contact center express proposal

Avaya Customer Interact ion Suite

An Avaya Contact Center Express Solution for

PRUDENTIAL

Presented by:Sun Ivy & NSE Inc.

May 08, 2007

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Avaya Customer Interaction Suite

Table of Contents

1. Proposal Overview............................................................................................................................. 1

The Avaya Customer Interaction Suite...................................................................................................2

The Avaya Advantage............................................................................................................................ 5

Avaya Contact Management.................................................................................................................. 7

2. Solution Design.................................................................................................................................. 7

MultiVantage™ Contact Center Overview..............................................................................................7

Call Center Elite Offer............................................................................................................................. 7

Avaya Virtual Routing........................................................................................................................... 14

Contact Center Express....................................................................................................................... 19

Multimedia Overview........................................................................................................................ 20

What's New Contact Center Express................................................................................................21

Preview Contact Media Store...........................................................................................................35

Avaya Call Management System (CMS)..............................................................................................45

Call Management System (CMS) on Netra 210...............................................................................51

Avaya Visual Vectors – A Graphical Routing Administration Option.................................................52

NICE PERFORM recording system......................................................................................................54

TP Knowledge Management (KM)........................................................................................................55

3. Service Management........................................................................................................................ 58

4. Implementation Plan......................................................................................................................... 58

5. Pricing (Please see Appendix A)......................................................................................................59

6. Additional Information....................................................................................................................... 59

a. Proposal System Total Diagram:......................................................................................................59

7. Proposal Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 60

©2007 Sun Ivy & NSE Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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1. Proposal Overview

For Prudential’s Contact Center, the pressure to deliver positive results that provide competitive advantage has never been greater. To achieve that advantage, your call center must come through on a number of fronts. In today’s business climate, customer satisfaction is critical to PRUDENTIAL’S success. So it’s vital for PRUDENTIAL’S Contact Center to deliver more consistent, personalized customer service. In addition, you need to accomplish more with less. That means operating the Contact Center at a lower cost while increasing agent efficiency and effectiveness across the enterprise. And you must be able to do all of this while enhancing the business value of each and every customer interaction.

The right technology solutions can make all the difference in improving the ongoing productivity and revenue potential of PRUDENTIAL’S Contact Center. Effective Contact Center solutions allow agents to respond rapidly to customer demands. They provide for optimum load balancing based upon the workhandling guidelines PRUDENTIAL’S firm wishes to implement—under both call surplus and agent surplus conditions. They make the most of agent availability, skills, and experience and integrate readily with other productivity tools in a multi-vendor environment.

Finally, and most importantly, superior Contact Center solutions lower PRUDENTIAL’S Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase PRUDENTIAL’S Return on Investment (ROI).

Avaya Contact Center delivers benefits in three key areas:

Serving Customers Better – Deliver exceptional and consistent customer experiences anytime, anywhere.

Enables seamless customer relationship and experience across channels

Provides a standardized solution across the organization

Enables customer segmentation

Increases first contact resolution

Customer service distinguishes successful players from “also-rans” in the market today. To stay competitive, companies must engage customers across multiple communication channels, including the Web, e-mail, fax, and traditional telephone. Moreover, with the growing reliance on wireless networking, IP telephony, and Web-based business processes, customer demands can literally come at any time from anywhere.

When you can ensure the quality of every customer interaction, you can build loyalty and increase revenue opportunities. In contrast, there’s a high price to pay for neglecting the customer experience. Fully 70 percent of customer defections are a result of poor customer service. And it costs five times as much to acquire new customers as it does to retain existing ones.1

Maximizing customer service—and minimizing the cost of finding new customers—requires that you be able to respond quickly and serve customers at their convenience by whatever methods they prefer. That means having the ability to communicate seamlessly across all channels.

To provide customers with consistent, superior service across all channels, you need an integrated application suite that gives everyone involved with customer service a single, comprehensive view of each customer. To optimize productivity, each worker needs instant access to information like customer history, common segmentation strategies, business decision-making rules, and routing intelligence. To

1 Sources: James L. Heskett, Thomas O. Jones, Gary Loveman, Jr., W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard A. Schlesinger, Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition, (Harvard Business School Press, December 10, 2003). Frederick F. Reichheld and Thomas Teal, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value, (Harvard Business School Press, 2001).


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optimize returns, a contact center solution must allow decision makers in PRUDENTIAL’S organization to quickly take action and enhance PRUDENTIAL’S business whenever the opportunity arises.

Increasing Revenues – What makes a contact center a strategic asset?

Provides scripting and prompting to drive customer engagement

Promotes cross-sell and up-sell opportunities by intelligently routing customers to the proper resource

Every customer contact is an opportunity to "make or break" PRUDENTIAL’S brand image and customer relationship. The business of real-time matching of the right customer to the right agent or resource in the right time is paramount to a successful customer experience. If done right, customers are more satisfied, up-sell and cross-sell can be more effective, and high-value customer segments can be handled according to PRUDENTIAL’S business rules. Through enterprise wide agent pooling and patented resource matching techniques, Avaya Contact Center solutions help businesses realize higher levels of efficiency while at the same time driving increased revenues.

Lowering Operational Costs – Avaya’s unique evolutionary approach.

Provides open IP standards support

Includes distributed enterprise / remote agent capabilities

Provides universal customer value-based intelligent routing

Enables global integration

Provides investment protection

Uses a single application environment

Deriving business value from operating a Contact Center is very challenging. Numerous studies by industry analysts have identified the two most significant cost drivers as people (salaries, benefits) and telecommunications (trunking, 800 charges). These two expenses make up between 80-90% of the total cost structure of running a Contact Center, and these costs get magnified when running a multisite center. Not surprisingly, organizations have been keen to implement multisite optimization technologies to help minimize those two line items by invoking centralized management and pooling agent resources, referred to as virtualization.

The Avaya Contact Center solution leverages IP to flatten and consolidate contact center infrastructure, removing expensive network charges and running many locations from one centralized set of applications (or maybe two for redundancy). Home agents, satellite locations, outsourced resources, and resident experts are then easily added as extensions to the same contact center, maintaining centralized management and decision-making. With the unique, evolutionary Avaya approach to IP, contact centers can get started at their own pace, choosing whatever mix of existing traditional and new IP telephony makes sense.

The Avaya Customer Interaction Suite

The Avaya Customer Interaction Suite provides the model framework for a powerful suite-based architecture. At the highest level, it forms an integral part of Avaya’s strategy of using an integrated communications architecture to drive business results enabling reduced costs, lowered risk, and increased revenues. The following diagram (Figure 1) helps put this framework in perspective by depicting where it falls within the Avaya Communications Architecture, Avaya’s overriding communications strategy.


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Figure 1: Avaya Communications Architecture

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The architectural diagram shown in Figure 1 illustrates Avaya’s commitment to consistent, cohesive, integrated communications across the enterprise with complete interoperability for:

Unified Access: providing consistent, personalized, collaborative access to any media communications at any time, from any where

Communications Applications: offering the common framework, interoperability, modular software, and flexible capabilities to meet particular business requirements and industry needs, including our new architecture for contact center solutions, Avaya Customer Interaction Suite

Converged Infrastructure: enabling simplified solution design, deployment, and management with an open standards platform, multi-vendor integration, and common administration tools

Global Services: supplying the expert services that surround the architecture with a single point-ofaccountability and a comprehensive portfolio of support from initial consulting and development to maintenance and managed services

Within this powerful communications framework resides the Avaya Contact Center solution, Avaya Customer Interaction Suite, which carries suite-based architecture to the next level by offering Avaya’s robust contact center capabilities in one integrated, modular, open-standards suite (see Figure 2).


