BT Contact Boosts Video And Social Media Capabilities With New Cisco Solutions

IRVING, Texas, Feb. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- BT today announced significant enhancements to its contact center portfolio, BT Contact, by integrating the latest contact center solutions from its strategic technology partner, Cisco. Cisco's new suite of products and services will be rolled out by BT globally in the coming weeks and will help enterprises improve productivity, reach customers through new channels, such as social media and video, and enhance customer satisfaction. 

BT Contact's modular architecture allows enterprises to closely tailor the solution they purchase.

• Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise is a complete, pre-packaged solution that supports up to 1,000 agents. It offers everything organizations need to deliver exemplary customer service, with a simple design, pricing, ordering and deployment to single site or distributed contact centers. The solution integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and comes with a comprehensive range of management and reporting tools.
• The latest release of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express enables BT Contact to deliver a highly secure, resilient and sophisticated customer interaction management solution for up to 400 agents. The solution enables team managers and supervisors to monitor the contact center remotely and gives them the ability to remotely reassign agents to fully optimize customer service. A further enhancement is the ability to support in-branch video kiosks, providing customers with access to expertise from any store or branch location, in high-quality video. The addition of Workforce Management enables contact center resources to be managed efficiently and service levels are delivered through effective automation, analysis and scheduling.
• Cisco SocialMiner is a solution allowing BT Contact customers to listen, monitor and respond in real time to conversations customers are conducting online. This is particularly useful for identifying unhappy customers on public forums and helping to engage with them to resolve their problems. 
• Message of the Day Portal enables customers to record and change interactive voice response (IVR) messages on demand via a browser-based portal in real time.    
• The Cisco Customer Management Portal makes changes to scripts or IVR flows through a single portal that is accessible from anywhere.
• Finesse Desktop is integrated into BT Cloud Contact to provide a thin client multimedia desktop which gives companies the ability to customize their desktop environment without the need for an expensive technology overhaul. This helps improve productivity as agents' desktops can be tailored in a way that suits their company's contact strategy.

Andrew Small, VP of BT Contact, BT Global Services, said: "Our contact center customers have been telling us that the pace of change in their sector has never been higher. Their own customers are becoming ever more demanding, expecting consistently excellent service, delivered across multiple new channels, around the clock. The challenge for contact centers is to be flexible enough to meet these changing demands, while keeping operations simple enough to be effectively and efficiently managed. The new Cisco additions to the already extensive end-to-end capabilities of our BT Contact portfolio will strengthen what we can deliver and ensure that we provide the full breadth of solutions that our customers want."

John Hernandez, Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Collaboration Business Applications Business Unit, said: "We believe the combination of BT and Cisco creates a uniquely compelling proposition. BT Contact customers benefit from enterprise-class service levels, security and reliability from two of the most-established companies in the contact center field. Furthermore, they can apply our combined strength to contact centers of any size, from the smallest to the very largest, and in any location."  

Details on the BT Contact portfolio are available at www.bt.com/btcontact.

For further information

All news releases can be accessed at our web sites: http://www.globalservices.bt.com/us/en/news and http://www.btplc.com/news

About BT

BT is one of the world's leading providers of communications services and solutions, serving customers in more than 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to its customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, BT Retail, BT Wholesale and Openreach.

In the year ended 31 March 2012, BT Group's revenue was £18,897m with profit before taxation of £2,445m.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York. 

For more information, visit www.btplc.com

SOURCE BT