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Number of results 10 for Centers

06/03/2012 - Telcentris launches short duration call service built on VoxOx VoIP platform

Telcentris, which created Skype competitor VoxOx and has been expanding its white label VoIP portfolio in the past year, has rolled out a new service that it says fills a void for businesses with a high volume of short duration calls.

The service, offered through Telcentris' wholesale division, is targeted at outbound call centers, resellers and agents that cater to call center traffic where the majority of calls end in voicemail, disconnected phone numbers or hang-ups.

Telcentris said calls of less than 30 seconds typically are low margin and often considered unprofitable by many carriers.

"On average, outbound call center traffic tends to be between six and 30 seconds with many calls not answered at all," said Tad Nikolich, VP of business sales at Telcentris. Its original VoxOx platform was specifically designed to handle very high call volumes at very low infrastructure cost, he added, enabling Telcentris to create a short call service as part of our wholesale offerings.

Nikolich said recent equipment and network enhancements, along with carrier negotiations that have resulted in new contracts and pricing is facilitating the launch of the short call service.

Customers that have their own switches can purchase VoxOx In Business SIP Trunks with the desired number of concurrent calls and simply sign a wholesale agreement to get started. There are two options: a flat rate per minute and an NPA/NXX option, which offers different rates for every rate center to terminate calls. The second option caters primarily to resellers interested in offering this service to their call center clients.

For more:
- see this release

19/01/2012 - LiveVox rolls out click-to-call manual dialing for cell phones

LiveVox, a provider of private VoIP cloud and integrated contact center applications, today announced click-to-call manual dialing for cell phones that segregate cell phone numbers from predictive campaigns and allow agents to manually intervene in the decision to skip or call these numbers.

The LiveVox cloud contact center platform contains several core applications including ACD/PBX, predictive dialer, IVR, call recording and reporting. The platform also includes numerous, customizable compliance features that allow contact centers to increase efficiency and manage risks even as rules change. Since these features exist within the same multi-tenant cloud, all click-to-call manual dials are recordable, protected by time zone controls and generate real-time reports.

LiveVox continues to add to its inbound/outbound contact center compliance suite that includes:

PCI certified, fully redundant multi-tenant architecture;
Secure multi-carrier MPLS interoperability;
Cell phone scrubs and click-to-call manual dialing;
Account penetration settings;
End-to-end PCI compliant payment lines;
State dialing configuration GUI;
Integrated call recording for inbound, outbound and manual dials;
Manual dialing time zone controls;
Real-time agent monitoring and reporting; and,
DNC (Do-Not-Call) list scrubs

For more:
- see this release

Related articles:
LiveVox Records More Than 400 Percent

25/08/2011 - Report: Softphone market set for rapid expansion

Softphones haven't impacted the enterprise market like smartphones have, but new research indicates they could see strong growth in the next six years as businesses look to contain costs and take advantage of expanding VoIP networks.

Global Industry Analysts forecast the market could grow to $217.2 million in value by 2017, with 2.9 million units in volume sales, primarily driven by increasing enterprise mobility and workforce virtualization.

The firm said that while the United States is the world's largest market for softphones, the fastest growing region is APAC, where sales are increasing at a CAGR in excess of 19 percent, and revenue is growing at a CAGR of more than 13 percent.

Major players in the marketplace include Avaya, Broadview Networks, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), CounterPath and Mirial, among others.

Call centers continue to adopt softphones, primarily because the ability to turn a PC and/or a laptop into a telephone allows for the elimination of wired hardware requirements, saves space, is easy to set up and install, and is cost effective for long-distance international calling and rapid integration into database systems.

The diffusion of SIP devices, the progressive decrease in price points, and the continued rise in the overall value proposition of IP softphones in terms of applications and features are some of the factors that could encourage market adoption.

GIA said mobility and workforce virtualization are key growth drivers for the market.

Increasingly, vendors are looking to SMBs, offering specially tailored solutions designed to meet the unique requirements of this customer cluster. As increased numbers of SMBs begin to recognize the advantage of IP telephony, and as older telephony platforms reach the end of their lifecycle, IP adoption is expected to continue gaining momentum.

Growing deployment of VoIP networks as a result of globalization and deregulation of markets, and improving performance of VoIP networks, is helping push up the business case for enterprise softphones, said GIA.

