First Coffee for 17 June 2006: Wicom, Avaya, Stravinsky, Agileview, IGSW, Witness Systems

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David Sims
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First Coffee for 17 June 2006: Wicom, Avaya, Stravinsky, Agileview, IGSW, Witness Systems

By David Sims
 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, a recording from a concert in Madison Square Garden on a night when, as one critic wrote, they just might have been The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the world:

CRM: It’s not just for business anymore.

Scott Miyake Geron, MSW, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Geriatric Social Work, recognized a need for work-based training products that meet a wide variety of demands in the field of aging and social work, so he turned to CRM vendor Agileview for help.

IGSW has created an innovative series of online training courses that offer social workers and other social service professional’s vital training in aging and also provide Continuing Education Credits (CEUs) and an optional Certificate in Aging from Boston University.

Individuals or agencies may buy licenses to IGSW’s packages with either a credit card or Purchase Order. The SmartView Learning Management System automates the delivery and tracking of all content and training.

“Agileview, and the people managing SmartView, in particular, have given us an outstanding partnership that allows us to deliver a user-friendly experience to all of our clients,” says Geron. “As we become increasingly experienced with user preferences, and technology; SmartView has provided us with a cost effective, flexible product to change with the times.”

This year IGSW hopes to serve social workers nationally with high quality, cost-effective continuing education products. Though demand is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years as the Baby Boomers finally shuffle off this mortal coil, the current staff expects to keep pace thanks to their planning, and use of tools such as SmartView LMS.

SmartView’s low-cost, all-inclusive system enables agencies to build their own training content, deliver 24x7 classes to targeted audiences, track individual progress, and automate certification tasks. The SmartView team includes one-on-one assistance, especially for those agencies who may be implementing online tools for the very first time.

Witness Systems, fearless vendor of workforce optimization software and services, has announced that Impact 360, its comprehensive workforce optimization product, is compliant with key IP telephony and contact center products from Avaya, a firm which certainly needs no introduction here.

The packaged Impact 360 Workforce Optimization product powered by Avaya, which includes quality monitoring/full-time recording, workforce management, performance management and e-learning capabilities, has been successfully compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with Avaya Communication Manager 3.1, the company's IP telephony software.

With Impact 360, according to company officials, organizations can capture, analyze and act on cross-functional information that impacts the performance of their contact center workforce, customer interactions and customer service processes.

"Being rated Avaya compliant signifies another milestone for our Impact 360 Workforce Optimization product, which is sold by Avaya and its Business Partners," said John Bourne, senior vice president of global product management, Witness Systems. "Building on the scalability of the Avaya Communication Manager 3.1 platform, the Impact 360 Workforce Optimization Packages – powered by Avaya – scale to approximately 800 users on a single server.”

This, according to Bourne, reduces the total cost of ownership of the software-based Impact 360 products.

Witness Systems is a Premier member of the Avaya DeveloperConnection Program, an initiative to develop, market and sell third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology. As a member of the program, Witness Systems is eligible to submit its products for compatibility testing by the Avaya Solution Interoperability and Test Lab in Lincroft, N.J. where Avaya engineers test plan for each application to verify whether it is Avaya compliant.

The DeveloperConnection program lets Avaya provide products and capabilities to member companies. One example is Application Enablement Services, a set of application programming interfaces, protocols and Web services that makes it easier for developers to create Avaya-compatible networks, devices and applications.

Witness Systems used AES to build Avaya interoperability into its Impact 360 software.

Wicom Communication, a European provider of IP based Contact Center products and VoIP telephony software for fixed and wireless network environments, is announcing its support for the Competence Call Center Group in its international expansion.

The Call Center service provider brings together its German, Austrian and Swiss operations into one virtual call center with the help of Wicom’s Communication Server Suite.

The Competence Call Center’s 250 employees in the German capital and 50 agents in Zurich are already using the Wicom product, and now also the company’s operations in Linz, Austria will run on Wicom CSS. The Wicom CSS is an open standards-based all-IP telephony software suite, allowing a single, integrated system to be used for multi-channel customer service, telesales, enterprise telephony and mobility

“The virtualization of our Call Center opened up new opportunities for us to deploy our resources at an optimum level. We are now able to offer a better customer service at competitive costs to our clients,” claims Christian Legat, Managing Director of CCC in Berlin.

A customer calling into the call center, whose details are already captured on the database, is put through to an agent who instantly receives all relevant information about the caller. Incoming queries via e-mail are also handled in this way.

The system decides which agent is most suitable on the basis of key words included in the incoming query. This type of intelligent routing means incoming calls are put straight through to the right agent, cutting down waiting times and minimizing the amount of call transfers.

“If for example there is an influx of calls coming into the Linz center, colleagues in Berlin or Zurich can be brought in to share the load at the click of a mouse button and within seconds agent numbers handling inquiries increase significantly,” explains Stephan Bahr, Regional Sales manager for Wicom in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. “Agents don’t need to be physically present for this. The Communications Server Suite integrates not only home office workers but also agents available on mobile phones.”

In addition to callers and call center agents, the management team at CCC also benefits from Wicom’s VoIP product. Real-time monitoring is now possible across multiple local offices as the system records and provides information on all communication events coming in and out of the call center.

Today’s Igor Stravinsky’s birthday, born in Oranienbaum, a suburb of St. Petersburg, Russia in 1882. The Writer’s Almanac has a great account of  the opening performance of his composition “The Rite of Spring” in Paris in 1913:

The audience sat quietly through the first several minutes of the piece, but when the music suddenly turned harsh and dissonant, people in the audience began to shout at the stage. Fights broke out between the audience members. People who were enjoying the music attacked those who were booing. People spat in each other's faces. Men exchanged cards in order to fight duels the next day. The police were called. Stravinsky was so upset by the response that he left his seat in disgust. But the performance kept on, despite the disturbance. The composition lasted only thirty-three minutes, but it made Stravinsky was one of the most famous composers in the world.

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