COSMOCOM ANNOUNCES GLOBAL RESALE AGREEMENT WITH HP FOR
CONTACT CENTER PLATFORM

CosmoCall Universe to Be Sold with HP OpenCall Media Platform

In last month's CosmoChronicle, we reported on CosmoCom's participation in HP Communications World in Vienna. This month we're happy to share CosmoCom's recent announcement of a global reseller agreement with HP that will provide enterprises and telecom service providers with a unified contact center and media platform. The integrated solution can help companies reduce cost and time-to-market as their contact centers handle customer inquiries through live operations and automated voice response systems.  

Under the agreement, HP will become a global reseller of CosmoCall Universe™ (CCU), an all-Internet Protocol (IP) contact center platform. The agreement will enable HP's direct sales force and its channel partners to resell CCU worldwide integrated with the HP OpenCall Media Platform (HP OCMP).  

The integrated offering brings together CosmoCom's leadership in next-generation contact centers with HP's highly successful voice and video services platform, its integration services organization, and its worldwide support capability. Customers that use the HP OpenCall Media Platform with CCU will be able to develop contact centers more rapidly and deploy them more securely.  

"The reseller agreement between CosmoCom and HP makes sense," said Daniel Hong, Lead Analyst of Customer Interaction Technologies at Datamonitor. "CosmoCom broadens its channel with HP, while HP gains a product line that complements its OpenCall Media Platform."

Read the press release (http://www.cosmocom.com/pressreleases/PressReleases2009/pr012720097.htm)  to learn more.

STUDY SHOWS CONTACT CENTERS ACHIEVE
MAJOR COST SAVINGS WITH IP PLATFORMS

Shows Over 80 Percent of Virtual Contact Centers Improve Agent Utilization,
Queue Times, and Call Spikes

A recent CosmoCom sponsored study of over 200 contact center operators conducted by analyst firm ContactBabel confirmed that virtual contact centers offer far better economies of scale than stand-alone operations. However, while over half of US contact centers are parts of a group of contact centers, over one-third have not yet realized the benefits that would result by linking disparate contact centers together to form a larger virtual contact center. The findings were reported in the "Flexible Working" chapter of "The US Contact Center Operational Review (2nd edition)".

Operators of virtual contact centers gain flexibility in agent locations and work schedules, while improving efficiency and service levels. Over 80 percent of those responding to the report cited these benefits. The report shows that the ability to smooth out call spikes and the resulting reduction in wait times were particularly impressive.

Steve Morrell, author of the ContactBabel report, said, "The virtual contact center environment lets operators seamlessly move calls among agents across all locations for better utilization of agent time and better service for customers."

"The report provides strong support for our core value proposition that virtual IP contact centers help enterprises to be more reachable and more responsive in a highly cost effective way, " said Steve Kowarsky, CosmoCom's Executive Vice President. "Consolidating multiple locations, captive and outsourced operations, multiple communication channels, and multiple applications is increasingly recognized throughout the industry as the best deployment strategy for enhancing customer care while reducing its total cost."

Download a complimentary copy of the "Flexible Working" chapter or the full 300 page report free of charge.

FOCUS

By Ari Sonesh, CEO - Focus is always important to the growth and prosperity of a company, but in times of economic downturn, it is more important than ever.  Focus on the customer, focus on real market needs, and focus on repeating successful practices are the keys to weathering the economic storm.

 With these principles in mind, our management team recently spent several days analyzing our past performance and brainstorming ways to focus on the customers and market opportunities that have brought us the most success.  Our challenge is that CosmoCom's product is a very horizontal one, because every business needs to communicate with its customers.  Indeed, when we look at our customer base, we find customers in almost every industry, including Transportation, Manufacturing, Travel, Telecoms, Insurance, Banking, Government, Tele and Business Process Outsourcers, High-Tech, Automotive, Retail, Healthcare, and Utilities, to name but a few.  We looked at the uniqueness of our value proposition to these industries, and the idea of consolidation stood out:  consolidation of hardware and software on one centralized, unified platform. Working with one vendor provides a better utilization of manpower.  It's about the ability to integrate communication with business processes.  It's about better and more efficient communication with customers.  It's really about a compelling ROI (Return on Investment) through UCC or "Unified Customer Communications."

