Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

IP phone system maker Aastra has reportedly launched a new version of its Solidus eCare multi-media contact center solution.

Just like the previous version of this enterprise-grade contact center solution, Solidus eCare offers intelligent skills-based routing, scales to support up to 10,000 agents and handles up to 400,000 calls per hour.

But the new version -- Solidus eCare version 7.0 -- offers InTouch, a new unified communications client offering advanced UC features and capabilities including “presence,” which is the ability to view the availability status of other users on the network.

Presence is particularly useful for companies that wish to deploy “informal” or “un-centered” contact centers, which is where calls can be transferred to other knowledge workers in an organization for the purpose of delivering more specialized customer service.

“Customers want more than just contact center agents. They are looking for ‘special agents’ - the right people within the business - to answer their queries,” said Jason Andersson, head of applications at Aastra, in a release. “This is what we are delivering. Aastra is putting communications at the heart of the business, enabling customers to achieve higher levels of customer service through the use of cutting edge technology."

By bringing unified communications to the contact center, agents can have access to a mix of communications technologies, thus enabling them to deliver faster and more accurate customer service.

The revamped, standards-based (i.e. SIP-based) solution also offers corporate directory searches and instant messaging by way of a single user interface.

 

Aastra is also offering Solidus eCare Lite, a downscaled version of the solution designed for businesses with smaller contact centers (50 agents or less). Available on the Aastra MX-ONE Compact, this new option offers the same high class functionality with simpler entry level features for companies looking for a compact, competitive yet highly reliable solution. It offers most of the features and capabilities of its parent solution, including multi media support (calls, e-mails, SMS, internet collaboration, fax and Web chat in a single virtual queue), mobility for agents, virtual contact center for distributed sites and also multi-tenancy.

"Most companies have contact centers with only a few agents -- and their imperatives for quality are just the same as large call centers,” Andersson said. “We are very excited to bring an industry-leading platform such as Solidus eCare to a wider audience and enable businesses with small contact centers to get advanced tools. Such development has also been very positively received by our channel partners. As businesses' needs grow, they can simply scale up their contact center solution and can continue to use the same environment to serve customers."

 

Other improvements include enhanced reporting, real-time display as well as new report capabilities for management.

Aastra USA, a provider of innovative unified communication solutions for enterprises and small businesses, made news earlier this month when it announced enhanced fixed-mobile convergence features for its Clearspan UC solution.

Clearspan from Aastra is a SIP-to-the-core solution that targets large enterprises with 1,500 to more than 100,000 users. The solution can be deployed as an overlay for existing call managers to offer direct access to new advanced unified communications features, while still protecting their existing investment in hardware and endpoints.