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Figure 2: Avaya Customer Interaction Suite Architecture

As shown in Figure 2, the Avaya Customer Interaction Suite architecture connects people and processes across the enterprise with benefits for:

Customers: with consistent multichannel communications and personalized customer services

Agents: extensive multi-location interactive capabilities for productive “right” agent support, i.e., routing the right contact to the right agent with the right information at the right time

Enterprise: modularity for cost-effective leveraging of the current infrastructure and cohesive, multivendor integration for efficient operations, business process optimization, and connectivity across multi-locations

Specifically, this suite-based architecture features a versatile array of enhanced capability areas that can be purchased, deployed, and used according to each enterprise’s particular contact center needs for:

Contact Management: making it easier for customers to interact with businesses to increase agent productivity, optimize investments and management, and reap better returns from every customer contact experience

Self-Service: enabling convenient, intelligent, and automated service via voice, Web, and email while lowering total interaction costs and eliminating the need for additional staff resources

Proactive Contact: building relationships by anticipating and satisfying customer needs, better managing inbound and outbound contacts, identifying added cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, marketing more effectively, and reducing overall operating costs

Operational Effectiveness: enhancing customer satisfaction with real-time monitoring and historical insight that improves business decision-making, planning, and overall performance

As shown in Figure 2, underlying these capability areas is the valuable relationship between the Avaya Customer Interaction Suite architecture and the extensive support that is readily available in solutions


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that integrate CRM/Business applications (through Partner Adapters), deploy contact center solutions (via Avaya Global Services personnel), and enable extensive, enterprise-wide connectivity as follows:

Enterprise Applications Integration: supports open standards integration to business applications such as Siebel 7, pre-written Partner Adapters, and services integration with PeopleSoft, SAP, Onyx, and E.Piphany

Avaya Global Services and Professional Services Integration Solutions: add the expertise and worldwide resources of Avaya services professionals to every facet of an enterprise’s contact center for implementation, integration, and maintenance of contact center applications. These services also support integration that connects the contact center to an enterprise’s front and back office applications as well as a wide range of third-party products across the infrastructure from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to operational effectiveness and workforce management packages.

Avaya Enterprise Connect and Avaya Global Connect: include Avaya Customer Interaction Suite applications and Avaya IP Telephony systems as part of an integrated solution that extends seamless, high-quality connectivity across multiple enterprise locations from headquarters to remote branches, virtual sites, and global centers

Finally, with Avaya Customer Interaction Suite, capabilities can be used in their entirety as a complete solution, deployed gradually in a “start small and grow” scenario, applied as an easy migration path to add new features and functionality that compliment a contact center’s current capabilities, or even added to simply enhance integration between components in a contact center’s existing infrastructure. This flexible, modular architecture enables enterprises to leverage existing investments by adding and expanding solutions as needed while avoiding cumbersome upgrades or costly replacement strategies. PRUDENTIAL’S existing network.

The Avaya Advantage

Avaya Contact Center Solutions offer tools that can help you empower PRUDENTIAL’S customers, employees and partners, build strong business relationships, improve PRUDENTIAL’S bottom line and differentiate PRUDENTIAL’S business. They deliver just what you need to win in today's challenging customer economy.

Industry leading agent and call selection criteria. The decisions based on these criteria govern the assignment of work; Avaya uses unique predictive technologies to make superior, business impacting decisions. A patented Avaya software module, Avaya Business Advocate, minimizes the effects of random call arrival and random agent availability. This exclusive Avaya software manifests itself in improved match rate between customer segments and agent segments, reduced abandon rates, lower average speeds of answer, higher agent occupancy rates, and lower maximum delays.

An extremely robust and reliable Contact Center feature set. A result of more than 25 years of organic software development, this application software offers over 700 features and is operational in the most challenging production Contact Centers around the globe. The software code currently runs more than 32,000 Contact Centers around the world.

Massive scalability for the multisite Contact Center provided by Avaya’s integrated ACD/PBX, Avaya Communication Manager (ACM). A single instance supports up to 5,200 agents, 8,000 trunks, 3,000 native prompts and announcements, 25,000 queue slots, and up to a 540,000 busy hour call completion rate (general call mix, non-ACD)

Simple, elegant application infrastructure. This design delivers full scale on a single set of stateful fail over, Linux based, server appliances.


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Highly secure application processing. The Avaya processing complex can be completely isolated from the corporate LAN/WAN if desired, and IP phone conversations completely encrypted to prevent eavesdropping.

Network agnostic architecture supports a range of configurations from 100% IP, 100% TDM, to any mix in between. Avaya’s Contact Center philosophy is to define the problem, develop a solution, and then determine the appropriate network transport. Sometimes the decision is all IP, sometimes it remains TDM, most frequently it is a mix of both. It is only within the context of a larger Contact Center business problem that the transport technology has any relevance.

Services including application and network design, integration, implementation, security, business continuity, maintenance, and support are available globally.


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Avaya Contact Management

Avaya Contact Management solutions help enable higher agent productivity, optimized investments, more effective contact center operations, and more consistent personalized service for every customer. Avaya offers multi-channel, multisite contact center solutions with intelligent routing of voice, Web, and e-mail interactions across PRUDENTIAL’S virtual enterprise.

2. Solution Design

MultiVantage™ Contact Center Overview

Avaya Call Center Basic is included at no additional cost with each and every Avaya Communication Manager 3.1 system without requiring a separate ACD system, server, hardware, or software. Call Center Basic includes basic ACD functionality including call queuing, basic announcements, direct (linear) call distribution or uniform call distribution (most idle agent hunting), agent login/logout, agent work states (Auxiliary Work, After Call Work, Auto In, Manual In, Auto Available, Auto Answer), agents logged into multiple splits, multiple call handling, Service Observing, VuStats, and more. Basic Call Management System (BCMS) is also provided with Basic Contact Center at no additional charge. BCMS provides “built-in” Contact Center reporting capabilities without requiring any adjunct server or software.

For more advanced ACD requirements, Avaya Call Center 3.1 is now available, as an optional overlay to the included Call Center Basic, in three (3) scaleable packages designed to suit the particular needs of PRUDENTIAL’S business:

Avaya Call Center Elite: Our most popular package features Avaya Expert Agent Selection (EAS) skills-based routing and the full complement of advanced Call Vectoring conditional routing capabilities. In addition, the Elite package now includes:

– Avaya Virtual Routing – offers the ability to have separate Call Centers operate as a single virtual Call Center by effectively load balancing work activity across centers.

– IP Agent Shared Control – provides a common soft phone desktop for all agents and allows all agents to be IP enabled. IP Agent shared control allows the IP Agent application to control DCP or IP terminals directly, i.e. without the need for CTI support. Agents can use either the IP Agent application or the telephone phone buttons for feature activation or call control. It is used for an on-site agent option to enhance the capabilities of the DCP or IP terminal through the use of the IP Agent user interface. This now allows for a consistent agent soft phone desktop for all agents, enabling even legacy DCP Callmaster terminals to function as IP Agents. IP Agent Shared Control licenses enable advanced communication application features such as instant messaging, screen pop and VuStats Monitor, all of which can provide agent productivity enhancements.

