The desire to provide organizations with contact center functionality and UC capabilities everywhere—including accommodating the explosive growth in the use of mobile devices by employees, partners, and customers—has sparked intense interest in the cloud-based UC market from both customers and vendors of all types seeking to enhance their functionality. That is why the announcement that service provider Sprint, through its unit, is partnering with contact center solutions provider to integrate robust contact center capabilities into with Microsoft Lync is noteworthy.
An enhanced, comprehensive offering
As Sprint says, the goal is to provide a one-stop shop for companies looking to improve their unified communications (UC) capabilities, and the partnership with ComputerTalk illustrates exactly what they mean by a one-stop shop.
ComputerTalk offers a native contact center solution called ice. It is described as an all-in-one, software-only, cloud-based contact center that has been built and integrated into the full Microsoft stack. Features include:
- Contact Routing and Distribution
- Full Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Designer
- Call recording and historical reporting
- Real-time monitoring and skills-based routing
- Media-specific interactions
- “UC Workflow” designer for building self-service and complex routing apps
- Instant Messaging (IM), voice, email, web chat, and Twitter
- Ability to route calls to any endpoint recognized by Lync (e.g., mobile devices, landlines, and Lync phones in common areas)
- Ability to forward instant messages to public instant messaging clients
“Sprint is offering the first Microsoft universal communications suite with a native Lync contact center that provides enterprise-grade capabilities,” said Mandle Cheung, chairman and CEO of ComputerTalk. “This will allow Sprint customers to quickly and effectively transition to a cloud-first, mobile-first enterprise solution for communication and collaboration while enhancing the business customer experience.”
Sprint notes that its suite of solutions includes enhanced mobility and SIP trunking integrated for every user, and that this enables customers to have an end-to-end UC platform with a consistent experience across all collaboration tools, operating systems, and endpoints.
“Equipping employees with a wide variety of communication needs and work styles with the right technology will bring them together, foster stronger collaboration, and help businesses grow faster,” said Mike Fitz, vice president of Enterprise Commercialization at Sprint. “Enhancing Sprint Complete Collaboration with contact center features enables businesses to provide a consistent unified communications (UC) solution for all employees while adding capabilities for specific work groups, such as the unique tools needed to directly support customers. Businesses can rely on Sprint as a one-stop shop for this integrated solution that will easily scale and adapt to their business needs.”
With UC serving as the foundation for communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offerings in general, and extending contact center functionality not only across the organization but ultimately to its entire value chain, the pace at which industry players enhance functionality—particularly through integrations with existing services and enterprise customer experience systems such as CRM and ERP—will be a major industry trend in 2015. Sprint’s partnership with ComputerTalk is indicative of just how important this trend will be.
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