Upgrade or replace my Alcatel Call Center

[j79]

Hi all, I'm a french guy juste hired by a voyage company.

The project for 2014 is to upgrade my old Alcatel infra to an up to date and performant solution.

Here is the situation :

ALcatel 4760 REV9, UCCS Rev 9

About 350 positions on 4 sites. ABout 300 statistics pilots (CDN)

My needs are :

• Automatic call distribution-ACD

• Keeps call records and reports statistics

• Verint or Nice compatible for quality monitoring

• SYmon or Scala compatible for Digital SIgnage

• Rich and scalable real time reporting

• Rich and scalable historical reporting

• Human detection (qualify then hang up if not a human)

• API that my sale software could use

Action on the call (Answer, qualify, hang-up, transfer, ...)
Get some real and historic datas (Call duration, origin, ...)
I've identified two scénarios:

1 - Change everything, Hardware and software I'm thinking about Cisco UCCX/UCCE or AVAYA AACC(Elite). Mitel being integrated to AASTRA I think this operation could slow down and complicate the projetc.

2 - Upgrade Alcatel to R11 and add a blank software I've identified ISI-COM, VOCALCOM, OBS FCC, KIAMO, Altitude UCI, ...

Any advices, experiences will be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jérôme

[cavagnaro]

Well there is not a single answer for this. The Nice or Verint is more on PBX side. Symon or Scala more depends on the CTI used. Reporting also on Contact Center software. I'd say that Alcatel can offer you a solution with Genesys or OTPE for CTI and reporting. Also has a powerful SDK for integration and development. But what about the future? What else you plan to integrate or do? Will be a simple Call Center or could become a Contact Center? Upgrading the OXE (if needed ) may be much cheaper rather than changing the whole platform.
Advantage from my POV is that if you leave everything as is and add a branded ALU CTI (Altitude is also now partner with ALU but is still on initial phases for integration where Genesys/OTPE is already done for years) integrator guys have the experience and support from A single vendor rather than 2 or more.
Recording and Wallboard systems are apart but ALU has also validated many of them and even has integration tests and results.

That again is my POV

[tot3nkopf]

Alcatel CCD has a great ability to execute for a single channel CC solution, when combined with embedded ACR solution. It is also very scalable.
What I would consider is that the new solution should be able to reproduce what you have in place (many CC solution would struggle to do this) and be able to add the new requirements that you have.
Rip and replace would be very expensive in my view. I would go to a new solution highly integrated with current PBX. I am not sure upgrade is really needed at the moment, however a software upgrade + a new CC solution on top may be quite cheap compared to a completely new PBX and a new CC solution on top (integrated or not).

Genesys can offer a great integration via RSI proprietary interface (leveraging embedded voice guides, tone/progress detection, users, etc).

Altitude offers a tightly integrated solution rebranded as OTCS. RSI integration is not ready yet by my knowledge. Only CSTA v2 integration via TSAPI prem server is available using PCM boards. However among the integrated scenarios you can find one that was very interesting for me: keep CCD infrastructure for inbound routing, add new statistics interface (may suit your need for keeping statistics - not yet very clear in available docs), add CTI APIs with new solution (may suit your needs regarding integration with your business apps; add new communication channels as needed (chat, mail, etc). You may not have voice channel blending with the other channels in this scenario, however you can have many other features available and keep the price low as you would not need to pay again for licensing 350 inbound agent licenses...

Of course you can go for a SIP trunk integration (many CC vendors available there) but you have to consider that you will loose most of the business features that are available on a PBX phone.