Business Editors/High-Tech Writers
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 28, 2003
Industry Veterans Raise the Bar for High Performance,
Cost-Efficient Enterprise Contact Centers
Nuasis(TM) Corporation, a new software company in the emerging Internet Protocol (IP) contact center market, today announced the launch of the Nuasis NuContact Center(TM), a multimedia contact distribution system designed to route and queue voice, e-mail and Web contacts on a single platform. The end-to-end IP-based system consolidates the routing of customer phone calls, e-mails, and web contacts for improved customer service and contact handling. By delivering voice communications over the corporate data network, along with e-mail and Web contacts, the NuContact Center eliminates the high cost and administrative burden of maintaining both telephony and data networks for the call center application.
The NuContact Center is a single distributed system, built on Nuasis' Enterprise Routing Architecture (ERA(TM)), that routes customer contacts across the corporate data network to the best available agent within a single contact center or geographically dispersed contact centers. The system reduces the total cost of ownership compared to legacy Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs) and eliminates the need for costly and complex Computer Telephony Integration (CTI).
"Current solutions for networking contact centers together are cost prohibitive for all but the largest companies," said Ed Lauing, president and chief executive officer of Nuasis. "With the NuContact Center we are changing the rules by lowering the number of agents required to staff centers, reducing system costs for a networked solution, minimizing telephony charges and eliminating the cost and complexity of CTI."
"The Nuasis system allowed us to quickly implement data-directed call routing without any CTI costs," said Gary Ketron, director of world wide technical support for Attachmate(TM), a worldwide supplier of host data and business-logic access and management solutions. "A screen-pop application took hours to develop versus days or weeks. This, and the ability to distribute voice calls and e-mails on one system were key reasons for deploying the Nuasis solution."
With no specialized APIs or complex integration efforts, the NuContact Center accesses customer information on Attachmate's Vantive (PeopleSoft) CRM database to intelligently route a contact to the agent best suited to service the customer. The system can be easily configured to access any external business system database.
By combining the distribution of voice, e-mail and Web contacts (Web chat and co-browsing sessions) on a single platform, the NuContact Center can route e-mail and Web contacts with the same efficiencies achieved for voice calls in the past. E-mails can be escalated and 'pushed' to agents to assure proper handling. This is crucial as a recent Jupiter Research report found that although 88 percent of surveyed consumers expect a response to an e-mail query within 24 hours, only about half the companies sampled actually met these expectations.
In addition to providing the full functionality of separate ACDs and e-mail systems, the NuContact Center delivers the following benefits:
-- Mission-critical reliability - unlike first generation IP call
center systems, the NuContact Center includes several design
features to satisfy the mission-critical requirements of the
call center application. A patent-pending Voice Gateway
assures that no calls are lost. In the event of agent PC,
server, or network failure, the Voice Gateway detects the
failure and automatically re-directs the call to another
available agent on the network with all of the associated
data.
-- Multi-site scalability - the system scales across multiple
locations. Currently the system can be configured for up to
three locations and 300 agents, with increased capacity
releases over time. Deployment to new contact center locations
is easy and low cost.
-- Toll-quality Voice - Nuasis designed the NuContact Center to
reliably deliver toll-quality voice over the corporate
network.
-- Elimination of complex and costly CTI for easy integration
with CRM systems - the NuContact Center eliminates traditional
CTI costs and can be easily configured to access information
in external databases, including CRM applications.
-- Agent-productivity tools -a single desktop for all phone,
e-mail and Web contacts ensures a consistent experience for
customers and agents. Nuasis' Shutters(TM) desktop management
application automatically opens and closes desktop
applications as required to most efficiently complete customer
service inquiries. The NuContact Center provides improved
contact routing capabilities and agent utilization, as well as
consolidated real-time and historical reporting.
-- Migration from legacy systems - companies can leverage the
investment in existing ACDs, PBXs, IVRs and e-mail systems as
they migrate call center locations to the NuContact Center
solution.
-- CFO-friendly ROI - the NuContact Center reduces the number of
agents required in a multi-site contact center environment,
and lowers acquisition, deployment, maintenance and telephony
network service costs by leveraging a single corporate IP
network.
Pricing and Availability
The NuContact Center is a software solution that runs on standard, off-the shelf, low-cost servers. The NuContact Center utilizes the Linux operating system and runs Microsoft XP on the agent PCs. The voice gateway is SIP-based with patent-pending call re-direct technology. The NuContact Center is priced at approximately $3,990 per agent seat, based on a three-node system and 100 agents. That price includes system software at a central hub and remote location nodes; a multi-media agent desktop (no phone sets required); voice gateways, user licenses, implementation and training; and automated routing applications such as screen-pop and data-directed call routing. Typically, with legacy ACD systems, these routing applications require complex and expensive CTI implementations that are not required for the NuContact Center. System pricing does not include the Linux servers. General availability is July 30, 2003.
Target Customers and Market
Nuasis targets medium to large companies across all industries operating either stand-alone or multiple dispersed contact centers. The Pelorus Group estimates that the ACD market for all media (voice, e-mail, Web) will total $7.3 billion in 2005. Frost and Sullivan estimates the IP call center segment of the market at $359 million through 2005 with an annual compounded growth rate of 59%.
The Nuasis Management Team
The Nuasis executive team includes industry veterans in the enterprise software, CRM, and contact center markets. They have contributed to the growth and success of companies including Aspect Communications, Cisco, Lucent/Avaya, Rockwell and ROLM. These individuals have launched venture-funded companies, next-generation products, and world-class support organizations. In the last round of funding, May 2002, the management team raised $23.7 million.
About Nuasis Corporation
Nuasis Corporation, a new company in the emerging IP contact center market space, is leading the transformation of the customer contact center from proprietary circuit-based ACD switches to IP-based enterprise software applications for handling customer inquiries via the phone, e-mail, and Web. The company has offices in major metropolitan cities in the U.S. Nuasis is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, contact Nuasis at (408) 350-4900 or visit us via the Web at www.nuasis.com.
Nuasis, the Nuasis logo, NuContact Center, ERA, and Shutters are trademarks of Nuasis Corporation.
All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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