Reachme An Open Software-Based Contact Center Solution
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An entirely new contact center solution The ezuce enterprise communications and collaboration solution includes a fully-integrated flexible and open contact center application called Reachme. Reachme represents a new generation of multi-media and multi-channel contact center solutions, built as a software application, administered as part of the IT infrastructure, and with features that make agents and supervisors more productive. It is an easy to install, easy to administer contact center solution that seamlessly integrates with Uniteme unified communications and collaboration features for a modern call routing experience. It allows IT to add contact center capabilities to a UC deployment without heavy administrative effort or cost. Based on open standards, it can integrate with CRM systems including Salesforce, SugarCRM, and others. Knowledge workers and supervisor desktops can easily be customized to fit specific customer or application needs. Powerful skills-based and priority routing gets customers connected to agents in no time. Agents and supervisors enjoy a presence-enabled work environment with a set of modern tools at their disposal to do a better job at a fraction of the cost. 3 Reachme Reach
Why choose Reachme? Traditional contact center solutions are complex and expensive. Reachme introduces a new value proposition, fully integrated into Uniteme's comprehensive unified communications and collaboration solution. If you are an IT manager looking to replace a costly legacy call center product with an affordable, light and Web-based solution with modern features, Reachme is the ideal solution. It will make agents more productive at a fraction of the cost of competing products, and it integrates easily with your existing Uniteme or other unified communications environment. Web integration is easy as Reachme offers a powerful Web Services based API for business process and application integration. Reachme is easy to use and as a standards-based SIP application it seamlessly integrates within your existing environment. Reachme is a flexible and cost-effective contact center solution that enhances your operational efficiencies by reducing an agent s average processing time. Agents are more satisfied with their work environment as Reachme offers greater flexibility, an attractive agent dashboard, and location liberation, providing the freedom to work from anywhere. 4 Reachme Reach
Ideal for hosted and private cloud operation Reachme is designed with virtualization and cloud operation in mind from the ground up. As a component of Uniteme, it directly benefits from the small resource footprint and automated cluster deployment that has made Uniteme the preferred cloud-based communications and collaboration solution. Reachme is a pure software solution that runs on standard virtualized hardware and a standard Linux-based software stack with no additional cost for operating system, middleware, or database. Reachme technology will allow clustering across large geographic distances, offering multi-client queueing for the globally distributed contact center. Packaged as an easy to deploy product, Reachme is ideal for the midsize to large enterprise wanting to host their own contact center solution in their private cloud, or for Managed Services Providers (MSPs) offering a contact center managed service. Powerful and flexible features Configurable recipe-based queue management Each queue follows a recipe. Recipes are a set of configurable rules that allow for granular control over how calls are routed and handled. The recipe allows configuration of a large number of static and dynamic queue behaviors. Music on hold, queue audio, queue audio interval, and termination audio are all configured in the recipe. The recipe also allows for dynamically changing a call or message priority or the skills required to process the call or message based on time in queue and other criteria. Skills-based routing Reachme is a skills-based contact center solution. Incoming calls and messages are assigned a skills requirement based on criteria related to the specific call or message. Each call or message is prioritized and is only assigned to qualified agents having all the skills required. Agents are assigned skills based on their abilities or assigned work. Reachme can also support basic queuing, assigning calls to queues and without the use of skills. Queue overflow management Queue overflow is handled through recipes and is part of queue management. The recipe dynamically defines actions to be taken if a call remains in queue for too long. For example, the recipe could reduce the skills required in order to allow additional agents to accept the call. Priority queuing Incoming calls or messages are queued against agent skills and the priority in that queue is determined by a number of configurable factors including ANI (CallerID) and media type. Some of these factors are represented as static rules; others are dynamically assigned based on events in the system or supervisor intervention. Each queue can be assigned a weight and calls in queues with higher weight are assigned higher priority. Multi-media and multi-channel operation Reachme not only handles calls but can also queue voicemail messages and emails, and it is ready to support instant messages (chat) and video messages. Indeed, the Reachme queueing mechanism is independent of media type and therefore allows great flexibility for customers in need of more than calls. 5 Reachme
