OREANDA-NEWS. May 23, 2012. BT announces the expansion of its Contact Center portfolio for the U.S. The newest addition to the portfolio is a cloud-based IP contact center service based on Cisco’s Unified Communications and Collaboration technology (UCC).

 With organizations everywhere looking to take advantage of the emergence of cloud services, BT Cloud Contact helps overcome major challenges in providing global unified communications to contact centers, such as reach, flexibility and cost control. Built to support the global expansion of multinational organizations, it is based upon BT’s extensive global network, with this UCC platform based in BT data centers across US, EMEA and Asia Pacific, delivering a proven high level of reliability for over a decade.

 With cost the key driver for the market shift to cloud-based services, BT Cloud Contact is available on a flexible pay-as-you-use basis. Significant costs savings result from shifting to an opex-based commercial model, driving operational savings and service improvement. The biggest savings, however, are realized in the ability to share hardware, software and licensing across an organization’s contact centers in a secure and resilient ‘private cloud’ with savings averaging 45% compared with the traditional on-premise model.

 “As the drive for cost reduction continues to place increasing demands on call center operations, this service can be a key enabler to transform the traditional call center into a customer interaction network, enhancing reliability while streamlining interactions to help deliver superior customer service,” said Andrew Small, vice president Unified Communications, CRM & CPE Portfolio, BT Global Services.

 John Hernandez, vice president and general manager of the Customer Collaboration Business Unit at Cisco, said, "The cloud-based contact center empowers businesses and organizations of all sizes to provide world-class care to their customers. We are delighted that BT is launching this new service based on Cisco Unified Contact Center technology."

 BT Cloud Contact is a global solution that can be seamlessly integrated into other existing call center infrastructures. It combines the best features of BT’s CRM portfolio into a single, powerful center, hosted by BT and flexible enough to grow with an organization.