For more:
- see this release

25/08/2011 - Fonality rolls out mobile iteration of HUD UC, call center suite

Businesses are planning to spend upwards of $125 billion in 2011 on IT, and a considerable amount of that will be for communications, researchers at IDC reported in June. But, with the economy still going through some extreme gyrations, SMBs are looking for ways to contain costs without sacrificing performance.

Enter Fonality and its Heads Up Display Mobile (HUD) application, which delivers access to cloud-based unified communications and a presence desktop solution to Apple and Android platforms that will enable SMBs to manage their business or contact center regardless of location.

Fonality claims the app supports mobile workers with enterprise-grade UC, VoIP and contact center capabilities to improve productivity, and, in the process, also can reduce mobile costs by more than half by using voice over Wi-Fi.

With nearly half of all SMB employees working for four hours or more away from the office daily, according to an upcoming SMB study by Webtorials, those savings--and connectivity--could be critical to a business.

The new app is based on the company's desktop version of Fonality HUD.

"SMBs cannot afford to be out of touch with customers and colleagues for extended periods," said Fonality's CTO, Rick Bushell. "For fast-growing companies, it's imperative to make important decisions at a moment's notice."

HUD Mobile includes:

Voice over Wi-Fi calling;
Real-time presence and collaboration capabilities;
Instant access to company directory, visual voicemail and virtual conference rooms;
"Find me/follow me" functionality for connectivity between desktop and mobile devices;
Unified messaging and Microsoft Outlook integration;
Call management, allowing managers to monitor, whisper or barge contact center calls;
Call transfer to and from mobile and office phones; and,
Additional tools such as secure chat, photo caller ID and on-the-fly call recording.

For more:
- see this release

15/08/2011 - Nuance set to acquire Telecom Italia's Loquendo

Voice and language solution provider Nuance Communications said it will acquire Telecom Italia's Loquendo, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Italian telco, in a deal Nuance said will help it push voice-enabled solutions for contact centers, automobiles, mobile phones and other consumer devices in Europe and Latin America. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, is expected to close next month.

Loquendo's text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition and voice biometric solutions help consumers interact with technology using plain speech. The company provides a range of speech technologies for telephony, mobile, automotive, embedded and desktop solutions in 32 languages with 76 voices, which currently are deployed in 20 million devices worldwide, powering millions of calls every day in telecommunications and enterprise markets.

"The penetration of Loquendo's offerings and the company's positive industry recognition will serve as a catalyst in expanding our market reach and our voice and language portfolio," said Steve Chambers, chief marketing officer and head of the enterprise division, Nuance Communications. "Together, we will provide a range of best-in-class solutions, delivering natural, conversational interactions across a number of growing markets that will initially include enterprise, mobile and automotive--with a significant opportunity to accelerate our efforts in Europe and Latin America."

Consumers' adoption of speech technology is driving the demand for fully voice-enabled experiences across many industry segments.

For more:
- see this release

03/06/2010 - Call centers target of new tax

One of the tricks of the IP communications industry is being able to make calls being routed to foriegn countries or even neighboring states look nice and local. When our business clients want to run a call center in a distant land to save on costs IP communications helps them do that--making one part of the business easier. Unfortunately all this success has recieved some notice from cash hungry state governments looking for a political win.

Connected Planet picked up on a story that New York State is planning a 25 cent tax on calls being transferred to foriegn call centers. The move might begin to hurt hosted overseas call center services and number routing services if the cost savings are outweighed by the tax. On the plus side, there is an opportunity to bring more of the call center industry back to the USA. More jobs and possibly a growth opportunity for the telecom sector.

For more:
- read the article

27/05/2010 - Verizon's Global Wholesale VoIP usage up 200%

If you're looking for evidence that wholesale VoIP is looking good, just check out Verizon's numbers. This week Verizon's Global Wholesale VoIP unit announced that its VoIP minutes of use grew more than 200 percent in 2009 over the past year--and that's after celebrating 10 years in the business.

Verizon Global Wholesale provides a variety of call origination and termination solutions for customers with multinational needs. In 2010, the company has a few new enhancements planned including the deployment of more robust VoIP network interfaces in Europe and the support of Caller-Provided CLI--an in demand call center service.

"Since we launched our VoIP portfolio 10 years ago, we've seen steady growth reflecting customer desire for reliable, cost-effective IP voice services," said Mike Millegan, president of Verizon Global Wholesale in the release. "And, as this market grows, we continue to add new VoIP services while enhancing our existing portfolio."