Call Center Elite Offer

Our most popular package features Avaya Expert Agent Selection (EAS is Avaya’s term for skills-based routing) and the full complement of advanced Call Vectoring (conditional routing) capabilities. The Elite package now includes Network Call Redirection (NCR), which provides the ability to transfer a call from an Avaya server to another network user in the public network, thereby releasing the trunks for reuse by another call. Features such as Service Level Maximizer can help customers guarantee service levels across the call center by evaluating current versus target service goals in determining call priority. Variables in Vectors adds flexibility, reduces administration, and facilitates centralized control. Maximum Occupancy helps prevent “agent burnout” by ensuring agents are less than 100% occupied. The Elite package now includes all of the 3.0 enhancements in support of consolidation and survivability. And, Basic Call Management System (BCMS) is provided with Call Center Elite at no additional charge.


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BCMS provides basic “built-in” Call Center reporting capabilities without requiring any adjunct server or software.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is a communication server software feature that processes high-volume incoming, outgoing, and internal calls and distributes them to groups of extensions called hunt groups or splits. With Call Center Elite, hunt groups or splits are referred to as skills. Calls to a specific skill are automatically distributed among the agents that possess the desired skill. Calls queue to the skill until an agent is available. ACD allows a system administrator to create an efficient call management environment. This administrator can add or remove skills from the system, add or remove announcements, add or remove agents, add trunk groups and route calls to the appropriate skills. The administrator can also specify ACD measurement criteria to provide reports on ACD efficiency.

When a call arrives for a skill, the ACD software checks to see if an agent with the desired skill is available to handle the call. If an agent is not available, or busy, the call enters the skill’s queue. Calls queue only if no agents are available, a queue is assigned to the skill, and the queue is not full. A skill queue is a holding area for calls waiting to be answered. When a call is put into queue, the caller may hear one or more delay announcements, music, and/or silence, depending on the treatment assigned for the skill. Calls enter the queue at the bottom and move toward the top or head of the queue. After a call reaches the head of the queue, it connects to the next available agent.

Agent Call Handling

Agent login and logout – To receive ACD calls, an agent must log into the system. An agent can be logged into multiple skills.

– Agent Login – To log in, an agent goes off-hook and dials the login feature access code (FAC) and the login ID. A login button may be assigned on the agent’s voice terminal. If login is successful, the agent automatically enters Auxiliary Work mode. The Auxiliary Work button lamp lights steadily and the agent hears the confirmation tone.

– Agent Logout – The agent should log out when he or she leaves for an extended period of time and is unavailable for ACD calls. When temporarily unavailable for calls, an agent should use Auxiliary work mode, rather than logging out. To log out of a skill, an agent goes off-hook and dials the logout FAC. A logout button may be assigned on the agent’s voice terminal. If logout is successful, the agent hears confirmation tone and work-mode button lamps darken.

Agent answering options – An agent can answer ACD calls by using a headset, handset, or speakerphone. You can assign an agent as either Automatic Answer or Manual Answer.

– Automatic Answer – An agent assigned to Automatic Answer hears zip tone and connects directly to incoming calls without ringing.

– Manual Answer – An agent assigned to Manual Answer hears ringing, and then goes off-hook to answer the incoming call.

ACD work modes –At any given time, an agent can be in one of the following four work modes. An agent can change work modes at any time. To enter any work mode, an agent presses the button or dials the FAC for that mode, depending on what you have administered. If the agent has no active or held calls, the new work-mode’s button lamp lights steadily. If the agent has active or held calls, the lamp flashes until all calls are dropped, then the new work mode’s lamp lights steadily.

– Auxiliary Work mode – An agent should enter Auxiliary Work mode whenever taking a temporary break. This makes the agent unavailable for ACD calls and removes them from the most-idle-agent queue. When an agent logs in, he or she automatically enters AUX Work mode.


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– Auto-In mode – In auto-in mode, the agent automatically becomes available for answering new ACD calls upon disconnecting from an ACD call.

– Manual-In mode – In Manual-In mode, the agent automatically enters ACW mode for the skill upon disconnecting from an ACD call and is not available for any ACD calls. To become available for ACD calls, the agent must manually reenter either auto-in mode or manual-in mode.

– After Call Work mode – An agent should enter ACW mode when he or she needs to perform ACD-related activities, such as filling out a form as a result of an ACD call. The agent is unavailable for ACD calls to all skills while in ACW mode. Communication server administration determines whether the agent remains in the Most Idle Agent queue while in ACW. When an agent is in the Manual-In mode and disconnects from an ACD call, he or she automatically enters ACW mode. Although no longer available for ACD calls, the agent is still available for non-ACD calls.

Add/Remove Skills

The Add/Remove Skills feature allows an agent using Expert Agent Selection (EAS) to add or remove skills. Agents can dial feature access codes (FACs) to add or remove a skill. Or a supervisor with console permission can enter an agent’s login ID and add or remove an agent’s skill.

Agent Call Handling Preference

With Call Handling Preference administration, you can specify by agent whether you want the agent to receive calls based upon Skill Level or based upon Greatest Need. If Skill Level is selected, the agent will not receive calls for a secondary skill until all calls in the primary skill have been answered. If Greatest Need is selected, then the agent will receive the highest priority, oldest call waiting for any of their skills. This allows you to implement preference strategies by agent. The skill level can be used not only to reflect agent skill proficiency, but a preference level allowing you to indicate the type of skills you would prefer the agent handle in times when there are multiple agents available.

Auto-Available Skill

Auto-Available Skill (AAS) allows members of an ACD skill to be in auto-in work mode continuously. An agent in auto-in work mode becomes available for another ACD call immediately after disconnecting from an ACD call. AAS is used to bring ACD agents back into auto-in work mode after a system restart. Although not restricted to such, this feature is intended to be used for skills containing only nonhuman members - for example, recorders or voice response units (VRUs).

Best Service Routing (BSR) Single Site

Avaya Call Center Elite can provide Best Service Routing (BSR) for a single site or multiple sites, which improves upon the overflow functionality and provides load balancing, maximizes resources, and provides best service for PRUDENTIAL’S customers. Avaya’s patented Best Service Routing algorithms are based upon the proven, precise prediction of the Expected Wait Time. BSR allows you to consider in advance all of the appropriate skills to answer a call and route the call to the best place the first time. Best Service Routing can be used instead of overflow capabilities to reduce scenarios where a call queues for a primary skill, waits a pre-determined time, then automatically overflows to one or more secondary skill groups. With BSR, this scenario is predicted up front, and avoided.

Direct Agent Calling

With the Avaya Call Center Elite option, the Direct Agent Calling feature is also available. ACD agents can receive any type of incoming or transferred call including DID, attendant, and private network station


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calls, when allowed by Class of Restriction (COR). The Direct Agent Calling feature of Expert Agent Selection software allows you to direct a call to a specific agent login ID and have that call treated as an ACD call. Direct Agent Calls are treated as ACD calls with the following capabilities:

Calls may queue for the agent.

Agents can receive zip tone when these calls are delivered.

Agents may have After Call Work, Stroke Counts, and Call Work Codes (with optional Avaya Call Management System) associated with these calls.

Basic Call Management System and Avaya Call Management System correctly measure these calls as ACD calls.

Direct Agent Calls can have the highest priority of any calls.

Routing to a Call Coverage path, if assigned, or to a VDN if no coverage path is assigned.

