Great things are afoot. (High Priority).

Summertime, and perhaps the living is easy for some, but the contact center industry has seen a buzz of activity on many fronts as summer starts to heat up, as the business of communicating with customers remains a 24/7/365 job.

Alcatel Acquires Telera

Although mergers and acquisitions have slowed down considerably over the past year, Alcatel (www.alcatel.com) has signaled it thinks it is safe to go back in the water and has announced it will acquire Telera (www.telera.com), which for the last four years has been striving to bring voice to the Web through its Voice Web application platform. The acquisition will be made for $136 million in Alcatel stock.

Telera's Voice Web application platform uses VoiceXML, SIP and other open standards that allow service provider and enterprise developers to implement applications that provide telephone access to data that were previously available only through the Web, giving customers more opportunity to take advantage of self-service options. Telera will become part of Alcatel's Genesys (www.genesyslabs.com) contact center software business. Ad Nederlof, CEO of Genesys, said the acquisition of Telera will allow Genesys to add voice-enabled self-service applications to its portfolio. Companies can now provide access to additional corporate data without adding additional contact center infrastructure. According to Prem Uppaluru,. CEO and co-founder of Telera, the demand for voice applications is huge. Uppaluru said there are three business drivers for this market: 1) the convergence of data and voice on the network; 2) the growing mobility of users; and 3) the improvement of the underlying technologies, such as speech reco gnition, voice verification, signaling, etc., that drive the applications. Genesys will now be able to offer an integrated solution for both live customer assistance and voice-enabled self-service. This will help advance the business case for converged voice and data networks Alcatel promotes as the "borderless enterprise," which "provides secure access of internal networks to the external world:

SCB To Provide Lucent IP Centrex Solutions

Carriers have taken a hit over the last year and are scrambling to come up with new services to offer their customers. Lucent Technologies (www.lucent.com) has recently teamed with SBC Communications (www.sbc.com) to provide SBC with an IP Centrex solution that SBC will use to offer its customers advanced central-office-based services. The Lucent IP Centrex solution incorporates the Lucent iMerge Centrex Feature Gateway (CFG), developed by Lucent subsidiary AG Communications Systems (www.agcs.com), and the SpringTide 7000 IP Service Switch. The iMerge CFG works with any Class 5 switch and serves as a bridge between circuit-switched networks and IP network infrastructures, delivering the features and functionality of that Class 5 switch on the packet network. The SpringTide 7000 provides virtual routing and advanced IP services for enterprise security and address management, According to James Marney, communications director at Lucent subsidiary AG Communications Systems, one of the prime drivers in the past for PBXs versus Centrex has been one of control. With the new offering, IP Centrex service users can now per form their own adds, moves and changes inhouse. Also, smaller businesses will be able to purchase services bundled with DSL and other offerings that have nor been available to small companies in the past. Other advantages of IP Centrex include the ease of setting up multiple locations, increased levels of physical and network security and the ability to add in teleworkers, as well as the role the service can play in disaster recovery in that users can move to an alternate location and plug into a dial tone.

Cruisin'

When the cicadas are out and the temperature starts rising in summer, a favorite activity of Americans everywhere is cruising down the road with the top down and the tunes cranked up. Summertime is also the time for Firecracker Fourth of July sales, and many of those sales will be taking place in automobile dealerships. A company with a 75-year history in the automobile retailing industry, Reynolds and Reynolds (www.reyrey.com) recently released its Generation Series CRM package for the automotive industry, which is built on an open architecture platform that utilizes Microsoft .NET technology. Modules will cover all aspects of automotive retailers' operations, from strategic planning to Web brand management, customer contact management, finance and insurance, service and parts operations management and business and employee management, Automobile retailers will be able to add new modules as they become available; the first two modules are Web services and contact management solutions. Auto dealers certainly need to improve their contact management systems, as more than 56,000,000 customer interactions and inquiries are received in one year by America's automobile dealerships. Generation will take advantage of .NET Passport technology to move customer information back and forth, According to Gregory Collins, senior vice president for Reynolds Transformation Solutions, Generation will provide a holistic approach to managing customer information. Collins also pointed out that one of the largest problems facing auto dealers is turnover, and Reynolds Generation will provide faster, easier training for new employees.

