Siemens today announced two new unified communications enabled contact center packages based on its OpenScape Unified Communications Server, and a new voice portal solution. These products target the needs of midsized and large companies that require a distributed contact center.

The OpenScape Unified Communications Server, which also supports a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based OpenScape Voice package, provides the foundation software for the new contact center software package. The new package is designed to leverage unified communications in a distributed contact center and to facilitate presence and collaboration capabilities. It is compatible with existing enterprise communications systems including those supplied by Siemens, Avaya, Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, and NEC. The system can scale to 7,500 active agents and 100,000 users.

The new voice portal also leverages the OpenScape Unified Communications Server and OpenScape Voice with speech-enabled applications, transaction-based self-service capabilities, and integration with contact center routing. The voice portal scales to over 15,000 ports and is based on open standards that include Voice XML (VXML), SIP, and Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP).

When we spoke to Ross Sedgewick, Director, Global Portfolio Marketing for the Applications Portfolio at Siemens Enterprise Communications about the announcement, he emphasized the critical need for contact center agents to resolve a customer request with the first customer contact. We think that blending a unified communications application with contact center systems creates an opportunity for the agent to improve “first contact resolution.” This can help the agent get expert answers more quickly - especially when the contact center properly builds an internal support team along with an efficient presence-based unified communications application to manage internal communications.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.