Easy IP for call centres

Simplified solutions targetted at small to medium sized sites

February's Alcatel Forum in Paris saw the vendor introduce a number of new contact centre and IP communications applications for medium-sized firms.

The OmniTouch Contact Centre Premium Edition is a simplified version of the Alcatel OmniGenesys corporate telephony software, and is designed for firms employing between 20 to 150 agents.

Nigel Jones, Alcatel marketing and business development manager, conceded that there are many IP telephony vendors pitching similar systems for smaller firms. But he argued that Alcatel’s offering is easier for non-technical call centre staff to use, and resellers who would normally need to be certified to install the product would require only a few days’ training.

“We had quite good feedback on the [call] routing matrix on our standard product, Visual CC. It’s very graphical while lots of others rely on what I call pseudo routing scripts,” Jones said. “This is a true drag-and-drop environment and people can adapt to it very easily.”

Alcatel also introduced a web-based collaborative suite for thin clients. The Alcatel 8628 Multimedia Instant Conferencing suite combines audio, data and video conferencing with messaging and document-sharing capabilities.

Alcatel offers flexible pricing to reduce start-up costs for sites deploying an IP private branch exchange (IP-PBX) for the first time. The firm also announced a deal for its IP communications systems to ship on IBM BladeCenter servers.