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Hello! I have an assignment due that I've been given an extension on, but it's still due ASAP. It concerns a DeVry NETW250 Week Four IP-PBX RFP Vendor Selection between the providers, Avaya, Mitel, and Siemens. I've attached the document I did for week two, but just need some help completing what's needed for week four. Please find below the instructions as designated by my professor.
Week 4: The ACD-IP PBX vendor selection is due and is worth 50 points. The derivable should include a numerical matrix indicating the score assigned to each vendor for each checklist item. Add the matrix or table to the corresponding section of the Outline, and submit it to the Week 4 Course Project Dropbox. Please read the Week 4 Deliverable (ACD-IP PBX vendor selection) Rubric below to understand how your deliverable will be graded.
Week 4 Deliverable (ACD-IP PBX Vendor Selection) Rubric
| Documentation, Editing, and Formatting | 10 | 20 |
A quality document has zero to minimal spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors. |
| Organization and Cohesiveness | 10 | 20 |
A quality document includes an introduction based on a well formed thesis statement. The logical order of its content is derived from the thesis statement. |
| Content | 30 | 60 |
A quality document should provide a numerical evaluation matrix scoring each checklist item for each vendor, using the provided ACD-PBX document. ACD-PBX Doc |
| 50 | 100 |
A quality document should meet or exceed all of the above requirements. |
ACD-IP PBX Request for Proposal
Samuel Gastel
DeVry University Author Note
This paper was prepared for NETW250
Taught by Professor Lawrence Awuah
DeVry University Online Today I am comparing three companies: Avaya, Mitel, and Siemens. I am comparing
them based on a multitude of factors, including the experience and connectivity of the
companies, as well as their multimedia support, as well as several derivative factors of
those aspects. I intend to come to an unbiased conclusion, based solely on whichever
company the facts point toward as being the preferred company to suit my needs.
ACD-IP PBX (RFP) Outline
I. Avaya
A. Experience and Connectivity
I. Experience of Company
II. ACD based on Windows
III. Connectivity
B. Multimedia Support
I.
E-Mail
II. Chat
III. Voice Mail
IV. IVR
V.
Outbound dial
VI. CTI
VII. URL
VIII. CRM support
II. Mitel
A. Experience and Connectivity
I. Experience of Company
II. ACD based on Windows
III. Connectivity
B. Multimedia Support
I.
E-Mail
II. Chat
III. Voice Mail
IV. IVR
V.
Outbound dial
VI. CTI
VII. URL
VIII. CRM support
III. Siemens A. Experience and Connectivity
I. Experience of Company
II. ACD based on Windows
III. Connectivity
B. Multimedia Support
I.
E-Mail
II. Chat
III. Voice Mail
IV. IVR
V.
Outbound dial
VI. CTI
VII. URL
VIII. CRM support
This document is a side-by-side comparison on IP contact call
center solutions. It was conducted by Faulkner’s Advisory on
Computer and Communications Technologies (FACCTs) several
years ago. FACCTs (http://www.faulkner.com) is a trusted
reference source that provides in-depth information on computer
networking, software, telecommunications, etc.
Although products and services are frequently upgraded,
replaced, or discontinued, this document captured industry trends,
vendor and product profiles, and pricing information of IP contact
call centers at the time when the research was done.
Serving as a compilation of responses to a real-world Request for
Proposal (RFP), this document shall help students assign scores
to a set of checklist items (refer to Course Project) and choose a
winning vendor. IP Contact Call Centers: Side-by-Side The right IP contact call center can make potential new customers go away
happy. A conventional “Your call is important to us…” call center—in today’s
age of Internet gratification—will likely just make them go away.
Take a conventional call center, put it over an IP-telephony infrastructure,
plug in a multimedia server or two and upgrade the agent PC client software,
and presto—you’ve got all the makings of an IP contact center. It’s not quite
that easy, of course. Contact centers—so called because they add customerinteraction channels beyond just voice—represent considerable added
complexity, and cost, over voice-only call centers.
After listening to years of vendor claims about their nouveau contact centers
—ROI, ease of use, functional one-upmanship—BCR and Miercom decided to
see for themselves. Invitations were issued to all vendors known to us in the
contact-center marketplace for a hands-on comparative evaluation.
Five leading vendors quickly responded, welcoming us with open arms.
