VIRTUALIZATION A WINNER FOR MULTISITE CONTACT CENTERS
ACCORDING TO COSMOCOM SPONSORED STUDY

72% of Executives Report Significant Improvements in Call Handling Statistics

The latest research by contact center industry analysts at ContactBabel has confirmed that joining multisite contact center operations together into a single 'virtual' contact center has brought significant benefits to both businesses and their customers. This is according to the more than 200 contact center operational leaders surveyed for "The US Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide" -- a major annual study produced by ContactBabel and sponsored by CosmoCom.

Research for the report has found that respondents who had implemented virtual contact centers were generally very pleased with the gains in efficiency and service levels that they have experienced. Nearly three quarters cited ability to smooth out call spikes by balancing the load between contact centers as their top benefit, followed closely by reduced wait times, wider ranges of skills available to callers, and overall cost savings between sites.

Coping with call spikes is one issue which is growing year upon year. With virtual contact center technology, like CosmoCom's, call workload is not limited to a single site, but instead can be allocated across all agent locations (including home workers) as volume or business rules dictate, heading off many of the issues normally associated with call spikes.

Flexibility to allocate agents when and where needed means better agent utilization, so virtual call centers are less likely to have agents sitting idle while others are under great pressure. This same flexibility also expands the pool of agent talent available to callers, including specific technical and language skills. The resulting reduction in wait time and increased access to skilled agents translates to increased caller satisfaction. A majority of virtual contact center respondents also strongly agree that there have been significant savings on call costs between physical sites.

Of the survey respondents with multiple-site contact centers that had not yet virtualized their operations, 61% agreed that their main concern was the management of teams across multiple locations. "Managing virtual teams across any number of virtual contact center locations is simplified when you have a unified platform like CosmoCall Universe (CCU)," explains Steve Kaish, CosmoCom VP of Product Management, "With all of the call center features unified together seamlessly in one high-availability, highly scalable platform, it makes it much easier to manage virtual teams."

The report's author, Steve Morrell, comments, "The best virtual contact center technologies allow multiple operations or even home workers to be linked together so as to be viewed and managed as a single mega-site. This allows significant economies of scale and improvements in performance to take place, without the attendant problems around environment, morale and attrition that plague many very large operations. Our research shows that those businesses which have taken the virtualization route have usually found very significant cost and performance benefits."

"The findings in the report reinforce that our core value propositions around multi-tenant, multi-site virtual contact centers are right on target," said CosmoCom CEO, Ari Sonesh, "It is also worth noting that survey participants reporting the highest use of a multi contact center deployments were in the healthcare and insurance industries, which explains why we've seen such good uptake in these verticals."

SUNFLOWER COMMUNICATIONS ROLLS OUT PREMIER
HOSTED CONTACT CENTER SERVICES IN CIS REGION

CosmoCom Powers New Cloud-Based Contact Center Offering from
Successful Ukraine/Russian Systems Integrator

CosmoCom recently announced that Ukraine-based contact center solutions provider Sunflower Communications (SFC) has expanded its IP contact center portfolio to include Hosted Contact Center On-Demand (CCOD). As a systems integrator, SFC has had considerable success offering turn-key, premise-based contact center solutions based on CosmoCom technology in Ukraine, Russia and the CIS region. Creating an on-demand contact center service was a natural next step.

"Over the past few years we've gained tremendous experience deploying virtual contact centers for large and distributed companies," said Alexey Chufistov, General Director of SFC, "We added a SaaS contact center service to round out our offering and give customers a full range of delivery models to choose, from premise-based to on-demand hosted. That flexibility is one of the many reasons we selected CosmoCom technology in the first place."

"Sunflower is a great example of the trend among VARs and Integrators toward becoming service providers as well," commented Ari Sonesh, CosmoCom CEO, "SFC has proven to be innovators in delivering contact center solutions that meet and exceed customer expectations, regardless of delivery model."

Read more about SFC's Hosted Contact Center Offering

CONTACT CENTER INTEGRATIONS/TIME TO MARKET KEY THEMES AT PARIS EXPO

CosmoCom's Technology Footprint Grows at Stratégie Clients

Over the past few years the footprint of CosmoCom's contact center technology, CosmoCall Universe (CCU), has been growing at the famous Seca customer relationship show in France. This year the conference merged with the related DATAS and CRMing shows to become "Stratégie Clients" bringing together the various communities involved in customer relationship (CRM, Data and Call Center) under one roof which made CosmoCom's participation more relevant than ever.

Fittingly, CosmoCom's theme for this year's booth was Contact Center Integrations and Time to Market and all across the show floor were examples of innovative integrations with CCU as well as hosted offerings by CosmoCom service providers.

Since CRM and customer data were two of the pillars of the show, CCU's proven ability to easily and quickly integrate with any commercial CRM (like MS Dynamics, SAP, Salesforce, RightNow, etc.) as well as home-grown business applications was well received. CCU's integratability was further evident in two featured cooperative partnerships (Telemetris and Akio) that add value to each side. Telemetris provides a quality monitoring solution that complements and extends CosmoCom's own rich functionality recording suite and vice versa. Akio is one of Europe's premier e-mail management application providers whose artificial intelligence engine provides automatic or suggested responses to emails, and through integration with CCU allows for seamless consolidation of interactions between the two applications for added value on both sides.

