Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) has been busy building up its contact center portfolio, based on the integration of the OpenScape Contact Center Portfolio with products from another member of The Gores Group and Siemens’ portfolio, the former SER Solutions (I still think the joint name should be SENSER). Siemens and SER have a great deal of synergy, and the new customer interaction applications, OpenScape Contact Center Unity (OSCC Unity) and OpenScape Contact Center Campaign Director (OSCC Campaign Director), reflect that. For those of you not familiar with SER, the products include software-based Workforce Management, Quality Management, contact management, and speech analytics solutions for the contact center. Obviously this fits nicely with Siemens’ contact center offerings, which were missing most of these capabilities.

During an analyst briefing, Scott McDonald of Siemens noted that the company’s guiding principles have remained the same in the past year. Siemens’ products are moving from enterprise to larger customers with more sophisticated requirements, the company is continuing to extending its portfolio with new products while leveraging the OpenScape Voice Solution, SEN is executing on its strategic plan for open standards as well as contact center and UC convergence, plus a continued focus on Siemens’ core product values such as SOA standards and first contact resolution. McDonald noted that SEN has delivered on these principles, and will continue to execute on this plan.

The new OpenScape Contact Center Solutions portfolio (formerly HiPath ProCenter) products announced are OpenScape Contact Center Unity (OSCC Unity) – an all-in-one application targeted at campaign/claims driven market segments in collections, healthcare, financial services and insurance; and OpenScape Contact Center Campaign Director (OSCC Campaign Director), aimed at contact center optimization, outbound predictive dialing, campaign and list management.

While Siemens’ current product, OpenScape Contact Center Version 7, added voice portal and multitenancy capabilities last year, the newest version (which is currently in development) adds multiple contact handling for chat and email, as well as IM support for inside the contact center and outside to the enterprise using UC.

SER’s outbound capabilities and speech analytics toolkit, based on a software-based open approach, lets customers leverage existing infrastructure while adding these new capabilities.

By intelligently blending agents inbound and outbound calls, OpenScape Campaign Director is an outbound application for campaign management, predictive dialing, proactive contact, and agentless IVR, aimed at large volume outbound contact centers or inbound centers looking to add proactive contact.

OpenScape Contact Center Unity is an all-in-one application that primarily at outbound campaign driven, but also has inbound routing, chat, and individual call recording. It is aimed at collections, healthcare, insurance claims, loans processors, financial services, outsourcing, and telemarketing needs.

SEN wisely tied the need for these types of capabilities by companies in today’s down economy, nothing that there is currently a focus on increasing customer revenue and retention. The ability for blending inbound and outbound agentless, as well as agentless IVR can help in this area. There is also a need to reduce operating expenses, which can be addressed by reducing inbound call volumes using proactive contact and increasing agent efficiency leveraging inbound agents for outbound. SEN added a blending option for OpenScape Contact Center Enterprise for blending inbound and outbound agents, making agents more efficient and lowering operating costs. The new blending module keeps inbound agent focused on inbound calls but makes them available for outbound dialing when needed.

Siemens has probably been the most aggressive enterprise communication vendor in terms of moving to software-based solutions, and the company is continuing in that direction. Its UC-enabled contact center solution is an open standards, software-based offering, and products like OSCC Campaign Director are evolving to software-based solutions that will be bundled with Siemens’ UC server.

While depressing to think about, two of the few growing markets in today’s economy are collections and outbound campaigns from debt consolidation and debt counseling companies, credit card companies, and other similar types of organizations. Siemens’ OpenScape Contact Center Campaign Director and OpenScape Contact Center Unity provide the outbound capabilities needed by these companies to be more effective at collections and telemarketing - and disturbing us during dinner time.