openuc DIAGRAM PLACEHOLDER Agent Workstation The Reachme agent workstation is easy to use and intuitive. Based on freely arrangeable Web widgets it provides agent state, personal statistics, and session presentation and management. Agents can also use tablet computers with touch screens for their work to create a modern and mobile environment. Flexible call handling It is easy for agents to put calls on hold, transfer to other agents, queues or external numbers. Prior to transfer, the agent can see the other agent s current status. If the other agent is not available, the call can be transferred to another agent or queued. Agents can also initiate ad-hoc conferences between the caller and one or more other agents or supervisors. An easy-to-use graphical interface makes these critical and effective features effortless to use. Voicemail Rather than waiting in queue, callers can exit to voicemail and leave a message. Priority for voicemail messages relative to calls is configurable and agents are presented with and manage voicemail messages similar to live calls. Calls can also roll over to voicemail based on configurations performed by the recipe or through supervisor intervention. Agents can call back or send an email in response to the caller. Email messages Each queue can be assigned one or several line (DID) numbers and email addresses. Emails sent to the queue s email address are queued against agent skills based on the skills required by the incoming message. Agents can 6 Reachme
process email messages similar to how they process calls or voicemail using the agent dashboard. Message disposition and wrap-up times apply. Multi-customer use case If you need a contact center that operates on behalf of several customers or clients, a specific customer or client name can be assigned to an incoming line or address. This customer ID is reflected in reporting and can be assigned as a dynamic or magic skill to agents so that certain agents preferably process calls for a certain customer. For an incoming call the agent is presented with the client name and optionally a logo so that the call can be answered appropriately for that customer. Call disposition After the agent is done processing a call or message, an optional call disposition process can be initiated where the agent selects from a set of options. Call disposition is integrated with reporting and allows structured follow-up with callers. Call disposition can be integrated with third party applications, such as Salesforce.com or SugarCRM. Release codes There are many reasons for an agent to be temporarily unavailable. The call center manager and supervisor can define a custom set of away or break codes from which the agent can choose. Each away or break code is associated with a bias, either negative or positive, that allows calculating an overall productivity score. Welcome audio Each line allows the configuration of a custom welcome/announcement message played to the caller. This message is played in its entirety prior to being routed to the appropriate queue. The playing time of the message is not included in the reporting of queued time. Wrap-up time Queues enable the definition of a wrap-up time which can be used to allow agents to wrap up a conversation and be available for the next call. The administrator can configure the count down timer displayed to the agent and can be used to move the agent out of a wrap-up state into idle. barge in to help, or record calls for quality assurance. Supervisors may also dynamically change call or message priority, required skills to answer a call or message, and the individual skills offered by an agent. Remote agents Another significant benefit of a SIP-based contact center is the ability to allow agents to work remotely from anywhere. This adds tremendous flexibility for distributed contact centers including home-based or virtual agents. Agent groups Reachme allows the creation of agent group profiles with certain skills, which simplifies the administration of large agent populations. Reporting can be generated at the agent group level to help supervisors gain visibility into their specific areas of responsibility. Agent call back Reachme offers an outbound calling capability for agents to dial out. This is useful for example to respond to voicemail messages or email messages, where the caller requested a call back. Automatic ring-fail If an agent does not pick up a ringing call, a ringfail condition is triggered and the call stays at its current position in the queue to be offered to the next available agent with the appropriate skill set. The number of rings before ring-fail will be configurable and, following the failures, the agent is signed out and assigned a release state with negative bias. Call pop-ups Calls are announced to the agent with all available information. Integration with third party CRM or other systems is possible. The agent dashboard allows for a screen-pop based on a parameterized URL that fetches relevant information from a third party CRM or other system. Supervisor interventions Supervisors can monitor ongoing conversations, 7 Reachme