(Note: Nortel has been removed from the table since they no longer are in
business, however, references to Nortel within the analysis was left in for
completeness.) Avaya, which showed off its high-end Interaction Center, along with its midsized offering, a Microsoft-based package with equally rich multimedia
support, the Contact Center Express.
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, which offered its flexible Genesys
7 Suite.
Interactive Intelligence, which presented its Customer Interaction Center.
Mitel Networks, which offered its 6100 Contact Center Solutions package, a
set of contact-center building blocks.
Siemens’ subsidiary, Trango Software, which showed its HiPath ProCenter
Standard. The “Standard” is in addition to the lower-end “Agile” version,
which has smaller agent capacity but otherwise the same architecture and
code base. Table 1 provides a thumbnail, side-by-side comparison of the key aspects of
the contact-center packages reviewed. These participating vendors,
especially Avaya, dominate the contact-center marketplace today.
TABLE 1. IP Contact Call Centers Reviewed
Interactive
Avaya
Genesys
Mitel
Siemens
Intelligence
Total
contact
center
seats
shipped
(all
products),
per vendor
Contact
center
package,
version
reviewed
Contact
center
server(s)
required DBMS 6 to 8 million
(25,000 contact
centers globally) 1.25 million 100,000
(3,000
(100’s of
contact
contact
centers)
centers) 6100
Contact
Center
Solutions
v4.5
Sun
Windows
Windows;
Solaris,
primarily, Windows, w/ integratio
Windows
IBM AIX,
also Sun
MS LCS
n w/ MS
or XP
and/or
Solaris, IBM support
LCS
Windows
AIX, Linux
coming
Oracle or
MS SQL
SQL-based MS SQL
IBM DB2 MS SQL
Server, for
RDBMS, MS Server or
SQL
Server;
full
SQL Server; Oracle;
server;
customercapability;
customer- customercustomer provided
customerprovided
provided
-provided
provided
Contact
Interactio
Center
n Center
Express
7.0
2.1 Customer
Genesys 7 Interaction
Suite
Center
v2.3.1 Typical/avg
no. agents
100-200 50-100
per contact
center 500 seats 100 seats Max agents
per contact 5,200
center 150 16,000
seats 600 per
server 15% 25% 25% Est.
percent
new
systems
shipping
with 30% 500,000
(2,100
contact
centers) 40% 50 1 million
(shipping
2,000
cont
ctrs/mo) HiPath
ProCenter
Standard
v6.5 Windows Informix
RDBMS;
included 150 300 to
750
350
(custom
concurrent config to
agents
1,250)
5% to 10% 10% to
20%
(globally);
25% to
30%
(U.S.) multiple
media
PBX
infrastruct
ure (over
which
contact
center was
reviewed) S8500- S8500based
based
Vendor’s
CommMg CommMg SIP Server
r 3.0 (on r3.0 (on v7.0
Linux)
Linux) None;
Siemens,
requires
Nortel,
Other PBX
Avaya
Ericsson
support
Comm
& Aspect
Mgr 3.0
ACD
PBX Cisco,
Nortel,
Avaya and
20+ others
via their
CTI
interfaces Vendor’s
SIP-based
Mitel 3300 HiPath
ACD
ICP
4000
infrastructur
e
Can
connect,
Any SIP, or None;
via HiPath
via Q.sig or requires
4000
T1 PRI; or
Mitel PBX
Q.sig
TAPI to
and
gateway,
Cisco
phones
to Cisco
or Nortel In this initial review of these products, not knowing what we would find, we
applied a comparative methodology designed to highlight differences and
similarities. For each package, we conducted a thorough architectural
assessment, reviewed the agent and supervisor interfaces, reporting
capabilities, management, and then all other add-ons, connectivity options,
and special and unique features.
It was not our aim in this initial round to produce a hard comparative
scorecard, which requires rigid testing against a detailed methodology.
However, given what we have learned—that these packages share many
aspects and features in common—future reviews of this nature may apply a
more structured test plan and feature a graded scorecard. Noted Achievements
Even given the nature of this review, several aspects of some of the contactcenter packages emerged as clear competitive winners. We note these
achievements with the following awards.
“Best Reporting, IP Contact Center,” awarded to Avaya for its
Interaction Center.
“Most Scalable, Distributed IP Contact Center,” awarded to
Genesys for its Genesys 7 Suite.
