Mitel is upgrading its call-center software to make management of dispersed agents simpler.

The Customer Interaction Solution is a combination of software and a Mitel IP PBX, the 3300 IP Communications Platform.

The upgrades, which were announced at last week's VoiceCon show, parallel features being added to equipment from competitors Alcatal, Avaya, Cisco, Inter-Tel and Spanlink.

The software includes Mitel Visual Architect, management software that gives supervisors a map of an automated call-distribution configuration and the ability to modify the configuration.

It can shift calls from a swamped part of a call center to a part where there is less traffic, says Dougal McLean, CIO of PC help desk firm YourTech Online in Kelowna, British Columbia.

"You don't have to call a call technician to do that. It's all there on the screen," says McLean, whose company has been using Mitel gear for four years to support its agents, all of whom work from home.

The software also features Mitel Visual Queue, which can flag premier customers waiting for an agent to pick up, and lets a supervisor give them priority by moving them forward in the queue or sending the call to an alternate answering point. If a customer or group of customers are stuck in a queue, they can be dragged and dropped into a different queue where the wait will be shorter, McLean says.

Visual Queue can flag calls that go on longer than average so supervisors can find trouble spots more readily where intervention might help. The software upgrade supports virtual call centers consisting of agents who may be working from dispersed locations and who connect to the call center via IP phones or Mitel's new automatic call-distribution softphone.

The software gives supervisors a tool to designate which remote workers will be associated with specific agent groups, such as agents in a bank call center who have expertise in mortgages. They will be assigned to the same groups and have calls distributed to them as if they were all in the same physical call center.

The software also supports a feature called hot desking, in which agents can log on to the call center from a Mitel IP phone or Mitel softphone and have the PBX download their personal settings, such as programmable keys and speed dials.