A system-wide Direct Agent queue delay announcement

Expected Wait Time (EWT) Routing

The Avaya Call Center is unique in its ability to provide callers with the most accurate prediction of Expected Wait Time (EWT) available in the industry today. This predictive ability of EWT allows call center managers to intervene and redirect calls to alternate treatments before actual wait times exceed pre-established thresholds. Using EWT to redirect calls can increase customer satisfaction, decrease costs, and create a more manageable call center environment. Historical predictors tell you that you just had a problem; real-time predictors tell you that you are now having a problem; and EWT tells you that you are about to have a problem. Only EWT allows you time to prevent the problem from occurring. The patented, predictive technology of using Expected Wait Time to make routing decisions is also the basis for Avaya’s award-winning Best Service Routing (BSR) feature.

Expert Agent Selection

With Expert Agent Selection, you can assign individual skills to each agent based upon the actual skills they possess. Up to sixty skills can be assigned to an agent. You can specify a skill level from 1 to 16 for each individual skill assigned to the agent. Using skill levels allows you to prioritize calls that are delivered to the agent. Skill level 1 represents a skill that the agent is highly proficient with or a type of call that you would prefer the agents handle.

The ability to specify agent skill sets and levels and skills-based routing is provided natively by the Avaya Expert Agent Selection software (a feature of Avaya Call Center Elite software) and does not require an external server.

Forced Agent Logout from After Call Work

The Forced Agent Logout from After Call Work (ACW) feature automatically logs out an Expert Agent Selection (EAS) agent who spends too much time in ACW mode. The timeout period is specified on a per system basis and on a per agent basis. The timeout is reported with a customer-assignable reason code set on a system basis. The per agent timeout setting takes precedence over the per system setting. For Auto-In agents, the Timed ACW feature takes precedence over the Forced Agent Logout from ACW feature.

Least Occupied Agent

Least Occupied Agent (LOA) considers an agent’s total call occupancy rate since logging on, not just how long it has been since the agent’s last call. In a call center with both multiskilled and single-skilled agents, it is often the case that the multiskilled agents have much higher occupancy and these agents often burn out or complain of unfairness. With Least Occupied Agent, hot seats are eliminated. The mix


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of calls a multiskilled agent takes will now include fewer of the kinds of calls handled by single-skilled agents.

Location Preference Distribution

Location Preference Distribution tries to route incoming Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) calls to agents located in the same location as the incoming trunk on which the call originated whenever possible. If an incoming caller cannot be matched with an agent in the same location, calls are routed to agents at different locations. In this case, the routing is determined by administered distribution algorithms without regard to location. When there is more than one choice for call delivery, Local Preference Distribution matches the trunk and the agent location numbers. The Multiple Locations feature defines the location number. Delivery preference is given to the agent whose location number matches the incoming trunk location number. Location Preference Distribution takes precedence over most other caller-agent selection features except for direct agent and reserve agent calls. Customers can use this feature to lower customer networking costs by reducing the amount of intra-switch network traffic and to improve audio quality.

Logical Agent

The Logical Agent feature is a capability provided with Expert Agent Selection (EAS) software. With the Logical Agent feature, an agent’s ACD Login ID is associated with a particular voice terminal only when the agent actually logs in at that terminal. When the agent logs off, the association of an agent’s ACD Login ID with a particular voice terminal is removed. Numbers from the system station numbering plan are used to assign ACD Login IDs. Agents become logical entities and not physical entities. Logical Agent allows ACD agents to log into any voice terminal on the system regardless of type, designation, or location. This can be very useful when additional ACD positions are needed on short notice or when a disaster strikes. All agents in the system can be designated as Logical Agents if desired.

In addition to skills, the following capabilities are associated with agents' login IDs.

Calls – Calls to the Login ID reach the agent independent of the voice terminal the agent is currently using. These can be Direct Agent calls (calls to a particular agent treated as an ACD call).

Name – Calls to the Login ID display the name associated with the Login ID and not the name associated with the voice terminal. This is also true for calls made from a voice terminal where an agent has logged in.

Coverage – When the agent is logged out, or when calls go to coverage because the agent is busy or does not answer, calls to the Login ID go to the coverage path associated with the agent and not the voice terminal. When an agent is logged out, calls go to the agent's busy coverage destination.

Restrictions – Calls to the Login ID or from the agent use the restrictions associated with the agent and not the voice terminal.

Work Modes – A single work mode button applies to all the skills assigned to the agent currently logged in. The Multiple Skills feature allows agents to log in to up to 60 skills simultaneously.

Message Waiting Lamp – This lamp by default tracks the status of messages waiting for the logged in EAS agent Login ID rather than messages for the physical terminal. If desired, the Message Waiting Lamp can be programmed to track the physical terminal.

Auto-Answer – With EAS, auto answer settings can be assigned to agents on the Agent LoginID form. An agent's auto answer setting will apply to the station where the agent logs in. If the auto answer setting for that station is different, the agent's setting overrides the station's setting.

Other physical attributes of a voice terminal, such as button administration, do not follow the agent.


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Maximum Agent Occupancy

Our Maximum Agent Occupancy (MAO) feature, included with Call Center Elite, was created to support ongoing agent efficiencies and minimizing agent burnout. It has been designed to prevent overloading agents, especially single-skill agents. This feature is a system wide feature that is set for all agents in the system (allowing an objective threshold setting between 0 - 100 percent occupied). As well received as our Least Occupied Agent (LOA) feature has been since its introduction in mid 1998, prior to the introduction of Maximum Agent Occupancy, there has never existed a way to ensure that an agent will not be engaged for less then 100% of their time. With MAO, an agent will be put into AUX (Auxiliary) Work with an administered reason code until their occupancy moves below the threshold. Agents can override this feature and move into an Available status.

Most Idle Agent (MIA) Across Skills Option

When the Uniform Call Distribution – Most Idle Agent (UCD-MIA) call distribution method is used, the communication server searches for the agent extension that has been idle (waiting) the longest and delivers the call to that extension if the agent is available to handle an ACD call. This type of call distribution ensures a high degree of equity in agent workloads even when call-handling times vary. If Most Idle Agent Across Skills is selected, then the system will consider the agent’s activity across all their skills. If it is not selected, the system will only consider the agent’s activity in the current skill required.

Most Idle Agent (MIA) Treatment for After Call Work (ACW)

You can choose whether Agents in After Call Work (ACW) mode are or are not in the eligible-agent queues for the communication server.

Move Agent/Change Skills While Agent Staffed

A staffed agent can be moved between skills without requiring the agent to logoff. If the agent has any call on the telephone or is in ACW, then the move cannot take place immediately, but is pending the agent telephone going idle (all calls have been terminated), or the agent changing out of the ACW mode.

Network Call Redirection (NCR)

Network Call Redirection (NCR) offers an optional call redirection method between sites on a public network or a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that can reduce trunking costs. These cost reductions are particularly valuable in enterprises or multi-site contact centers environments where network costs are typically high. When an incoming ISDN call arrives at an Avaya communication server that has the NCR feature enabled, call redirection is managed by the PSTN instead of the local server. As a result, ISDN trunks that the server would otherwise retain to accomplish the redirection are not required.

The cost reductions associated with reduced trunk use can be significant, particularly when other Avaya call vectoring features, such as Best Service Routing (BSR) and Expected Wait Time (EWT) are implemented.