What really caught my eye, gageteer that I am, was a new Reynolds and Reynolds' telematics offering (in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard and Networkcar, Inc.), the Vehicle Lifecycle Management Solution (VLM). The initial offering, to be sold by automotive retailers, will feature an onboard telematics appliance, Networkcar's CAReader, which continuously monitors and wirelessly transmits a vehicle's electrical, mechanical and emissions systems data, as well as the vehicle's location. Consumers will have a direct Web link with their automotive service providers that can provide proactive notification regarding engine performance, service opportunities, appointment scheduling and other services. Car companies will be able to monitor diagnostic trouble codes, identify trends and address supplier defects or improve their design processes.

eGain Enhances Knowledge

Always looking to improve its self-service and agent-assisted service solutions, knowledge management solutions provider eGain Communications (www.egain.com) has updated its eGain Knowledge product with the release of version 5.3, which will allow its users to more easily implement changes in the knowledge base so that customers and agents can get the answers they are looking for, no matter if it is in a company's structured or unstructured data.

Using the Workflow Authoring tool, companies can set permissions to allow users to suggest and design new contributions to the case base, yet still retain the review and approval process before the suggestions are added to the searchable data. The authoring team is notified of and can see the suggestions and data wake so they know from where the suggestion came.

eGain Knowledge 5.3 now also provides 19 standard reports, including Content, Acceptance, Usage, Session, Case Base Verification, Agent Contribution and Agent Reports. Users can access the reports through a Web browser after logging in through the security set for access, so they don't have to install reporting software on the local machine. Reports can be viewed multiple times without having to reenter the same report parameters each time, which means that standard reports can be created for repeated viewings.

In response to customer suggestions, especially in the financial services industry, eGain has enhanced the security features in 5.3 to allow for the enabling and disabling of the security option; the enforcement of password policy; the enforcement of an inactivity policy; providing a user password expiration policy; maintaining a password history; and providing security lockouts.

As far as providing access to more information, Knowledge 5.3 can now access unstructured information and allow access to multiple information sources through a single interface through its support of Verity K2 and Microsoft SharePoint in addition to the previously supported Microsoft SiteServer and Lotus Notes. Knowledge 5.3 also now supports traditional and simplified Chinese and Korean, adding to the 13 languages it previously supported, extending its reach to 86 percent of all potential self-service users in the world.

Michael Lehane, director of product management for the Knowledge product, said that as proof of the effectiveness of the Knowledge product, Deutsche Telecom improved its first-time resolution rate to 90 percent and reduced call time as well. Lehane also reported that DaimlerChrysler receives about 1,000 suggestions a month, of which it ends up adding about 100 to the knowledge base.

Movement In SME Installations

While at TMC's recent Communications Solutions[TM] Expo in Boston, I had the chance to speak with Mike Carpenter, CEO of CTSource (www.ctsource.com), which specializes in building non-stop networks that support data, telephony and Web-based Intranet and Internet services, Virtual Private Networks and server-based FAX systems. CTSource is a reseller of the Tele Vantage PC-PBX from Artisoft (www.artisoft.com). According to Carpenter, people are beginning to see the value in PC-PBX solutions llke TeleVantange, as they allow the integration of call center products, Carpenter reported that customers are starting to use TeleVantage as development platforms for custom applications. As a reseller, Carpenter said about 90 percent of his business is in convergence, but right now most of the requests he has seen for VoIP have been for intra-office communications.

While the typical installation for CTSource is around 80 seats, Carpenter told me about the case of Winston Flowers of Boston, which has nine store locations and 225 employees and was looking for a technology to handle more calls, provide full reporting capabilities, could handle complex routing, and was flexible and easy to deploy. CTSource provided them with a TeleVantage system that gives the 20 Winston associates who rake calls the identity of the caller on-screen, allows them to route the calls to the appropriate person, and also allows Winston to monitor, record or track the calls in real-time. Winston also uses the recording for training to improve customer service. The PC-PBX system works well, as Winston reported a 25 percent increase in sales over the previous year.

It's good to see that more advanced telecommunications technologies are now within the reach of SMEs, and that companies such as Alcatel, Lucent, Reynolds and Reynolds, and eGain continue to bring Innovations for enterprises of all sizes. So, while summertime may be a slow time for many (with most of Europe on holiday or in the local pub watching the World Cup), the contact center industry is heating up again.

Sincerely,

Rich Tehrani

Group Publisher, Group Editor-in-Chief [e-mail]

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