CosmoCom Signs Nicholville Telephone

Independent Telco Uses CosmoCall Platform for New Customer Care Initiatives

Hauppauge, NY, June 1, 1999 – CosmoCom, Inc., the leader in virtual call center technology, announced today that Nicholville Telephone Company is using its award-winning solution, CosmoCall, to enhance its own customer care, to provide hosted services to others, and as the platform for DirectCall, its new customer care outsourcing operation.

CosmoCall is a complete IP-based virtual call center system which goes beyond the capabilities of traditional telephone call center technology. CosmoCall seamlessly blends, manages and distributes both live telephone and Internet calls, and messages including voice, fax, and e-mail.

Nicholville is a small independent telephone company in New York State that is diversifying and offering new services in the areas of Internet access and consulting, Website development and hosting, outsourced customer care, and Web-based application development, including electronic commerce.

"We saw CosmoCom as a perfect fit in many of our new service areas," said Tom Hardiman, who handles special projects like this one at Nicholville. "This is where we see much of our future growth coming from, and we know that our use of CosmoCall will contribute to this growth in a number of ways.

"As an ISP, we see CosmoCall as the perfect way to provide customer care. We’re already offering customer service on the Web, so why not offer live care within the Web channel? With CosmoCall, when our ISP customers need to use the phone, their calls are blended seamlessly with the Web-based calls.

"It’s also a great fit with our web applications, especially our e-commerce and hosting initiatives. CosmoCall allows us to integrate live contact into these services, which gives us additional revenue and helps us to differentiate ourselves from the commodity web-hosting competition."

Nicholville is using CosmoCall as the platform for a whole new service, DirectCall, providing 24x7 live customer care on an outsourced basis for businesses. All the calls to DirectCall now are telephone calls. The screen pop that informs the customer service rep receiving the call is created via a browser-based application developed by CosmoCom’s professional services group.

"We were amazed at the ease and speed with which CosmoCom’s people created a browser-based customer care application environment, and how flexible and easy to enhance it is," said Hardiman. "CosmoCall’s open development framework lets us continue enhancing the system on our own. In fact, we have just deployed the first of our own developments: an emergency notification feature that overrides the normal agent availability status and pops up on all agent desktops in the event of an urgent call – a patient emergency for a physician customer, for example.

"We are always pleased when people use our software creatively and effectively," said Steve Kowarsky, CosmoCom’s Executive Vice President. "We are especially delighted to see what Nicholville has done. This is a terrific example of what many small and large telcos can accomplish with CosmoCall."

About CosmoCom, Inc.
Founded in 1995, CosmoCom (www.cosmocom.com) creates advanced call center technology that, for the first time, enables Internet businesses to fully realize the potential of e-commerce. CosmoCom offers live, one-to-one, integrated multimedia customer service for Internet and telephone callers by combining the functions of ACD, CTI, IVR and unified messaging in one totally IP-based system. CosmoCom’s clients are a who’s who of top e-commerce companies, and the company’s major partners include Computer Associates, Microsoft, Dialogic and Siemens. Led by CEO and President Ari Sonesh, Vice President of Engineering Stephen Dellutri, and Executive Vice President Stephen Kowarsky, CosmoCom is a privately held company based in Long Island, NY.

About Nicholville Telephone Company:
An independent telco near New York State's northern-most border with Canada, Nicholville Telephone Company (www.nicholville.com) dates back to 1902. In the last decade, they have been on the cutting edge in deploying digital and optical technologies for their customers. In 1995, the company launched an ISP called St. Lawrence Internet Connection (www.slic.com), which has provided helpdesk, computer networking, web commerce and site design services between Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain. Building on their existing repertoire, the new Slic DirectCall operation applies CosmoCom technology to provide the "next generation" of ISP help services, while creating a new web-based communications service bureau to handle the phone and internet traffic of enterprises that would not otherwise have professional staff available on a 24 hour by 7 day basis.

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