Instant Messaging to improve productivity Reachme allows agents, specialists and supervisors to use chat and group chat to communicate instantly. Chat rooms are used for agents to meet with specialists and ask questions without delay and without having to transfer the call. Instant messaging and presence are critical tools in the modern contact center environment and both agents and supervisors can greatly benefit from this capability. Uniteme uses the standard XMPP protocol to facilitate chat with both internal and external parties leveraging the powerful and highly scalable instant messaging service provided by Uniteme. Chat can easily be initiated from within the agent dashboard using the Web chat gadget, or an external client can be used such as ezuce Unite. Specific chat rooms can be defined to implement support groups for certain skills, products, or clients or agents can be put in a chat room with their supervisor. 8 Reachme
Reachme system architecture Reachme is a scalable and optionally redundant software-based contact center implementation. It is fully integrated into the Uniteme administration and cluster management system. Enabling Reachme on an existing Uniteme system is as simple as checking a single check box in the admin portal of Uniteme. All the necessary actions to install and configure Reachme happens automatically under the hood. One or several Reachme nodes can be instantiated on different virtual or physical servers, with each Reachme node paired to a media server for call processing. All Reachme nodes are centrally managed and setting up an additional node is easy and fully automated. The Uniteme system offers a dedicated role for an Reachme node that can be assigned to a server in the cluster. Individual Reachme nodes then communicate over the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) with the Uniteme SIP Session Manager. Reachme architecture offers redundancy and disaster recovery in a very elegant and effective way. Queues are able to span several Reachme nodes allowing agents to take calls from queues served by any node. If a node fails, while calls on that node may be affected, the contact center continues to operate with new calls coming into the other functioning nodes. Nodes can be dynamically added and removed to scale contact center capacity based on call or message volume during the day, assuring good occupancy rates. connections, now available in browsers. This leads to a responsive user experience with the user interface updating in real-time. Fields and information in the user interface are updated individually and without redrawing the entire page, creating the user experience that is most desired by contact center workers. MongoDB, the database at the core of Origin, provides distributed persistent storage for the Reachme system. It stores configuration data as well as all events required for reporting. Backup and restore is centralized, automated, and integrated with the Uniteme system. All system configuration for Reachme is part of the Uniteme administration and management system. Reachme is built to run in the cloud on a variety of virtualized infrastructures. It is therefore ideal for service providers who want to offer hosted contact center solutions as a managed service, or for enterprises who virtualized their internal IT infrastructure. Reachme is the most cost-effective contact center solution available, requiring minimal virtual resources and significantly less labor to deploy, maintain, and support. Reachme nodes can be deployed in different locations with local trunks delivering calls into that node. The queues span several geographically distributed nodes and agents sign-in to the system and receive calls from any node. The result is significantly improved call center operation with easy and cost-effective disaster recovery options. The communication between the Reachme server and the agent/supervisor portals is using modern and extremely fast Web Socket (WS) 9 Reachme
Call recording and quality monitoring Reachme allows recording of calls for monitoring, archiving, or quality assurance purposes. The agent dashboard provides a recording gadget for easy search and retrieval of archived messages which can be played directly from the user interface. Additional external recording solutions are compatible with Reachme, such as the OrecX call recording solution. OrecX provides a fully featured contact center quality monitoring and recording product. 10 Reachme
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Many typical contact center deployments implement an IVR-tree before the caller hits the queue. Reachme offers a basic yet easy-to-use IVR system. An unlimited number of menus and submenus can be created to handle call routing. Extensive time of day routing can also be utilized to route calls to different menus or queues. Routing to different menu structures based on inbound dialed numbers is also easily accomplished. For an even more flexible IVR solution several options exist. For one, Reachme as a standards compliant SIP system, can easily be connected to third-party IVR systems if available. In addition, a fully programmable IVR can be added into the Reachme solution that can also tap into different databases to retrieve specific information used for call routing. For advanced call routing IVRs can be programmed using one of several scripting or programming languages. A PIN can be requested to enter certain