Verizon Global Wholesale has a base of more than 700 wholesale VoIP customers.

For more read:
- read this release

27/01/2010 - Verizon launches local calling solution for call center users

Remote call forwarding for enterprises with local business branches might become a thing of the past. Verizon Business, today, announced a new service called Verizon VoIP Inbound with Local Originations.

The new voice-over-Internet-protocol service from Verizon allows businesses to create a local face using a local phone number that can direct overflow calls as needed to off-site (centralized) call centers adding a new level of personalization to businesses handling customer calls. "Enterprises may want to demonstrate that they have a local presence even though they use contact centers," explained Alla Reznik, Director of Global Contact Centers for Verizon in an interview with FierceVoIP.

Generally prior to this new service, companies would use the same toll-free number for all their branches, and if a company wanted to have a local number presence they had to employ a work around using remote call forwarding to route to a toll-free number and call center. "Remote call forwarding has been used very widely, to the point where managers didn't realize how inefficient it is," said Reznik. With the old remote call forwarding, enterprise customers must design the route, pay for local calls, pay for the toll free charges as well as other charges.

Additionally, the new service integrates with Verizon IP Interactive Voice Response, can deliver customer calls to either traditional or IP-based contact centers, and by being a network solution it can stay up in the event of local network outages.

24/06/2009 - Empirix adds 'pay as you go' testing for contact centers

Empirix, an IP communications testing company, announced Empirix Testing as a Service, which is designed as a way for large contact centers to validate the performance of their voice services and the quality of the user experience while using a "pay as you go" model. The new service uses Empirix's Hammer testing technology and the company's expertise in addressing contact center performance issues to provide custom solutions that fit the organization's specific testing needs.

"In today's economic climate, customer retention is critical and therefore businesses need to ensure that their contact centers are delivering the highest level of customer service possible," Daniel Hong, lead analyst of Datamonitor's Customer Interaction Technologies team, said in a release. "Empirix Testing as a Service is an economically palatable on-demand solution that identifies potential issues before they can negatively impact the customer experience - and as a result helps protect revenue."

The Testing as a Service product, which is available immediately, can address interoperability issues in multi-vendor environments, check for performance compliance and help with migration from TDM to IP telephony. The company claims the service sets itself apart due to its ability to replicate real-world, peak-use scenarios around the specific functions of individual call centers.

For more:
- see the Empirix press release here

Related article
Empirix launches SIP trunking test tool

26/02/2009 - Vonage CEO: Customer acquisition cost "not acceptable," mobile phone client coming

Stating the obvious in Vonage's 2008 earnings call, CEO Marc Lefar called the company's expenses to secure new customers "not acceptable," and added that the net addition of customers and cost of customer acquisition "fell well below" expectations. Lefar rattled off a series of improvements Vonage needed to make in bringing on customers and improving problem resolution. He also briefly sketched out new product offerings, including some sort of mobile phone client to leverage WiFi.

For starters, the SLAC - marketing expense per customer brought onboard - has gone up to $309, despite reducing marketing costs by $3 million from the previous quarter. Last quarter, SLAC was reported at $289.

Lefar wants to improve the quality of prospects calling into the company. While Vonage's latest set of commercials have produced a 10 percent improvement in the level of interest compared to prior work, the company is looking for a new ad agency and expects to close a deal at the end of this quarter.

Once customers arrive, the onramp experience to get them beyond sign-up to actually using the service needs to improve; after three weeks, a quarter of the customers who have signed up haven't used the service.

Many customers who leave Vonage for competitive reasons are leaving due to call quality, Lefar said, so improvements are needed there as well.

Customer care is also a big cost center that Vonage needs to optimize. Lefar said the company gets 10 million calls per year into its call centers, but many of those can be "completely eliminated" with IVR and self-service web based tools. A 10 percent reduction in live calls would save the company anywhere from $6 million to $8 million per year.

New products Vonage is looking to include improvements to core services such as outbound caller ID and autoconnection to a 411 service. The company sees new market opportunities outside of the U.S., UK, and Canada to leverage its heavy international usage.

Vonage would also like to "take advantage of" open mobile applications, with download/preloaded apps using WiFi for local connectivity a "good opportunity." VonagePro is going to get fine-tuned, as the company develops an SMB offering to support up to 10 phone lines.

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