Reason Codes

Reason codes allow agents to enter a numeric code that describes their reason for entering Auxiliary (AUX) work mode or for logging out of the system. Reason codes give contact center managers detailed information about how agents spend their time. You can use this data to develop more precise staffing forecasting models or use it with schedule-adherence packages to ensure that agents are performing scheduled activities at the scheduled time. You can administer the codes so that entry of the code is forced or optional. Beginning with 3.0, you can have up to one hundred AUX reason codes, including a default code (0).

Remote Logout of Agents


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Remote Logout of Agent can be used to discontinue the delivery of ACD calls to a station that is no longer staffed by the agent. The Remote Logout of Agent feature allows a user to logout an idle ACD agent without being physically present at the agent’s station. The user who is logging out the agent can be locally or remotely located. A restricted set of users (supervisors) can log out an agent using a feature access code on the switch or remotely via Remote Access or (with Call Vectoring) a Vector Directory Number (VDN) and vector programmed for this purpose.

Service Level Maximizer

Service Level Maximizer, included with Avaya Call Center Elite 3.0, gives you control over PRUDENTIAL’S service levels without losing calls, constant monitoring, or sophisticated workforce management packages. Simply set PRUDENTIAL’S service targets for each skill in the form of X% in Y seconds based upon PRUDENTIAL’S business needs. Service Level Maximizer selects the agent that will maximize PRUDENTIAL’S ability to meet all of PRUDENTIAL’S skills’ service level targets.

Consisting of a set of algorithms and capabilities designed to optimize the level of service with the given staff, it maximizes agent utilization to meet service level targets. Performance parameters like "answer 80% (X) of skill 1 calls within 20 (Y) seconds” can be set based upon a number of variables. Different targets can be administered to each skill to differentiate service levels based on the value of this type of call to the business.

Service Observing – Logical Agent

With Call Center Elite, an observer can observe agents based on their logical-agent ID rather than their physical phone. The observer enters the logical-agent ID extension number of an agent, who must be logged in to a phone. The observer can monitor every ACD, personal, and direct agent call delivered to or placed by the agent, including calls placed to the physical extension.

Variables in Vectors

Support of conditionals in Call Vectors that can be set by the user and/or external conditions provides added flexibility in allowing changes to call processing based on customer selected variable values. Each variable is assigned as a certain type, which in turn specifies its characteristics and how it gets set. The variables can be either globally applied or locally applied, and Call Vector processing can be more easily changed by the user and/or external conditions. The global variables are set for the system and local variables are set for individual calls. By improving the general efficiency of vector administration, manager and application control over call treatments is increased and the creation of more flexible vectors can better serve the needs of the whole contact center operation. This capability is available as a standard component of Elite Call Center package.

VDN Time Zone Offset

With an Avaya Communication Manager call center, businesses are able to easily provide treatment throughout a distributed enterprise according to the local time zone of each office. A “VDN Time-Zone Offset” field is specified on the VDN (Vector Directory Number) form to be applied against the switch clock when a time of day (TOD) vector command is executed. It allows execution of TOD testing vectors using local time relative to the called VDN to simplify programming and to allow sharing of vectors with entry of actual time (e.g., 9 am to 5 pm can be used in all vectors without having to convert for local time relative to the switch clock).

VDN Variables

You can create general-purpose vectors that support multiple applications with call-wait treatments that are tailored to the application. Call centers have many vectors that use the same basic call flow but are unique because each requires unique announcements, route-to destinations, holiday tables, vector routing table indexes, and conditional limits. The VDN variables allow you to create a generic call flow


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vector. The unique items are now designated on the VDN form using VDN variables. VDN variables can drastically reduce the number of vectors needed, ensure common flows, and ease administration during crisis times when the flows need to change due to an unforeseen event. Unforeseen events can include problems with trunking, staffing, or messaging.

Vector Subroutines

Avaya Communication Manager supports Vector Subroutines. Subroutine calls for vector processing will be provided through use of the “goto vector” command and a new “return” command allowing the use of common vector programs by many different vectors. This feature helps customers consolidate redundant vector routines which will help reduce the need for more vector capacity and simplify administration. This enhancement supports the creation of vector routines that can be utilized by many other vector programs without duplicating the same sequence in each vector. It should significantly decrease number of steps and vectors required.

Avaya Virtual Routing

Avaya Virtual Routing is designed to help you provide the best possible service to PRUDENTIAL’S customers and use all PRUDENTIAL’S call center resources wisely and cost-effectively. Avaya Virtual Routing allows multiple locations to work together as a single virtual call center. Its smart routing capabilities monitor and anticipate changing conditions across PRUDENTIAL’S virtual call center network to find the best place to deliver each call, every time.

By continuously balancing calls across multiple sites—under normal call volume conditions as well as during peak calling periods—Avaya Virtual Routing provides consistent call handling and service for PRUDENTIAL’S customers, and equitable workload balancing for PRUDENTIAL’S agents. Together, that makes for a more manageable, successful call center operation.

When a call arrives, the first point in time, we ask the question: “If this call is placed in a particular queue or skill group, how long will the customer likely wait until they are assisted by an agent?” To answer this question, we may look within a single Avaya Media Server or Avaya DEFINITY® server searching out the best local skill group to queue the call; or across multiple networked Avaya systems, so that the best skill group and agent across the enterprise can be found to provide the best service to the customer. This predictive application is called Best Service Routing.

The following charts represent actual results measuring the average speed of answer for three sites. Governed by Best Service Routing, the results represent a “heartbeat” effect providing the “best queue experience” while minimizing network costs. The data expressed was chosen at random from an active Best Service Routing implementation. The first three charts identify the individual sites and the fourth chart combines all three.


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Best Service Routing

Best Service Routing, leveraging Avaya’s precise Expected Wait Time algorithm, corrects the inefficiencies inherent in “queue everywhere” and “static parameter” approaches. It is a continuous, quantifiable statistic that answers the question: “How long will this call wait?”

Best Service Routing requires only 10 to 15 percent call redirection (compared with well over 50 percent redirection for typical “queue everywhere” strategies) while delivering equal or better efficiency and performance. The minimal call redirects stem from the fact that as EWT takes hold and normalizes speed of answer across multiple sites, the call is probably (80 percent or above) in the right place the first time. In addition, any actual measure of customer experience whether it be Service Level, Average Speed of Answer, or Oldest Call Waiting, has been shown to be equalized by Best Service Routing across multiple sites. Customers utilizing Best Service Routing have been able to achieve 85 percent or better single queue efficiency ratios (the level of performance a single, co-located site would generate) without the expense of having to move agents into a single facility.

As the data shows, it is not efficient to queue calls to multiple splits, even in the same system. You can now avoid the complex, confusing performance statistics and group fairness issues resulting from sending calls to multiple places, while hoping the caller receives the service level you planned for them. Although this is a hard concept for many to grasp—almost counter-intuitive to traditional ideas of call


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center management—we have solid customer data that the Best Service Routing strategy, locally or remotely deployed, is effective.

Benefits of Best Service Routing

The principal benefits the Best Service Routing feature brings to the user are as follows:

Improved Agent Efficiency – By interflowing calls from centers with a surplus of calls to centers with a surplus of agents, overall agent efficiency is improved.

Improved Average Speed of Answer (ASA) – ASAs are improved in proportion to the agent efficiency improvements obtained.

Uniform Service Level – Best Service Routing balances the loads across the network in such a way that all callers for a given application experience approximately equivalent waiting times.