destinations, or a database dip can be performed to obtain specific account or billing information before moving a call into queue. While Reachme does not include a Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine, the built-in IVR is capable of interfacing with TTS-products from several vendors. The same applies to speech recognition systems from a variety of vendors. IVR capabilities Contact centers typically deploy an IVR system that interacts with callers, gathers information, and routes calls to the appropriate queue. The built-in IVR system is a powerful component of the Reachme system. It allows messages to be played and interactive responses, usually touchtones, to be processed in order to direct calls to particular destinations. It can allow callers to hear information without needing to speak to a live person, select options that enable or disable features, or enter data that can be used in further processing the call. IVR menus are defined in XML with a powerful set of options available to the administrator. Different greetings can be specified for different menu options and multiple sounds can be chained together into a phrase. Additional information can be gathered using DTMF tones. For each menu entry a destination and several options are specified. IVR menus can also be nested using sub-menus. 11 Reachme
Agent dashboard Reachme contact center solution includes a modern and fully configurable agent and supervisor dashboard. The dashboard technology is based on open Web standards allowing functionality to be offered in configurable gadgets that can be placed and moved around on the dashboard by the agent or supervisor. Each gadget is a separate logical block that can be added to the screen and positioned. Since standard Web portlet technology is used to build these gadgets, it is also possible to integrate these gadgets into other already existing Web pages and applications. This creates additional opportunity for customers, system integrators and managed services providers to customize and integrate with other applications and business processes. The user interface is built to render on regular computer monitors, but also on tablet computers with touch interface, resulting in maximum flexibility in work space setup and mobility. Available gadgets include the Agent State gadget, the Session State gadget, the agent My Statistics gadget and also an Outbound Call gadget. Additional gadgets can be added to accommodate new functionality. 12 Reachme
Agent real-time statistics Agents have access to personal real-time statistics that are relevant to the agent s specific role in the contact center. The agent My Statistics gadget provides all relevant real-time statistics that help an agent be productive. It shows the agent s personal statistics for different time intervals and allows comparison to the agent group overall. This gives the agent an immediate overview of his or her own performance in relation to the group. In addition, the agent can immediately get a measure of overall activity based on the different states of his or her peer agents. With many agents in Idle state load is light and with many agents In Session or in Wrap-up load is high. The agent My Statistics gadget allows individual tracking of statistics for different media types and it gives the agent information about profile and skills currently provided. 13 Reachme
Supervisor Dashboard The supervisor dashboard adds additional functionality and additional gadgets to the agent dashboard that are important to a supervisor. Supervisors can monitor agents and barge in to help. They can also record sessions and make recordings available to a QA group. Supervisors can change the priority of a call or message in queue, change its required skill set or change the skill set offered by an agent. Supervisors can also transfer calls to a specific agent or force the call to voicemail. Supervisors can monitor an agent s state or presence. Direct communication with the agent is possible using instant messaging. The supervisor can also broadcast messages to all agents or engage in a group chat. Supervisor reporting or real-time and historic data is available in reporting gadgets from the Reachme reporting server. 14 Reachme
Reporting Reachme includes the Jasper Reports (www.jaspersoft.com) reporting application to generate a powerful set of canned and customized reports. Reports are available through the Reachme dashboard with a number of predefined reports including Call Detail Report (CDR), agent group productivity report, agent productivity report, agent call disposition, agent release time, queue traffic overview, queue traffic detail, and agent session report. Additional reports can be custom generated based on the comprehensive set of event data recorded and stored by Reachme. Reports are available in Web format where certain parameters, such as the date range and other options, can be selected in real-time. A print or CSV format is also available. Combining the Jasper Reports functionality and business intelligence package with Reachme provides an extremely flexible and comprehensive reporting solution that should meet even the most stringent requirements at the lowest cost possible. 15 Reachme
