Telstra has launched a hosted contact centre service using technology from market leader Genesys. Meanwhile, its international arm is offering -outside Australia a cloud-based contact centre service using technology from Australian company IPscape in which Telstra is an investor.
Announcing the launch of the Genesys-based service, dubbed 'Network Contact Centre', Philip Jones, Telstra executive director, data & IP, network applications & services, said it would provide significant customer service benefits and had the potential to scale to several thousand agents across multiple locations.
According to Telstra, "the solution features improved functionality with BroadSoft integration for IP telephony environments, seamless web chat, SMS multimedia capabilities and enterprise workload management integration."
It is available either fully-hosted - on a pay by usage basis - or co-hosted on customers' premises. Telstra uses the technology to support its own contact centre operations, that field more than 100 million calls annually.
Telstra - through its subsidiary Telstra Application and Ventures Group invested about $5m for a 31.3 percent stake in Australian cloud based contact centre service provider IPscape in June and Telstra Global launched the product as Telstra Global Virtual Contact Centre (VCC), hosted in Telstra data centres and marketed initially to corporates in South East Asia.
IPscape founder and managing director, Simon Burke told iTWire at the time that he hoped the service would eventually be offered by Telstra in Australia.
Research firm Frost & Sullivan has tipped a significant shift to cloud based contact centre services in Australia and in the wake of the recent acquisition of Australian hosted contact centre company Engage by US based LivePerson, has predicted that several other US players will enter the local market in the next 18 months, singling out in particular inContact and CosmoCom.