Reduced Number of Abandons – Without some form of load balancing, callers at understaffed centers can experience exceptionally long waiting times, leading to a high percentage of abandons. With the load balancing provided by Queue to Best, these extremes are eliminated and abandons are reduced. The abandon rate also shrinks in proportion to the ASA improvements obtained due to improved agent efficiency.

Easier Management of Staffing Problems – Because the Best Service Routing feature effectively converts a set of geographically dispersed agents into a single large pool of agents, staffing problems do not need to be resolved on a center by center basis. If a single center experiences a major shortage of staff in a particular skill due to illness, meetings, training, weather, or other reasons, the impact on the overall service level for that skill may be minimal. In addition, staffing problems can be resolved by obtaining additional staff at any of the centers across the network.

Easier to Manage Unexpected Call Spikes – Any large spike in calls at a particular center is handled gracefully by the Best Service Routing feature. Providing that sufficient trunk connectivity exists, the extra load is spread evenly across the other centers in the network, minimizing the number of call abandons.

Simple Vector Programming – No complex programming logic or comparison steps need to be designed by the user. The user simply lists the local and remote agent resources to be considered for the call, and asks that the call be queued to the best of these.

Enhanced Look Ahead Interflow

There are exceptions to the Best Service Routing strategy; therefore the suite of solutions in Avaya Virtual Routing software has additional options. In cases where there are a small number of calls, especially with calls having long holding times, we have developed Enhanced Look Ahead Interflow. It implements a First In, First Out (FIFO) queue, but polls local and remote sites for available agents or other matching conditions. Further, the mechanisms have been improved so that only the call at the head of the FIFO queue can flow out. This ensures FIFO and prevents the processor overload that would result if this polling were allowed for every call in the queue, not just the call at the head of the line.

Enhanced Look Ahead Interflow is not recommnded for medium and high volumes since it still requires substantial bandwidth just like the “queue everywhere” strategies. Best Service Routing has been proven to provide better performance results in these scenarios.

Information That Helps Fine-Tune Call Routing

Understanding how well PRUDENTIAL’S routing is working and PRUDENTIAL’S callers’ experience can help you fine-tune PRUDENTIAL’S automatic routing criteria and vectors, evaluate agent performance, and assess overall call center effectiveness.


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Avaya Virtual Routing supports enhanced information forwarding to provide valuable details along with each routed call. The information “attached” to each call may include:

Vector Directory Number (VDN)

Caller-supplied collected digits

Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS)

Accumulated time waiting.

Avaya Virtual Routing also passes along a Universal Call ID (UCID), a unique identification “tag” that is attached to each call and remains with the call as it is routed through-out PRUDENTIAL’S network. This allows for lifetime tracking of calls routed among call centers, Avaya Media Servers systems, or switch adjuncts such as the Avaya Interactive Response system. PRUDENTIAL’S call center can utilize this call data and PRUDENTIAL’S existing business databases for CTI applications, generating screen pops of caller information to help agents provide personalized, efficient, satisfying customer service. As a manager, you can also access this call data by using a reporting tool such as Avaya Operational Analyst for comprehensive, cradle-to-grave, call center analyses.

Networking Connections Between Sites

Avaya Virtual Routing can use ISDN Primary Rate Facilities interconnecting the Media Server nodes of the network. The information sharing between nodes to determine the “best” place for every call takes place across the D-channel of the PRI connection. This is carried in standard Code Set 0 User-to-User Information. These PRI connections can be on dedicated DS-1 (T-1 or E-1) trunks or on PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) PRI facilities. MCI has successfully tested and installed our solution with their ISDN and EPN configuration and supports BSR over switched facilities. Other carriers are currently testing. PRUDENTIAL’S Account Team can provide the most current information regarding certification with the carrier in question. If testing has not been done to verify operation over the public networks involved with the preferred specific configuration, use of private ISDN trunking, ATM trunking, or IP trunking between the nodes should be assumed until successful testing has been completed.

IP Trunking

DEFINITY® IP Trunking (IP Solutions) can also support the Avaya Virtual Routing poll over an IP network between sites and can be used for Avaya Virtual Routing and Look Ahead Interflow since this trunk type can also emulate ISDN PRI trunking. IP Networking is added to IP Trunking to allow the emulation of IDSN-PRI protocol. This should eliminate any problems with carriers who have not been certified.

Best Service Routing (BSR) polling over remote Internet Protocol (IP) trunks allows polling vectors to include a BSR application plan that routes calls through a remote IP trunk, and collects wait time and available agent data using TSC (Temporary Signaling Connection) messages over IP trunk groups.

Previously, polling would require a B-channel (Bearer Channel) as well as a D-channel. The B-channel is the voice portion and the D-channel is the signaling portion of a call on an ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) trunk. With this enhancement, the signaling portion of a BSR poll is now handled by the new QSIG Temporary Signaling Connection (TSC) protocol without setting up a voice call. The QSIG protocol defines message exchanges at a point between two switches. QSIG TSC is also known as CISC (Call Independent Signaling Connection).

This enhancement eliminates the need for the expensive media processor board (MAP D or MedPro Prowler) if voice calls over IP are not required. This board established BSR Polling as a voice call, even though it only exchanged signaling information. Because the QSIG-TSC protocol performs BSR polling over IP trunking without using a B-channel, the B-channel is freed for voice transmission.

The increased B-channel availability on the trunk:


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Provides a significant gain in available communication bandwidth between contact center sites

Allows polling to happen all the time

Frees one Bearer Channel to support call completions, offering more line availability

Provides a significant cost savings with the elimination of the associated IP solutions hardware media processor (MedPro) board

May favorably impact processor occupancy

Conclusions

The award winning Avaya Virtual Routing suite delivers enhanced performance by overcoming the limitations found in other approaches to multisite routing, allowing for both agent and call surplus conditions to be addressed with significant improvements to customer and agent experience. Leveraging Avaya Virtual Routing and Avaya Business Advocate enables you to simultaneously balance the needs of PRUDENTIAL’S customers, PRUDENTIAL’S agents, PRUDENTIAL’S managers, and PRUDENTIAL’S business plan.


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Contact Center Express

Avaya Contact Center Express is Microsoft Windows-based software suite that enables companies to turn one-dimension call centers into powerful multi-media 'contact' centers.

Using the phantom call capability supported by Avaya Definity, MultiVantage and Communication Manager switches, Contact Center Express 3.0 allows PRUDENTIAL’S customers to make contact with you via phone, email, text or instant messaging.

Whether PRUDENTIAL’S customer likes texting on their mobile, sending emails or chatting over the internet, their method of communicating will be treated exactly the same as a traditional phone call - it'll be placed in a priority queue and distributed to an agent with relevant skills and knowledge. What's more, the agent can reply using the same method of contact, conducting a helpful conversation, just like you'd expect over the phone.

It used to be that powerful contact center technology was affordable only to larger enterprises. Smaller firms simply couldn't compete. Contact Center Express closes that gap. Whether PRUDENTIAL’S business requires only a few or many employees, it delivers the features and performance you need to compete on an even footing - and at a price you can afford.