Hardware requirements and scalability Reachme is designed as a cloud application that runs on virtualized hardware and within a standard Linux operating environment. Reachme integrates the MongoDB database and does not require any additional third-party licenses. Reachme can co-reside with other Origin services on a share server. Call capacity would vary depending on the server capabilities. Maximum load in any environment depends on several factors including call volume for the difference services that can run on a shared host. ezuce Solutions Architects are able to advise on requirements specific to each organization. For higher loads, additional compute resources can be dedicated to Reachme servers. Reachme can be clustered for scale and redundancy, where a queue can span several Reachme nodes and agents can receive calls from any node. Scalability in such a clustered environment is expected to exceed 1,000 agents, geographically distributed. 16 Reachme
Feature Matrix Contact Center Operation Multi-media contact center supporting voice and voicemail with email available in release 2. Ready to add Instant Messaging (chat) as an incoming media stream in a later release Cloud-based operation using all virtualized hardware Single server operation. Distributed and redundant operation in a later release Fully integrated with Uniteme and centrally managed Built-in IVR functionality, programmable Agent login via TUI or Web Clients, Queues and Skills-Based Routing Multi-tenant queuing supporting several clients Skills-based routing (call assigned required skill matched against agent provided skill) Magic skill dynamic expansion for parameterbased dynamic call routing Multiple queues with priority queuing based on queue, media type, DNIS (ANI) Multiple lines per queue for different clients or skills requirements Traditional queue-based call routing In queue call treatment via recipes that can be used to dynamically play audio, raise/lower priority, add/remove skills and more Source routing of incoming calls based on ANI via recipe Callers can exit to voicemail and voicemail is delivered to agent based on priority Expected wait time will become available in a later release Queue overflow management including overflow to voicemail Agents User friendly agent dashboard on regular computer terminal or tablet with touch interface Customizable agent gadgets that can be added and arranged on the dashboard Call transfer or conference to another agent, queue or external number Conference to multiple parties with individual control of each conference leg Call disposition entered by the agent Client configurable agent away or break codes with bias to calculate productivity scores Automatic ring-fail with bias. Reporting on bias in release 2 Caller specific screen pop from CRM or other application Outbound call gadget for agent call back Real-time statistics to agents provided by My Statistics gadget Unified presence integration between agent state and agent presence available in a later release Fully configurable Wrap Mode that allows for wrap time counter control and/or forced wrap-up of a call 17 Reachme
Supervisors Flexible supervisor dashboard using computer terminal or tablet with touch screen operation Supervisor call transfer or force call to voicemail available in a later release Supervisor broadcast of message of the day available in a later release Supervisor barge, monitor and actions Supervisor queue and agent monitoring using Agent and Queue gadgets Supervisor changing of call or message priority or required skills for a call will become available in a later release Supervisor changing (temporarily or permanently) the skills provided by an agent available in a later release Supervisor can change the state of an agent e.g. from Idle to Released Configurable call recording based on the Client for the inbound call Supervisor access to recordings via a call recording gadget that allows for filtering recordings on agent, client, queue, call ID and more All agent gadgets available to supervisors as well Agent and supervisor chat/group chat Remote agents using a SIP end-point for distributed contact center operation Reports Comprehensive data collection and archiving Set of initial canned reports available in the supervisor dashboard Database access provided for custom reporting or connection to third party reporting Historic reports based on Jasper Reports allowing easy generation of custom reports and customization 18 Reachme
About ezuce ezuce is an innovative technology company that provides a visually integrated unified collaboration environment to small and medium enterprises. The company leverages a commercial open source software and service model to deliver industry leading value to its customers and partners. be there ezuce is changing the way people collaborate within the enterprise. By emphasizing visual interaction, the human factor, and user-centricity, ezuce software and service solutions enable individuals and teams to collaborate on their terms, to be there for the busines at the right time, the right place, with the right device. ezuce OriginTM is an open software platform that supports any end-user device while delivering virtually unlimited scalability, robust functionality, and flexible cloud/on premise deployment options. Combined with an open-source economic model that slashes both operating and capital expenses to deliver unprecedented value among enterprise-class telephony and collaboration vendors. 19 Reachme
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