Cisco introduces next-gen of IP Communications solutions for the Contact Center.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO), has announced two enhanced IP Communications solutions: the Cisco Internet Protocol Contact Center (IPCC) Enterprise Edition 5.0 and Cisco Intelligent Contact Manager (ICM) Enterprise Edition 5.0. The contact center offerings are intelligent software call routing solutions which introduce the concept of a Customer Interaction Network through distributed IP-based call control, agent location independence, and full multichannel services.

"Cisco is helping to take us to the next level of customer service with the Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0. We were looking to add a large number of agents to our existing call center, while expanding and increasing our ability to interact with our customers through channels other than the phone," said Frank O'Connor, Chief Technology Officer of YHD Foxtons, the nation's fastest growing real estate company in the United States. "Rolling out the Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0 will let us do all of those things and we expect it to save us a considerable amount in cabling and facilities costs by enabling us to add remote agents, use our investments in legacy equipment and see increased agent productivity and improved customer service using multichannel communications."

"Cisco's strategic direction--conceptualizing the future of the call center as a Customer Interaction Network--is an accurate reflection of the way the market is changing. Call centers are increasingly moving away from the model of 300 call center agents in a building answering phones," said Sheila McGee-Smith of McGee-Smith Analytics. "The beauty of a Customer Interaction Network concept is that it embraces the extension of traditional centers with expanded capabilities, as well as a leading-edge center with a distributed, IP-based customer service infrastructure. Both require a continuously evolving suite of innovative multichannel services and customer relationship management applications that go beyond simple call routing and voice processing capabilities to enable true agent productivity and cost savings."

"Our new product offerings demonstrate Cisco's continued commitment to delivering increased productivity to contact centers," said Charlie Giancarlo, senior vice president for Cisco Systems, Inc. "The Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0 and Cisco ICM Enterprise Edition 5.0 call routing solutions are designed to break down the "call center" boundaries and extend customer service across a networked virtual organization. This not only empowers our customers to reach their current business objectives, but positions them to reach that next chapter in customer service that we define as the Customer Interaction Network."

The Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0 call routing solution, designed for contact centers with 50 to several thousand contact center seats, delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management over an IP infrastructure. New features in the Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0 include multichannel automatic call distributor (ACD) reporting, routing and streamlined administration capabilities with IP telephony in a unified solution. Contact centers will now be able to manage customer queries via the channel of customer choice (web, phone, chat) and route the calls to the correct agent, regardless of agent geographic location.

The Cisco Intelligent Contact Manager (ICM) Enterprise Edition 5.0 call routing solution, designed for both single site and enterprise-wide contact centers with the ability to scale to accommodate thousands of agents, is an enhanced version of the Cisco ICM solution that has been the core of the Cisco contact center offerings since 1995. New features in Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0 include multichannel automatic call distributor (ACD) reporting, routing and streamlined administration capabilities, while working with a variety of traditional ACDs and IVRs. This multichannel routing system is designed to enable a contact center to interact with its customers across an enterprise that can be made up of various call control, database and desktop applications, while providing a migration path to IP-based technology.

"We started our Cisco IPCC solution implementation in 2000, and have now scaled up to 1200 agents across 2 sites in India," said Sanjay Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of Seattle-based vCustomer Corporation. "Our third Indian contact center with another 800 Cisco IPCC-enabled workstations will come online in March. We serve six Fortune 500 clients using Cisco IPCC and have demonstrated that we provide the most reliable and scalable offshore-based voice solution."

The Cisco ICM Enterprise Edition 5.0 and Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0 call routing solutions will be available for shipment in late February, 2003. Pricing begins at $1,000 per agent.