Because Contact Center Express is an Avaya product, it takes full advantage of all the routing intelligence contained within Avaya Communication Manager systems. Easy to implement and simple to use, it delivers:

out-of-the-box desktop applications for agents and supervisors

framework applications, including intelligent routing, interaction data and centralized configuration

multi-channel routing for voice, email, web chat and instant messages

outbound preview dialing, either automated or agent-initiated

powerful application development tools for complete customization and integration

simple and fast wizards for desktop screen pops and routing rules

Based on open standards C#, C++, ActiveX and Visual Basic for Applications code, Avaya Contact Center Express offers a high level of user-controlled flexibility and agent desktop customization. With no extensive deployment support needed, a Contact Center Express application can be up and running in a matter of hours or days, not weeks or months.

It's really that simple. And that powerful.

Contact Center Express products fall into three major categories:

Desktop - Contact Center Express Desktop, Supervisor, Agent, Wallboard, Contact Center Express Reporting, Contact Center Express Control Panel and MS CRM Connector.

Server - Media Director, Preview Contact Media Store, Email Media Store, Simple Messaging Media Store, MSN Messenger Gateway, AOL Instant Messenger Gateway, Short Message Service Gateway, Web Chat Gateway, License Director, Application Management Director, Configuration Server, XML Server IVR Server, Call Routing Server, Interaction Data Service, Contact Database, SQL Plug-in, Rules Plug-in, SOAP Plug-in, Script Plug-in.

Developer - Developer

Enhance Contact Center Express making it better meet the growing needs of the Mid Market

o Enhancements to:

Email


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Web channel

Schedule Callback

User interface refresh

Support of newest releases of AES, Elite Call Center, CMS, BCMR Desktop and CM

o New Functionality

SMS channel support for mobile customers

AOL IM support

Pre-packaged reports available in CMS

Multimedia Overview

Contact Center Express Multimedia technology uses the phantom call capabilities of PRUDENTIAL’S switch to deliver non-voice work items to contact center agents. Phantom calls are those generated by a CTI (computer telephony integration) application that have no physical station as the originating point.

The Multimedia suite blends email and web-based customer inquiries with inbound telephone calls. It also distributes internally held customer records to agents, prompting them to initiate contact with customers by phone.

Email inquiries and outbound call requests can be controlled to coincide with different shifts, quieter times of the day (low-peak call times) and times of the day when it is easier to contact customers.

Multimedia technology allows you to give queuing priority to inquiries from special customers. It also allows you to reject messages from certain customers.

Multimedia work items are generated and distributed using the following Contact Center Express products: Media Director, Media Proxy, Email Media Store, Preview Contact Media Store, Simple Messaging Media Store, MSN Messenger Gateway, AOL Instant Messenger Gateway, Web Chat Gateway and Short Message Service Gateway.

Multimedia work items are displayed on the agent's screen using the desktop application Contact Center Express Desktop.


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What's New Contact Center Express

Application Management Service – The management and monitoring of all Contact Center Express media stores, License Directors and Media Directors is now accomplished by the Application Management Service. This service consists of two components: Application Management Director, which gathers server status and health information, and Application Management Console, which connects to the Application Management Director to display that information. Using the snap-in, a user can also change server configuration and operation information.

MSN Instant Message Gateway – MSN Instant Message Gateway interacts with the Simple Messaging Media Store to give customers who enjoy using MSN Messenger the ability to interact with call-centre agents. By using PRUDENTIAL’S existing computer telephony environment, The gateway allows you to blend MSN instant messages with inbound telephone calls. MSN Messenger users can enjoy the benefits of priority queuing and distribution to agents with relevant skills and knowledge.

SOAP Plug-in released – The SOAP Plug-in is a simple plug-in that uses Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to give Contact Center Express server applications access to any web or SOAP service on the internet. This is achieved without the need for new development on the server.

Script Host Plug-in – The Script Host Plug-in is a simple plug-in that takes advantage of scripting engines developed by Microsoft and others, to allow simple scripts written in VB Script or Java Script to be executed and provide services to the Contact Center Express suite.


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Phonebook Plug-in – Phonebook Plug-in allows you to integrate Agent with the Contact Database. Without changing Agent's code, users can search a database phonebook for a contact or group of contacts based on first or last name, dial a number and transfer or conference the active call. The application is available in all 11 of Contact Centre Express' supported languages.

MS CRM Connector – MS CRM Connector is a telephony plug-in for Microsofts's browser-based customer relationship management application, MS CRM Version 3.0. It allows office workers to call people in their Contacts and Accounts lists and view contact screen-pops with inbound calls.

Compatible with Application Enablement Services – Contact Center Express 2.1 is fully compliant with Avaya's Application Enablement Services (AE Services) software. Contact Center Express already runs with CentreVu CT, Release 3.3, 9.1, 9.5 and 10.1, as well as Avaya CT, Release 11.1 (with Service Pack 3) and Avaya CT 1.2. All references to the Telephony Server refer to the machine running CentreVu CT, Avaya CT or AE Services.

Media Client offers spell check functionality – Media Client now allows agents to easily spell check emails they are sending in response to an email work item. Emails can be spelled checked within Media Client using the language dictionary the agent chooses.

Media Client offers new email send option – In addition to the button on Media Client's interface that allows users to send an email reply and close the work item, a new button now gives users the option of sending a reply and returning to the original email work item.

Agent supports Spanish (Colombian) – You can now run Agent in Spanish (Columbian). This language joins the previously supported Spanish (Castilian), English, French, German, Portuguese (Brazilian), Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional).

Agent

Agent is an agent-specific application for contact centers wanting to optimize their computer telephony capabilities. The callbar occupies minimal desktop space and features intuitive drop-down menus with all the necessary call functions, including make call, answer, transfer, conference, deflect, hold and send DTMF tones. Telephony activity is managed via computer keyboard or mouse, and it includes the ability to access customer information stored within Agent phonebooks. Agent automates all stages of an agent's telephone activity, including agent login and agent mode change, receiving collected digits, VDN monitoring and sending user-to-user information.


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Agent Desktop – Boost PRUDENTIAL’S Agent Productivity

CCE Agent is a windows-based Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) application for optimizing PRUDENTIAL’S call center. All stages of an agent’s telephone activity are automated with Agent, including logging into queues, identifying and answering calls, and managing connected calls. The application provides all the necessary call functions—make call, answer, hold, transfer, conference, etc.—through an intuitive, graphical user interface. Agent supports all the agent functionality of Avaya DEFINITY®, MultiVantage™, and Avaya Communication Manager contact centers. Dynamic call controls present the agent with only the available options for a given call, minimizing error rates and training requirements.

Agent is a Microsoft Windows ActiveX integration product that enables call centers to cost-effectively integrate CTI with existing databases, customer management, or agent-related applications. Customers can develop their own applications by using Agent as an out-of-process server, or by using its built-in VBA Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

The Agent Callbar

Agent Functions on the Callbar


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Agent is available in English, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (Castilian) and Spanish (Colombian). In addition, the application's custom language control allows developers to change existing strings to suit local dialects or entirely new languages.

Microsoft Business Solutions CRM (MS CRM) is a browser-based customer relationship management application that enables you to automate sales and marketing functions and to manage sales and customer service activities in PRUDENTIAL’S organization.

Wallboards – Keep PRUDENTIAL’S Agents Informed

Wallboard is a Windows-based application that displays real-time statistical information on VDNs, skills or splits and agents in a marquee window. Installed on agent PCs, the scroll bar of information allows agents to closely track their personal work performance and the performance of their work group (skill or split). Statistical information is sent to the Wallboard application from the Interaction Data Server, which monitors VDNs, splits, skills and agent extensions, and then calculates statistics about all facets of a call.