“Best Integrated Multimedia, IP Contact Center,” awarded to
Interactive Intelligence for its Customer Interaction Center.
“Best Call-Flow Design, IP Contact Center,” awarded to Siemens
for its HiPath ProCenter Standard.
More details and explanation of these achievements are provided in the
individual vendor and contact-center summaries that follow.
Table 2 summarizes the main added media channels supported by these contact-center packages. A checkmark in this table indicates areas that we
consider fully addressed in an off-the-shelf manner; otherwise, comments
provide some brief elaboration.
TABLE 2. IP Contact Center Multimedia, Application Support
Interact
Genesy ive
Siemen
Mitel
Multime Avaya
s
Intellig
s
dia,
ence
other
Custom 6100
HiPath
features
Contact Prosupporte Interact Contact Genesy er
ion
Center
s
7
Interact
Center Center
d
Center Express Suite
ion
Solution Standar
Center s
d
• E-mail Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Custom
Y,
Limited
Avail
via MS
External Chat
;
Internal
4Q05
Messen
, (uses can be support
(agentwith MS ger;
MS
used
ed via
• IM
agentLCS
private
Messen internal special
supervi
collabor voice
ger),
ly; IM is MS
sor)
ation
calls
and
planned .NET
services internal
Internal
client
ly
• Web
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
N
chat
Y, as e- Limited, Y, as e•
Custom Custom Custom
mail
as part mail
Voicemai integrat integrati integrat
attach of
attach
l
ion
on
ion
ment callback ment
• Web
collabora Y,
Y,
tion: co- Browser
Browser
URL
Planned
URL
URL
browsing sharing,
sharing,
push via for next
push
push
, sharing URL
URL
Chat
version
URL
push
push
push
•
Custom Schedul Schedul Web
Web
Custom
Callback er can ed
ed
form
form
er via
schedul callback callbac deliver delivere Web or
e via
is
k was ed to
d to
agent
Web
planned to ship agent, agent, can
in July who
who
schedul
calls
calls
e back back
Only
Y, Plus
Y, IP
Y, IP
Y,
•
PCnew
Agent Agent
Microso
Softphon
based
ACD
Y
softpho softpho
ft SIP
e
phone
softphon
ne
ne
based
control
e in 4Q
Basic
Y,
•
Via IP
Basic
presenc With
includin
Presence
Via IP
Agent
agent e now; LCS
g
reporting
Agent
softwar
avail
SIP
support telewor
(SIPsoftware
e
status planne in 4Q05 ker
based)
d
agents
CRM
“out of
the box”
MS
MS
support SAP,
CRM,
CRM
MS CRM, MS CRM
(often
Siebel,
SAP,
(preSAP,
(include
involves PeopleS
PeopleS integrat PeopleS d); SAP,
extraoft,
MS CRM oft,
ed);
oft, ACT, and
priced
Onyx,
Siebel, Heat, Remedy, Siebel
integrati and
and
Remed Heat,
(extra
on
Epipha
vendor’ y, and others priced)
module, ny
s CRM others
or
connecto
r)
A few other media channels aren’t reflected in Table 2. There is fax, for
example, which is broadly supported by all these packages, although they
differ in the degree of fax integration with the other media types. There is
even desktop sharing, where an agent may aid a customer in completing a
form, for example, by sharing mouse and keystrokes. This capability, not now
widely implemented, is being eyed by all the vendors, but poses some thorny
security issues. Complex Pricing
Contact centers are not cheap, although neither were their voice-only callcenter predecessors. Some general comparison of the major cost
components is shown in Table 3. Keep in mind that these are U.S. List prices,
and may not always compare the same features, functions, or configurations.
