Nortel Unveils New Carrier-Hosted Call Center Solution

[JamieMoody]

Businesses of all sizes can improve customer service, reduce operation costs and ensure business continuity thanks to the latest investments in carrier-hosted call center innovations unveiled by Nortel* [OTC: NRTLQ] Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions (CVAS) at the Supercomm** tradeshow last week in Chicago.
Nortel CVAS's IP Powered Business voice and multimedia solution provides powerful carrier-hosted business line solutions with advanced voice and multimedia, unified communications, web meetings and mobility service. The new hosted call center features integrate call center services that can be delivered to business over IP or support a mix of IP and legacy equipment. The new features offer a number of benefits to service providers, including increased revenue potential, customer loyalty and satisfaction; and the ability to offer “one-stop-shopping” bundled services to their business subscribers.
Nortel’s carrier-hosted call center solutions build on Nortel’s industry leadership in the customer contact space and help decrease business expenses because they eliminate the need for hiring or replacing high-priced IT expertise. They also provide business continuity in the event of site disasters or an epidemic because the call center capabilities can be moved quickly and customer service agents can work from any location.
“Nortel’s CVAS IP Powered Business solution has all the elements service providers need to expand and strengthen their offer to business subscribers,” said Samih Elhage, president, CVAS, Nortel. “Nortel is an established leader in customer care solutions and our latest carrier-hosted call center solution is just one example of how we are investing in the future and creating new market opportunities for our service provider customers by empowering them to solve some of the business challenges of today's customer service and call center environments.”
Nortel’s carrier-hosted call center solution is a hybrid and all-IP solution that equips service providers to eliminate their business customer’s needs for complex onsite customer premise equipment (CPE). With Nortel’s carrier-hosted solution, service providers will be able to offer advanced Call Center features to small and medium-size businesses that they previously could not afford. Service providers can also help large businesses cut costs by outsourcing the Call Center communications equipment and buying the communications as a service from their service provider.
According to Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting, the hosted contact center infrastructure market will grow by 30 percent, 35 percent, and 20 percent each year from 2009 to 2011 respectively, as cited in DMG’s annual Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report, released in September, 2009.
Nortel’s carrier-hosted call center solution can be set up quickly, requires minimal capital investment, and provides business continuity by allowing agents to operate from any location. The solution equips service providers to offer:
• SIP-based ACD capability that helps to improve customer service and response rate by allowing businesses to rapidly distribute calls to the most appropriate agent, based skills and availability. Businesses can examine agent success and response rate and make adjustments as needed.
• SIP Hunt Groups that allow businesses to ensure that important calls do not go unanswered because the system automatically hunts around for an available agent.
• SIP Attendant Console which allows a call center attendant to answer and transfer calls using simple “drag and drop” buttons on their call center console.
Nortel’s new carrier-hosted call center capabilities are available today. Nortel Call Center features are deployed globally with carriers like BT, Optus and Bell Aliant. Nortel has been a leader in the customer contact center market for more than 30 years offering scalability and reliability in contact center, self-service, advanced speech, and workforce optimization solutions.
Nortel has shipped more than 115 million Carrier VoIP and Multimedia ports to more than 350 wireline and wireless carriers globally. According to Infonetics Research's recent report, Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers Market Share, Size, and Forecasts - 2Q09, Nortel kept its global leadership position for carrier softswitches with 30.2 percent market share. Furthermore, according to Infonetics, during the second quarter of 2009, Nortel kept its position as the dominant softswitch supplier in both North America and EMEA. According to Dell'Oro, Nortel has consistently been ranked as the #1 Global Carrier VoIP and Softswitch leader since 2002. Nortel CVAS has customer deployments in all continents with leading carriers and provides VoIP solutions to two thirds of IDC's worldwide listing of top 20 carriers (by revenue).
About Nortel
Nortel delivers communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel’s technologies are designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at Nortel. For the latest Nortel news, visit Nortel: News & Events.