These findings about CosmoCom's universal value proposition are very encouraging, but they remain horizontal.  To sharpen our focus, we also took a closer look at the applications that we excel at, especially those that are still in demand in spite of the economy. We also looked at the partner ecosystems that would help us to increase our market share.

By adding focus to several vertical industries and applications that have been very successful for us, we can repeat those successes. We'll be using a vertical and application focus to guide our investments in marketing and in staff education to ensure that our teams fully understand the nuances of our verticals in focus, including their organizational structures, their regulatory and compliance requirements, and their industry trends and challenges. 

One example of our vertical and application focus is the Telecoms industry. This has always been one of CosmoCom's strengths.  It started with becoming the multi-tenant platform of choice for Telecoms to provide hosted contact center services. That was followed by helping the same customers to address their own customer care needs through Consolidation 2.0 and Unified Customer Communications.  This focus has long been evident in our marketing messages, and you'll soon see more vertical content on our web site in a few other industries as we further implement the strategic value of focus. 

One common thread that has emerged is better control over outsourcers who, in many cases, do much of the customer care work.  Better monitoring and resource utilization means our customers can significantly reduce billing and realize instant ROI. That's a horizontal value proposition, but it's specific enough to satisfy the standard of focus, and it can be adapted as a message in the verticals we emphasize. Certainly a lot of Telecoms' customer care is being done by outsourcers. 

I believe that our focus will be one of the things that enables CosmoCom to continue growing, even in the current economic downturn, and to emerge from the recession as one of the strongest players in our industry.

CHUNGHWA TELECOM CALL CENTER SUPPORTS
TAIWAN GOVERNMENT PROGRAM

In the December issue of CosmoChronicle we brought you news of Chunghwa Telecom's (CHT) expansion of their CCOD platform which enables CHT to support both its own customer service agents and the call center operations of customers via the system's multi-tenancy. CHT proved that in early 2009 in a big way, making news in Taiwan as they have been entrusted by the government to handle the call center for the recently launched Consumption Voucher Program.

In the program, the Taiwan government seeks to stimulate the local economy by issuing shopping vouchers to more than 23 million of its citizens to increase consumer spending. To ensure success of the program, a specialized call center was set up to answer questions from both retailers and consumers. The center, run by Chunghwa Telecom, officially launched on 5 January with over 40,000 inbound calls the first day and nearly 100,000 calls on 17 January, the day before the Consumer Vouchers were released to the public.  The center will operate 7 days a week through the end of September 2009.

This is truly a story of Contact Center On-Demand, a story of a large contact center that had to be created quickly to meet a high volume of calls for a relatively short period of time, a lower volume of calls for a somewhat longer, and probably a limited overall lifetime. Chunghwa Telecom used its CosmoCom platform to successfully meet this challenge, winning praise from the government, the retailers, and the citizens. That's a winning proposition any way you look at it.

Check out this video news clip about the consumer voucher call center from FTV in Taiwan.

EASON TECH SPREADS THE WORD IN TAIPEI

While we are on the topic of Taiwan from the previous article, we'd like to update you on the activities of Eason Tech, which joined our growing CosmoCommunity of partners and customers in 2008. From the start of the partnership, Eason Tech has been actively promoting CosmoCom technology in the region.

It is always exciting to see how our business partners around the globe adapt our marketing materials and messages to their local markets. Eason Tech has done a fantastic job of doing this for their region. At CosmoCom's Global Sales Meeting in NY a couple of weeks ago, we had the pleasure of seeing samples of the high-quality collateral they produced, and of viewing photos from the recent International Contact Call Center Seminar produced by the Taiwan Contact Center Development Association (TCCDA).

The event took place on 27 November, and Eason Tech's eye-catching booth (pictured to the right) and strong, timely messages attracted many attendees to stop by to hear about how Eason Tech and CosmoCom could make a positive difference in their contact center operations. 

WHERE TO SEE COSMOCOM IN FEBRUARY

If you happen to be in Miami next week for TMC's IT Expo, be sure to stop by Atlantic Communications Products' booth 529. You'll be able to see demonstrations of CosmoCall Universe and CosmoCom's own Bill Frazier, Director for the SouthEast, will be on hand to support Atlantic Communications, answer questions and share his expertise.

From 2 - 4 February, for those of you in the DACH region of EMEA, look for CosmoCom at Call Center World 2009 in Berlin, Germany. We'll be waiting for you in Hall 1: 1A16 of the Estrel Convention Center to demonstrate how we can help make 2009 a successful year for your contact center.