In some cases, the incremental per-agent charge is based on total defined
agent seats, while in others it is based on concurrently logged-in agents, or
ports. TABLE 3. Availability, Pricing Of Key IP Contact Center Components
Pricing shown is U.S. List, per-seat or per-concurrent agent (per-port), for
software only (unless noted otherwise) Avaya
Interacti
on
Center;
Contact
and
center
Contact
package
Center
Express
(CCE)
300
Agent seats
(currentl
in contact
y
center
logged(pricing
in
basis)
agents)
$1,377
to
Base contact $2,877
center per- for
agent price Interacti
(software
on
only, unless Center;
noted
$425 to
otherwise) $1,800
for
CCE(2)
Per-seat cost $400,
of underlying plus
IP PBX and $250 to Interacti
ve
Genesys
Mitel
Intelligen
ce Siemens Custome
r
Genesys
Interacti
7 Suite
on
Center 6100
HiPath
Contact
ProCenter
Center
Standard
Solutions 300
(enabled 100
seats) 100 100 From
From
$1,725
$2,751
(inboun
(voice) $805 to
d voice)
to
$2,200
to
$3,662 (full
$2,477
$2,800
(all
multimedi
(w/emedia)(2); a)(2)
mail and
includes
full Web)
hardware
(2)
About
$350 to $760
$150 for $500,
vendor’s dependin $500 to
$600;
configurati $650 for SIP
addition Server;
al PBX- requires
phones(as
g on
onbased
addition
tested)
topology
dependent
callal
routing equipme
options nt
Key options, and their additional per agent costs
Basic IVR
included
•
Custom
$500
to
above;
IVR/ASR/TTS( $1,200(3) $1,800(3)
(3) developm
$1,600
ASR and
1)
ent
TTS are
custom
Support
Special
s
Siemens
package
Witness,
Third
resells
• Multimedia s from
other
party,
Verint and
recording/qu Witness
third
$380
mainly
Witness
ality
are
party,
ASC
quality
monitoring offered
via CTI
Telecom monitorin
by
interfac
g
Avaya
es
$725 (+
$3,750 Custom
• Outbound
$725 to
Not
$2,800
for
developm
dial
$1,750
supported
server
ent
software)
Several
$10,000 SDKs
•
for
optionall
Included
—
—
CTI/APIs/SDK software y
in above
(total)
availabl
e
$95 to Most is Most is Included
• Reporting
Included
$450
included included in above
(1) IVR=Interactive Voice Response; ASR= automatic speech
recognition; TTS=text to speech.
(2) Price range based on additional media channels and/or
advanced reporting options.
(3) Pricing based on concurrent logged-in agents (ports).
What’s not shown in the tables are the usually-considerable additional costs
borne by the contact-center customer for the design, configuration, deployment, modification, and customization of their contact center. The
vendors in our review concede this can amount to a 50-percent incremental
cost above the price of the contact center. Some call-center managers we
talked to say it can effectively double the outlay for the system.
While they vary considerably in some architectural respects, contact centers
do employ many of the same components and subsystems regardless of the
vendor. The key differences in architecture are discussed in the individual
vendor summaries that follow. However, here are some of the key common
components that collectively comprise the contact center.
IVR (interactive voice response): All contact centers need a way to
issue announcements to callers and walk them through digit collection,
where callers enter DTMF values. This is done in some cases via cards within
the PBX, an inexpensive approach. In other cases a full-blown, separate IVR
server system is required. We found that some vendors do a great job
integrating the announcement/digit collection process into their call flows.
But relatively few have yet fully integrated the more advanced speechprocessing engines, which deliver natural-language-like interfaces, perform
speaker-independent, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-tospeech (TTS) readout.
Multimedia recording and quality monitoring: It is not difficult
with audio-only call centers to selectively record, compress, and then store
for playback conversations between agents and customers. But add
multimedia to the mix, and the synchronized recording, storage and
playback of multimedia interactions becomes quite a challenge. While a
couple of the vendors we reviewed offer their own capabilities, most have
partnered with third-party vendors who specialize in such systems, whose
marketplace leaders include Witness and Verint.
Outbound Dial: An essential ingredient for outbound, telemarketing
campaigns. Neither Nortel nor Siemens currently offers this capability. And as
the tables show, it can be an expensive option from those that do support it.
CTI/APIs/SDK (Computer-Telephony Integration, Application
Program Interfaces, and Software Development Kits): The availability
of key software modules that let third parties gain high-level programming
access to the contact center (and often also the underlying PBX) is handled
differently by every contact-center vendor. Some vendors, like Nortel, offer a
standalone CTI Engine that does it all for $10,000. With some, however, API
accessibility is not productized and is still very much under the covers.
CRM and WFM: Two classes of applications are specific to contact
centers—customer relationship management (CRM), and workforce
management (WFM). CRM typically provides a lookup of customer records
and a pop-up to agents concurrent with delivery of a phone call. A couple of
contact-center vendors offer an inexpensive pop-up capability on their own,
but all support connectors—software linkage modules—to leading CRM
packages (Microsoft CRM, SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and others). At the bottom of Table 2 is a row that highlights the contact-centers’ off-the-shelf CRM
integration support.