Overall, the focus on integrations was very popular and the reporting and analytics in CosmoCall Universe 6 continued to draw in many attendees attracted to the drag-and-drop, widget-based interface.

As CosmoCom was represented over nearly half of the show’s floor space, we would like to thank the partners who made this possible, including: PhoneControl, Vidalia, Orange, Prosodie and Axantys. We hope to see many of you in Paris in 2011.

ISRAEL SALES TEAM TAKES IT TO THE ROAD

Our Israel office is always in perpetual motion between the activities of our large regional development and QA teams working to keep our contact center platform at the leading edge, as well as our Global TAC (Technical Assistance Center) providing support for our customers around the globe.

Our sales team keeps equally active with both direct selling activities as well as supporting the efforts of key partners in the region. March was an especially busy month with not one, but two, back-to-back events.

At the beginning of the month, CosmoCom joined systems integration partner Netcom to exhibit at the annual Call Center, CRM and Information Management Conference in Israel, produced by Lior Lurye, a leading consulting company in Israel for call Center and CRM. We saw a lot of interest in our contact center solutions and both CosmoCom and Netcom are busy with follow-ups.

Rounding out the month, CosmoCom participated -- as both sponsor/exhibitor as well as speaking guest -- at Health 2010 on March 24 at the Avenue Conference Center in Airport City, Israel. The event focused on technologies that play a significant role in improving the services and systems that help doctors and medical teams to operate efficiently and give better care to patients.

The theme was a perfect forum for CosmoCom to showcase CosmoHealth and CosmoHealth ProActive healthcare contact center solutions on the show floor as well as the conference stage. Numerous attendees, many of whom were IT executives from hospitals and large healthcare organizations in the region, were inspired by the concept of unified patient provider communications enabled by our virtual contact center technology.

COSMOCOM AT RECENT AND UPCOMING US HEALTHCARE SHOWS

In early March, CosmoCom participated in the annual Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) Call Center and MTM Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. During the two day event, from the 7th to 8th, CosmoCom showed attendees how CosmoHealth and CosmoHealth ProActive can help them communicate better with their plan members while improving the bottom line at the same time. CosmoCom's Bill Frazier, Regional Director, Southeast Americas, presented an interactive educational session called "Contact Center Trends in Unified Member/Provider Communications and Proactive Disease/Lifestyle Management" to show what is happening and what is possible in this exciting area of healthcare. We received very positive feedback and interest from visitors to the booth as well as from attendees at Bill's session.

Picking up on the great momentum of the BCBSA show, CosmoCom's US team is eager to share our healthcare contact center solutions and expertise at the upcoming 15th annual American Telemedicine Association Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Antonio, Texas this coming May. If you are in the healthcare field and planning to attend the show, we hope you'll join us in booth 942 to experience our healthcare contact center solutions and to discuss your individual patient provider communication needs with us. We look forward to seeing you there. Feel free to contact us to request a demo at the show or any time that is convenient.
 

COSMOCOM BOARD ADVISOR HONORED

The Channel-agnostic Call Center: Supporting the Customer Experience
In a recent edition of the RSR (Retail Systems Research) newsletter, managing partner, Paula Rosenblum discusses her observations about cross-channel customer service, and how the Call Center fits in. In the article, with a little help from CosmoCom EVP Steve Kowarsky, she looks at the customer call center experience including how it does and should work and ultimately the importance of a unified experience for the customer.

BT Unveils Pay Per Minute Hosted Services
On Feb 26, TMC ran a feature article about BT's then-recent announcement that they had made their hosted offering, Next Generation Contact Centre (NGCC) [powered by CosmoCom] even more attractive with the new option of pay-per-hour/minute pricing. The article cited, "While most contact center platform hosts still only offer per named agent pricing packages or even per concurrent agent, BT now offers a flexible pricing model to fit every type of contact center operation: per concurrent agent, per logged-in agent, per effective hour or even per effective minute. With this wide range of options, customers only pay for what they need." Read the article.

 BITS & PIECES: SOME VOIP FACTOIDS

Projected Growth in Hosted Contact Center
According to analyst of a recent report on the North American Hosted Contact Center Market by Frost and Sullivan, “Based on our most current research, we forecast overall hosted revenues to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.1 percent from 2008 through 2015. From a customer perspective, the low upfront investment, instant access to cutting-edge technology and rapid implementation timeframes make the model difficult to ignore. The real enabler is, surprisingly, a technical play - leveraging multi-tenancy architecture." CosmoCom has long evangelized the importance of multi-tenancy for hosted and virtual contact center deployments and is one of the only technology providers with a true, shared-platform, multi-tenant contact center architecture.

TRADESHOW NEWS: COMING ATTRACTIONS

	American Telehealth Association 2010 Annual Meeting and Expo May 16 -18, 2010 Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center San Antonio, TX, USA Join CosmoCom in booth 942 to learn more about CosmoHealth
	ON-DEMAND WEBINARS
	View On-Demand Webinars including "New Horizons in Telehealth", "Consolidation 2.0", "Hosted Contact Center for Outsourcers", "Contact Center On-Demand" and "Telecom Customer Care"

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