We'll be adding more events in the coming weeks and months so keep an eye on future issues and our events page.

 BITS & PIECES: SOME VOIP FACTOIDS

Virtual Call Centers Make Easy Work of Call Spikes
According to the "Flexible Working chapter" of the recently released ContactBabel US Contact Center Operational Review, The issue of coping with call spikes is one which is growing year upon year, and is particularly noticeable in this year's survey. Virtual contact centers allow agents from other locations (including homeworkers) to make themselves available to deal with a different queue, being seamlessly moved back to their original work when the spike has flattened or the length of their own primary queue triggers a move back to their original work. Dealing early with such call spikes can often remove the issue before it becomes a real problem, and such movement between call groups can be done automatically by setting thresholds in each queue. Such flexibility of agents means that there is a fairer agent utilization, as the situation of a set of agents sitting idle while others are under great pressure is less likely to happen.. Download your copy of the full report now.

WHO'S TALKING? RECENT INK

UC in the Call Center
Unified Communications ran a great article called "UC in the Call Center" in the Sept./Oct. print edition that finally made it to the online world this January. In the article, editor Richard "Zippy" Grigonis takes a good look at unified communications as it applies to the contact center. He opens with, "Everybody is waking up to the fact that the dividing line between UC and contact centers has been blurred for quite a while, but has now become "official" - meaning that it has become an identifiable marketing tool," and continues on to make a good case for that statement.

About mid-way through the article, the reader encounters a section called "First and Foremost?" that talks about a certain innovative contact center technology company that begins with the letter "C" ends with "m" and has been a leader in the unified customer communication space for years. Any idea who we're talking about?

IP Communications Boosts Bottom Line for U.S. Contact Centers
MultiChannel Merchant picked up on our release about the ContactBabel report that CosmoCom recently sponsored (see how to get your free copy above) and dug a little deeper to produce a nice article from their own perspective. The piece begins, "Is your call center still using copper infrastructure for phone communications? If so, you might want to consider finally making the jump to Internet Protocol." We couldn't agree more! Here is the article.

HQ HAPPENINGS

Launching 2009 with Global Meetings

CosmoCom colleagues from around the globe always gather every January for our annual Global Sales Meeting (GSM) and Global Sales Engineering Meeting (GSEM) for several intense days of knowledge transfer, group discussion, and team building.

This year, spirits were high and a strong sense of accomplishment and excitement for the coming year pervaded the atmosphere. In the spirit of Ari's article on focus, the GSM delegation rolled up its collective sleeves to look at where we've been, where we're going, and the best ways to get there, with a focus on how to repeat the very exciting successes of 2008 and earlier. One after another, members of the global Sales team shared inspiring case studies of customers who are realizing great benefits from our technology and our Consolidation 2.0 value proposition.

Product Management engaged the group in lively discussions of the exciting product roadmap for 2009, something you'll be hearing more about very soon. And of course there was the usual CosmoFun, CosmoNetworking activity, with one night that included the entire HQ staff so that everyone had the opportunity to meet personally the colleagues they often only encounter only via phone and e-mail.

Following the GSM, for the rest of the week, our international sales engineers gathered in our Training Center for a GSEM that included deep dives into our technology, and sharing best practices for successful implementations and creative customer applications.

All-in-all, it was a successful and inspiring week. Our watches are all synchronized, and we're ready to tackle the challenges and make the most of 2009.

TRADESHOW NEWS: COMING ATTRACTIONS

	Call Center World - 2009 February 16 - 19, 2009 Estrel Convention Center Berlin, Germany Booth Hall 1: 1A16 www.callcenterworld.de
	RECORDED WEBINARS
	View recordings of our Webinar events including "Consolidation 2.0", "Hosted Contact Center for Outsourcers", "Contact Center On-Demand" and "Telecom Customer Care"

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	TECH SUPPORT UPDATES
	CosmoCom has replaced SupportNet with a new improved support site, for customers and partners, called CosmoCom Online Technical Support. You can find the latest documentation, Hot Fix bundles, Microsoft updates that have passed QA for CosmoCall Universe deployment, discussion groups and more. In addition, you can now access your support tickets online. If you have not yet obtained your secure login information, please contact your CosmoCom representative or send support an email.

 

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