The following profiles summarize the products reviewed, alphabetically by
vendor, including highlights and shortcomings of each. Avaya Interaction Center and Contact Center Express
Awarded: “Best Reporting, IP Contact Center,” 2005 IP Contact Center
Review
The 800-pound gorilla of call and contact centers, Avaya estimates it has
shipped well over 6 million contact-center seats over the last dozen years,
equating to some 25,000 active contact centers around the world. And it is
also clear that the competition is gunning specifically for Avaya, touting their
packages as doing things better, cheaper, faster, easier, better managed or
with more integrated features than Avaya.
Avaya’s competition has their work cut out for them. We reviewed Avaya’s
current high-end offering—Interaction Center 7.0—and Contact Center
Express 2.1, oriented at the mid-size marketplace and handling up to 150
agents (see Table 1 for comparative details).
As our focus was enterprise-class, IP orientation and multimedia capabilities,
which both of the above packages deliver in spades, we did not review
Avaya’s voice-only Call Center 3.0. Nor did we spend time with the vendor’s
low-end Compact Contact Center v5, which runs on an Avaya IP Office PBX
and handles a maximum of 50 agents.
Avaya has implemented much of its contact-center call handling and routing
right within its Linux-based, PBX operating software, called Communication
Manager, or CM. Some very basic call-routing capabilities applicable to
contact centers are available to Avaya PBX customers at no extra price. But
most features require contact-center customers to take out additional
licenses for increasing levels of call routing and handling sophistication.
These PBX software options—called Elite, Advocate, Advanced Segmentation,
and Virtual Routing—can add $250 to $650 per concurrent agent, based on a
Contact Center with 300 concurrently active agents.
The mid-size call-center package, Contact Center Express, can only run over
an Avaya CM-based PBX with Avaya phones, which underscores the tight callhandling relationship between the contact center server and the underlying
PBX.
Technically, the high-end Interaction Center package doesn’t have to run
over an Avaya CM-based PBX, but well over 90 percent of them do, the
vendor said. Avaya offers special integration options that let you connect the
Interaction Center server to the CTI interface of specific Nortel, Siemens, or Ericsson PBX models, and you can then run your Avaya contact center over
these other vendors’ systems.
Of the dozen or so comparative aspects of IP contact centers we applied in
the review, we especially laud Avaya’s Interaction Center for offering the
best reporting capabilities—enabling contact-center supervisors to easily
track call, queue, and agent activity, in real-time as well as historical, to
whatever level of detail they desire.
All the products we reviewed offer generally very good, and in a few cases
excellent, reporting. But following two aspects of Interaction Center’s
reporting distinguish it from the competition.
1. There are several reporting packages and options, which offer layers of
reporting capabilities.
2. Some basic reporting comes with the package, but most are extrapriced.
Basic Call Management Reporting views data that’s pulled out of the PBX, via
the unadorned Avaya Site Administration interface. Adding about $400 to the
per-agent cost is CMS, or Call Management System, which runs on a separate
Sun Solaris server and is tightly coupled to the CM switch. CMS provides
clean, flexible, and delightfully legible views of call and contact-center
activity, primarily real-time.
The top of the line in Avaya’s contact-center reporting is the Operational
Analyst, which includes slick reporting software from Cognos, Inc. This
combination provides excellent, graphically rich client-based historical data
analysis. A unique offering is three-dimensional real-time activity graphing,
with the ability to find and view just selected data high points via a water
plane mechanism, which neatly slices the graph to focus on just the data
points of interest.
The richness of Avaya’s many modular offerings for its contact-center
packages may also be seen as a shortcoming. Having evolved along diverse
paths over the years, the many pieces—IVR/Speech Processing, Recording,
Out-dialing, and so on—now run on many different server platforms, and
feature very different administrative interfaces. For the purposes of
graphically creating contact-center flows, we note that the Avaya offerings
entail at least four quite different design tools and interfaces.
Avaya notes that it prefers to design, build, tailor, and deploy each
customer’s contact center, and that the additional cost for this level of
customization can, as mentioned above, easily hit 50 percent over the actual
cost of the contact-center package. Genesys 7 Suite
Awarded: “Most Scalable, Distributed IP Contact Center,” 2005 IP
Contact Center Review
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories has reportedly shipped more than
1 million agent seats in 3,000 contact centers around the world. That’s quite
an achievement for a company that does not make PBXs, as do most of the
other players in this review. Technically, Alcatel now owns Genesys, but that
relationship is subdued, given the Genesys package’s PBX transparency.
