice Services Solution

Customer-facing organizations, more than any other type of business, require reliable communications infrastructure. Often, delivering this infrastructure, in support of mission-critical functions, proves to be complex and expensive for enterprises. It need not be, though.

 

With an eye toward simplifying the design and implementation of customer service-supporting communications systems, NEC Unified Solutions is partnering with Microsoft subsidiary Tellme. The objective: to offer on-demand, enterprise-class voice services solutions.

 

NEC (News - Alert) already has an established relationship with Microsoft (the two companies have been working together for 30 years), so teaming up with Tellme was a logical move. NEC’s advanced applications services group is being tapped for its knowledge of interactive voice response (IVR) systems, systems integration and speech technologies.

 

“We were seeking to build out a new portfolio of services that leverages the best of premise-based communications and the benefits of the software as a service model,” said Paul Lopez, general manager of professional services development at NEC Unified Solutions. “The Tellme (News - Alert) platform is a massively scalable and elastic vehicle that enables us to shift our customers from paying for technologies to paying for what the technologies enable them to do.”

 

Coupled with Tellme’s platform, NEC’s expertise is being used to offer an end-to-end services solution that enables enterprises to efficiently plan, design, test, and deploy voice applications and supporting networks.

 

“We are bringing the best in communication solutions integration with the best in hosted caller experience solutions,” Lopez told TMCnet. “NEC manages the client relationship and professional services engagement. Tellme hosts the VoiceXML applications we will develop for our clients as part of the solution.”

 

Tellme’s voice services platform, built on VoiceXML (News - Alert), is used by Fortune 100 companies to handle billions of calls each day. Its on-demand capacity enables enterprises to manage call traffic spikes with ease, focusing more resources on customer service and less on supporting technology.

 

Lopez said the partnership is very complementary in that, rather than integrating overlapping products, NEC and Tellme are bringing together different strengths to create something new.

 

“Since Tellme is a hosted service, there are no overlaps in what NEC provides today,” he told TMCnet. “We offer speech-based communication solutions but they are premise-based. This is our first hosted offering.”

NEC Unified Solutions and Tellme share a common philosophy, namely that communications should serve customer needs via simple, intuitive services and applications that are based on the roles end-users play. NEC has a special title for this unified business communications approach: UNIVERGE360.

 “NEC UNIVERGE360 is a vision that helps companies unify their business communication by placing people at the center of communications,” Lopez told TMCnet. “It identifies the roles they play, and then unifies the technology and business processes needed to make their jobs and the organizations they work in more efficient.”

 

The UNIVERGE360 vision, combined with the new joint offering, address specific challenges faced by today’s enterprise contact centers, many of which are seeking what Lopez called “cost take-out opportunities,” but understand that sacrificing service levels in the process doesn’t make sense.

 

“When you look at how much we can save by considering what they spend on live agent idle time and annual infrastructure maintenance, the economics become quite compelling,” Lopez told TMCnet. “By completing more transactions in the hosted application, live agents can be more productive handling complex calls. We also provide dynamic scaling up or down during call spikes or quiet times where the contact center only pays for actual usage.”

 

In other words, by combining NEC’s expertise with Tellme’s on-demand platform, the two companies can help enterprises automate call flows, achieve business process integration, and ultimately improve customer experience levels in the contact center.