West IP Communications Announces ControlMaxx Update for Contact Centers

West IP Communications (West), a provider of cloud-based communication applications and services, recently announced significant upgrades to its ControlMaxx cloud-based contact center solution. ControlMaxx delivers a set of call routing, queue management, performance monitoring, recording and reporting functionality providing enterprises with the capability to meet the expectations of their most demanding customers. The new features focus on continued improvement to efficiency, productivity growth and the positioning of administrators and agents to deliver more effective customer service.

ControlMaxx Features

Baseline features are:

• Call Director – Interface to manage inbound numbers and how they route, based on geography, time-of-day and holiday schedules, or to enact disaster recovery plans in the event of outages
  
  
• Contact Center – Product bundle consisting of advanced contact center features for improved agent efficiency and management tools for visibility, control and reporting needs
  
  
• Call Queuing – Centralized interface for creating and managing call queues including controls for agent priority, call distribution, music/message on hold, and overflow options
  
  
• Call Recording – Record calls of individuals or call groups and retrieve them using a simple interface
  
  
• Call Monitoring – Listen real-time to individual calls without disrupting the agent
  
  
• Call Reporting – Robust reporting engine, providing real-time status and analytics, including reports by queue, agent, call or path
  
  
• Agent Desktop Client – PC application providing access to real-time queue/call statistics and alerts, user call status and transfer capabilities, secure chat functionality and advanced screen-pop functionality that can be integrated with a company’s CRM, like Salesforce.com

This newest version of ControlMaxx reflects the evolving demands faced by contact centers and is the direct result of in-depth feedback from West’s clients. These new features include:

• Enhanced User Interface – Redesigned menu system for easier navigation and updated call flow component layouts for visual consistency and ease of use
  
  
• Better Security – Supports Secure web protocol (HTTPS/SSL) for enhanced security
  
  
• Multimedia Queuing – Queuing capabilities for voice calls and chat discussions, opening up a new channel of communication with an organization’s customers
  
  
• Queue Priority – Queues can be prioritized for call distribution, ensuring agents in multiple queues will get the highest priority call
  
  
• Screen Capture Recording – Audio syncing capabilities with video for better monitoring, quality assurance and training purposes
  
  
• Barge – Supervisors are able to join agents on customer calls, in addition to monitor and whisper features, for better call resolution
  
  
• Session Tags – Administrators can provide relevant identifiers for use by agents during their calls or chats. Supervisors can also view and filter by identifiers in the Session Reports for better understanding of the relevance of a particular call or chat.
  
  
• Enhanced Reporting – Dynamic searching and reporting capabilities of sessions in Excel, PDF and CSV file formats

What This Means to You

West’s cloud solutions support most UC functions, including VoIP, contact center, messaging, audio conferencing, presence and mobility. Many clients subscribe to multiple UC functions, reports Gartner in its UCaaS Magic Quadrant (December 7, 2011). Focusing in on the contact center, Gartner sees this as a strong solution integrated with UCaaS.

West partners with inContact to offer joint cloud-based communications and contact center solutions.

We see two particular points in West’s favor: (1) ControlMaxx has been designed from the ground up to support the integration of communications into business processes; and (2) it was built with business continuity in mind.

Business process integration: Businesses know that communications infrastructure is at the heart of a modern business. It is an essential element in the recipe of providing their customers with a consistent and efficient service across all of their customer contact channels. Today, more than ever, customers have high expectations for service delivery, are intolerant of delays and inadequate services and leverage social media accordingly in voicing their likes and dislikes. Given this service context, ControlMaxx has been designed to enable voice and data to be inte­grated into enterprise business processes and applications. Incoming call- and caller-provided data can be used to provide intelligent call routing and integration with the applications and services an agent needs to deliver a high quality customer experience.

Business continuity: The ControlMaxx architecture is delivered from highly resilient, secure application servers located in geographically distributed data centers. The ap­plication provides a strong set of business continuity and disaster recovery features during times of critical need, allowing for on-the-fly changes to ensure that businesses continue to operate. ControlMaxx is further backed by 24x7x365 NOC for continual proactive monitoring.

Of course, West is not alone in offering such a solution – Genesys, Interactive Intelligence and ShoreTel, among others, offer competing cloud-based contact center solutions. As such, we recommend that customers assess the various competitive solutions in terms of the risk-adjusted benefits and costs.

Some additional questions that customers need to have answered are:

• Security: Can the same security available to applications on-prem be applied in the cloud?
  
  
• Compliance: Can applications in the cloud meet the same regulatory compliance requirements I am faced with on-prem?
  
  
• Control: Can application owners still have the same amount of control over their applications and the infrastructure supporting them in the cloud?
  
  
• Fear of vendor lock-in: Will use of a particular vendor for cloud services or infrastructure prevent use of a different one in the future, or will the enterprise’s data and applications be tightly locked into a particular model?
  
  
• Ease of implementation/management/maintenance: Is the management of the UCC/contact center solution straightforward and intuitive making life easier for the IT team, not more difficult?