When Microsoft added enterprise voice capabilities to Lync 2013 Server, many of its partners seized the opportunity to leverage them to create contact centre solutions.
They include Ottawa-based Mitel Networks, whose MiContact Center is one of its premier products.
On Tuesday that company said MiContact Center has been boosted with three new features for its Lync-based system that it took from its enterprise voice system:
–call-in customers can now use email, Web chat or social media to communicate through the contact cente in addition to voice;
–an interactive voice response (IVR)system gives organizations the ability to offer customers a self-service option, taking some of the load off call centre staff;
–contact center supervisors don’t have to be tethered to a desk, because MiContact Center now has tablet support for the real-time supervisor client.
“We’ve taken a single channel capability (voice) and turned it into a multichannel capability, Chris Courneya, general manager of Mitel’s contact centre solutions, said in an interview.
“In the same way we handle voice interactions to service customers, we can also bring other methods into the contact centre. If someone’s visiting your Web site and they’re having trouble, we can pop up a chat and ask, ‘Would you like some help on that?’ If they post a Twitter feed or Facebook post we have the ability to gather that and bring it into the contact centre, analyze and respond to it.
“If someone said something nice about you on Twitter you could take that into the organization to figure out how to monetize it and spread the good news. Similarly, if someone said something against the brand you could diffuse the situation and publicly address it and turn it into a positive thing.”
One early U.S. adopter using the IVR, a Florida mental health and substance abuse service, was able to increase the number of calls its contact centre could handle by at least 12 per cent,” Courneya said.
He emphasized that the Lync version of MiContact Center is written natively for the Microsoft suite, as opposed to some competitors, who do a SIP connection between Lync and their sever for processing of a customer interaction, then pass it back to the Lync server. MiContact Center leaves the interaction on Lync.
Call centre operators also use the Lync client; MiContact Center adds an intelligent layer that adds the contact centre capabilities to Lync.