OREANDA-NEWS. BT today announced significant enhancements to its contact centre portfolio, BT Contact, by integrating the latest contact centre solutions from its strategic technology partner, Cisco. Cisco’s new suite of products and services will be rolled out by BT globally in the coming weeks and will help enterprises improve productivity, reach customers through new channels, such as social media and video, and enhance customer satisfaction.

 BT Contact’s modular architecture allows enterprises to closely tailor the solution they purchase.

 • Cisco Packaged Contact Centre Enterprise is a complete, pre-packaged solution that supports up to 1,000 agents. It offers everything organisations need to deliver exemplary customer service, with a simple design, pricing, ordering and deployment to single site or distributed contact centres. The solution integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and comes with a comprehensive range of management and reporting tools.

 • The latest release of Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express enables BT Contact to deliver a highly secure, resilient and sophisticated customer interaction management solution for up to 400 agents. The solution enables team managers and supervisors to monitor the contact centre remotely and gives them the ability to remotely reassign agents to fully optimise customer service. A further enhancement is the ability to support in-branch video kiosks, providing customers with access to expertise from any store or branch location, in high-quality video. The addition of Workforce Management enables contact centre resources to be managed efficiently and service levels are delivered through effective automation, analysis and scheduling.

 • Cisco SocialMiner is a solution allowing BT Contact customers to listen, monitor and respond in real time to conversations customers are conducting online. This is particularly useful for identifying unhappy customers on public forums and helping to engage with them to resolve their problems.

 • Message of the Day Portal enables customers to record and change interactive voice response (IVR) messages on demand via a browser-based portal in real time.

 • The Cisco Customer Management Portal makes changes to scripts or IVR flows through a single portal that is accessible from anywhere.

 • Finesse Desktop is integrated into BT Cloud Contact to provide a thin client multimedia desktop which gives companies the ability to customise their desktop environment without the need for an expensive technology overhaul. This helps improve productivity as agents’ desktops can be tailored in a way that suits their company’s contact strategy.

 Andrew Small, VP of BT Contact, BT Global Services, said: “Our contact centre customers have been telling us that the pace of change in their sector has never been higher. Their own customers are becoming ever more demanding, expecting consistently excellent service, delivered across multiple new channels, around the clock. The challenge for contact centres is to be flexible enough to meet these changing demands, while keeping operations simple enough to be effectively and efficiently managed. The new Cisco additions to the already extensive end-to-end capabilities of our BT Contact portfolio will strengthen what we can deliver and ensure that we provide the full breadth of solutions that our customers want.”

 John Hernandez, Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Collaboration Business Applications Business Unit, said: “We believe the combination of BT and Cisco creates a uniquely compelling proposition. BT Contact customers benefit from enterprise-class service levels, security and reliability from two of the most-established companies in the contact centre field. Furthermore, they can apply our combined strength to contact centres of any size, from the smallest to the very largest, and in any location.”