Bell Canada and Avaya have entered into a quasi-partnership whereby some of Avaya’s products will be used alongside the telco’s to supply call centres with a multimedia product.
Bell, along with technology offered by Avaya Inc., will provide a turnkey multimedia contact centre solution that allows businesses to outsource the ownership, design, installation and management of its service systems. The solution will be available to Bell’s Managed Solutions customers throughout Canada. Bell is solely responsible for the management of the contact centres.
For its part of the deal, Avaya will provide its Enterprise Class Internet Protocol Solution (ECLIPS), a suite from its CRM portfolio, Interactive Voice Response System and Multimedia Contact Centre software, said Bob Gilbert, solutions manager at Avaya in N.J.
The turnkey contact centres will allow customers to implement multimedia capabilities and choose from a variety of communications vehicles when interacting with help desk support that includes fax, self-service voice response, e-mail, voice, Web chat and Web-live voice.
Under the first phase of the offering, Bell will supply design work, integration and professional services to customers. All the equipment that is provided by Bell is also owned by the telco. The company will work with customers’ IT departments to ensure their back-end systems work with the call centre application. The offering, Bell said, represents a unique opportunity for its customers.
“This is an opportunity for the customer to re-assign their expensive IT talent to do other things such as improving their internal applications and systems rather than (playing) around with the telephony or call routing capabilities,” said Hugh Pilkington, team leader in the managed solutions organization at Bell Canada in Toronto.
In phase two, Bell would manage the infrastructure and host data at its own facility – this phase is expected to begin in the middle of next year.
The entire offering is IP-based and cost is based on a per-agent formula. And while it is available to all call centres, Pilkington said that from purely a cost perspective, centres with 35 to 300 agents would benefit most.
For details, visit http://www.bell.ca or http://www.avaya.com.