Genesys’ market focus is unique: It offers an advanced, IP-oriented,
multimedia contact-center package that scales to support many thousands
of agents, and runs over almost any existing telephony infrastructure, which
can even be a mix of different PBXs in multiple, distributed locations. Add to
this the ability to run any of the package’s software modules on the same
server, or separate and distribute them over multiple, distributed servers.
And finally, versions of the package run on all the leading server platforms. It
all adds up to the most scalable, distributed IP contact center of the ones we
reviewed.
All the Genesys software runs on Windows 2000, and much of it also can run
on Windows 2003, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, or Linux. This, too,
accentuates the deployment flexibility of the Genesys contact center.
Genesys’ installations are among the largest. According to the company, its
U.S. contact centers support between 1,000 and 1,500 agent seats, while its
European contact centers tend to be smaller, typically 200–300 agent seats
(Table 1 reflects an average of 500 agent seats).
The ability to run over 35 different TDM switches and 23 IP and hybrid PBXs
reflects Genesys’ considerable development and expertise with CTI
interfaces. The company developed a set of modules, called T-server
connections, in which each PBX’s proprietary CTI interface is mapped to a
common set of about 50 Genesys API primitives. These let the Genesys
contact center control the underlying PBX and phone functions in a
consistent manner (such as turn on this phone’s message waiting light).
Yet another component of the Genesys package is the SIP Server, a SIPbased call-control engine, which can provide a full call-control infrastructure
for the contact center, in lieu of a PBX. Or the SIP Server can connect with
and augment any SIP-based PBX, as well as a broad range of SIP-based IPPSTN gateways, SIP phones and softphones.
Genesys also offers a set of standard software connectors to leading CRM
applications, like SAP, Microsoft CRM, or Siebel. And it offers customers a choice between its own WorkForce Management (WFM) application, or preintegration support for many other WFMs, such as the popular Blue Pumpkin.
Genesys’ package integrates with all the popular add-on subsystems that
customers may want in their contact center. Off-the-shelf integration is
offered for a dozen different IVR systems, as well as Genesys’ own GVP
(Genesys Voice Platform), featuring Nuance or ScanSoft-based ASR or TTS
handling. The industry-leading Witness system is supported for multimedia
recording and interaction-quality monitoring.
Genesys’ e-mail, web chat, and co-browsing integration are well done, all via
a lightweight Web-based agent interface. Other laudable aspects include the
attached data file that accompanies all interactions. This is a data record
that’s created when a call comes in, and then accompanies the call as it
moves around, displaying pertinent information about the caller and call to
each agent along the way, such as data collected by the IVR—like bank
account info, address, name, etc. This mechanism isn’t unique to Genesys,
but they’ve done it very well—legible and effective. Genesys also has a fairly
complete callback system, so customers can arrange timely callbacks, rather
than wait in queue.
On the downside, just a few notable nits turned up in our review. For one,
there’s no special handling of customer voicemail, as some of the PBX
vendors do well via their unified messaging applications. Also, some popular
contact-center supervisor features, like barge-in and call monitor, are not
now supported. And the vendor’s call-flow design tool and interface are
currently undergoing needed overhaul. Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center
Awarded: “Best Integrated Multimedia, IP Contact Center,” 2005 IP
Contact Center Review
Unlike some competitors, who had to evolve their contact centers from
voice-only call centers, Interactive Intelligence started from scratch with IP
and multimedia in mind. And in Miercom’s opinion, they have done a better
job of integrating classical voice call handling with new media channels,
including Web chat and e-mail.
There are several aspects of the Customer Interaction Center or CIC that
contribute to this clean multimedia integration.
Single point of administration (Interaction Administrator) for all
multimedia, workgroup and agent definition, and for call-flow handling and
design, including voice, e-mail, chat, and IVR processing. The vendor’s callflow design interface (Interaction Designer) even lets you define
sophisticated speech-recognition actions as part of any call flow. Integral IVR functionality (called Interaction Attendant) for prompts,
recordings and collection of customer responses. It is not a third-party addon package. Speech recognition and text-to-speech processing, featur...