TMC Labs Innovation Awards 2006: Part II

The TMC Labs Innovation Awards are now in their seventh year, and still TMC Labs is amazed at the continual innovation being brought to market in the contact center space to improve training, increase morale, reduce turnover, increase efficiency and reduce infrastructure software and hardware costs. The TMC Labs Innovation Award's sole purpose is to distinguish products and services that have unique features and that often help to carve out a new market niche or start a trend. This award is also about recognizing products and services with creative and groundbreaking features their competitors' solutions often lack.

TMC Labs researched each of the applications and eventually arrived at our winners' list. These winners have been published in two parts in order to accommodate our in-depth write-ups tor the winning solutions. Part one of the winners' list was highlighted in the September 2006 issue of Customer Inter@ction Solutions. Congratulations to all the winners. Mitel's Customer Interaction Solutions portfolio is unique in its ability to target the enterprise and the small business contact centers, scaling from five to thousands of agent seats. The new offering provides organizations of any size with the flexibility to implement a contact center solution for their unique service requirements. The Mitel Customer Interaction Solutions portfolio is a two-tiered offering that encompasses the Contact Center Enterprise Edition and Contact Center Business Edition.

The new features of the Contact Center Enterprise Edition support all forms of communication including voice, e-mail, Web chat and fax. This scalable, resilient solution combines robust communications platforms, automatic call distribution (ACD) and a modular suite of feature-rich, Webbased applications for streamlining contact center management and enabling advanced multimedia customer transactions.

Developed for individual contact centers with 25 agents or less, the Contact Center Business Edition is a cost-effective, out-of-the-box solution that allows customers to chose from a number of applications in Mitel's contact center portfolio including historical reporting, real-time monitoring, dynamic agent and queue control, screen pops and intelligent messaging. The Business Edition can scale up to fit the needs of any size business.

The Customer Interaction Solutions portfolio is essentially a "contact center in a box." It offers a completely bundled solution that includes integrated multimedia routing, historical and realtime reporting, integrated forecasting, integrated workforce management, integrated call accounting and integrated intelligent announcements: expected wait time, auto-attendant, screen-pop of CRM and more. This platform avoids "data silos" (different databases for different products) through a single, industrial-strength SQL database.

Customer Interaction Solutions was developed with .NET 2.0 and is the first to provide soft phone technology with ACD functionality and up-front advanced routing based on business intelligence which is "fed" by the CRM database.

The included soft phone features screen-pop, real-time presence and enhanced call control. The soft phone also features some time-saving functions including speed dial, pre-programmed call forward destinations, a customizable user interface and sounds for phone events. You can also select from a list of pre-configured account codes, contacts, a list of preconfigured "make busy" reason codes and quick key programming. The ACD soft phone facilitates first-contact resolution by enabling agents to avoid blind transfers by transferring calls directly to available agents they view in real time, thereby reducing instances of customers having to repeat requests in a single call.

From the real-time monitors that display calls in queue, you can simply drag a call on the screen and move that call to an alternate queue, a feature that TMC Labs found to be quite unique. In addition, you can right-click the call to transfer it to another extension (or even to yourself). Additionally, the platform can identify your most important customers and have them routed immediately to an agent.