This powerful feature is easy to administer. It eliminates the need for a separate expensive wallboard within a call center. Custom messages can be added with color and flash. For example, if an inbound call center wants to feature their TVs at a special customer price, that information could be flashed on the wallboard in red.


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Agent Extension

Standalone Application

Marquee information can include:

The number of calls waiting to be answered for a particular VDN or split/skill

The length of time the first call in the queue has been waiting

The average length of time callers to a particular VDN or split/skill are waiting before their call is answered

The number of calls to a particular VDN or split/skill that have been abandoned

The average length of time callers to a particular VDN or split/skill are waiting before abandoning their calls

The average length of time agents logged into the skill or split are talking to callers

The skill or split groups an agent is logged into

The number of calls an agent takes per hour

The average length of time an agent spends on a call

The average length of time the agent spends in After Call Work mode

The average length of time the agent spends in Auxiliary mode

Wallboard Configuration

Wallboard's configuration allows you to customize the wallboard's layout (size, text color, background color, scroll direction and speed, the text that prefaces statistics), as well as the wallboard's behavior if certain thresholds are exceeded (whether the scrolling stops, changes direction, or the text starts to blink).

Thresholds

Wallboard also features threshold functionality. If you have a few parameters you consider extremely important (for example, service levels or the number of calls waiting) and you want any exceptional statistics to jump out, you can apply a threshold to them. A threshold contains one or more alert values that, when reached, force Wallboard to appear and behave in a different manner from the default properties.

Supervisor Desktop – Tools to Effectively Manage PRUDENTIAL’S Contact Center

The Supervisor desktop module allows contact center supervisors to monitor the call activity of a group of ten or less agents. The application allows supervisors to:

See an agent’s request for help

Join a call as an observer (the supervisor can hear the conversation but the agent and customer cannot hear the supervisor)


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Join a call as a coach (only the agent can hear and talk to the supervisor)

Join a call as a participant (the agent and customer can hear and talk to the supervisor)

View the current state of each agent

What’s more, if Supervisor is connected to the Interaction Data Server, supervisors can:

View statistics on the average length of time an agent is spending in After Call Work (ACW) and Available modes

View statistics on the number of calls the agent has taken

“Click to coach” - send text-based messages to agents

Send call-related data to the Interaction Data Server and agents


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The Supervisor Desktop

Contact Center Express Desktop

Contact Center Express Desktop is Contact Center Express's flagship desktop application for presenting multimedia work items to agents. Contact Center Express Desktop uses plug-in architecture to give agents everything they need in one screen. They can reply to work items from customers who make contact via web chat, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, simple message service (SMS), email or telephone.

Without leaving their screen agents can search a directory for a phone number or email address, record customer notes, insert auto text, spell check their work or print work items. Contact Center Express Desktop also distributes internally held customer records to agents, prompting them to initiate contact with customers by phone. It also gives agents access to external applications within the Contact Center Express Desktop interface (such as Internet Explorer) so they don't have to minimize their work screen.Contact Center Express Desktop can also be configured to launch external applications in a separate screen. The application can be different depending on the work item type and task required.


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Contact Center Express Desktop is available in 12 languages.

MS CRM Connector

MS CRM Connector is a telephony plug-in for Microsofts's browser-based customer relationship management application, MS CRM. It allows office workers to call people in their Contacts and Accounts lists and view contact screen-pops with inbound calls.

MS CRM Connector Dial buttons automatically appear in the toolbar of all Contact and Account records. They represent the phone numbers stored in the MS CRM SQL database.


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Media Client – Displaying the Work Item on the Agent Desktop

Media Client is the .Net Windows client application that displays work items delivered from Contact Center Express media stores. Running on the agent's PC, Media Client:

displays campaign information contained in media store work items

displays customer information contained in media store work items

logs the result of the media store connection to a series of log files

returns customer information entered by the agent to media store databases

allows the agent to suspend the delivery of a work item to a later date

In the case of the Preview Contact Media Store, Media Client makes outbound customer calls. It also gives you the option of using Smart Dial.

In the case of the Email Media Store, Media Client receives and sends emails.

In the case of the Simple Messaging Media Store, Media Client provides an “I Say/You Say” interaction window.


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Media Director – Queuing Email, Web Chat, & Outbound Contacts For PRUDENTIAL’S Agents

The Media Director distributes non-voice work items to contact center agents. This item could be an email, a web chat session or an outbound call request. The distribution of the work item is achieved using the queuing algorithms built into the Avaya Communication Manager server.

Non-voice work items originate from plug-in modules called media stores. Media stores connect to disparate sources such as email servers or web servers and interact with the Media Director and clients using a well-defined protocol. When a media store receives a new work item from a media source (eg, email server for the Email Media Store, webchat for the Simple Messaging Media Store, or SQL database for the Preview Contact Media Store), it creates a work item object and passes a reference for that object to the Media Director. The reference tells the Media Director what queue (queue ID) the work item is to be associated with and what priority it must have in the queue. Using the information in its configuration that relates specifically to that queue, the Media Director asks the Avaya Communication Manager server (via the Avaya CT Server) to queue it to the appropriate skill group.

The Media Director uses the phantom call capabilities of the switch to generate a call and place it into a specified queue. Phantom calls are those generated by a CTI application that have no physical station as the originating point. This call is distributed by Communication Manager using standard queuing algorithms and blended with other traditional voice calls.

When an agent logged into that skill group becomes available, Communication Manager server delivers the most appropriate work item to the agent. The Media Director is monitoring the Vector Directory Number (VDN) and sees the work item delivered to the agent. The Media Director transfers the work item reference with the oldest, highest-priority (1-10 priority levels) object to the Media Proxy. The Media Proxy delivers the reference to the correct client application based on the specified work item type. The client application uses the reference to retrieve the data directly from the actual work item at the media store.


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“You’ve Got Mail?”, CCE Can Help

The Email Media Store allows you to blend customer email inquiries with inbound telephone calls, essentially using this work to fill in the gaps between peaks in inbound call traffic.

The Email Media Store receives emails from one or more mail servers using the POP3 protocol. Installed on a Microsoft SQL server, it uses its configuration data and the information specified in the database schema, to:

distribute emails sent to certain mailboxes to certain queues in the Media Director

manage that distribution by making email queues 'open' for certain times and days of the week

give queuing priority to emails received from special customers

assign different queuing priorities to the first email a customer sends and all subsequent emails they send as part of the same conversation

reject emails from certain customers and automatically email them that this has happened only allow emails from certain customers to queue to a certain email queue automatically inform a customer (via email) that their email has been received during or outside the operating hours of that queue.


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Every period, the email media store connects with the specified mail server and downloads new email items. Email from one mailbox is matched with one email queue in the media store and each email queue has a priority in which to send email to a certain Media Director email queue. Once downloaded, the email in the mail server is deleted, the connection closed, and a series of processing steps occurs:

Check for automated responses/error messages

Check for allowed and denied senders

Interrogate the email header for an existing conversation ID

Check for priority customer status

“I Say / You Say” Online Chat

The Simple Messaging Media Store sits between the Media Director and Contact Center Express simple messaging gateways, such as the Web Chat Gateway. It provides the base (common) messaging functionality required by these gateways, allowing you to blend customer text-based messages (information requests) with inbound telephone calls.


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Installed on a Microsoft SQL server, the Simple Messaging Media Store uses its configuration data and the information specified in the database schema, to:

send simple messages from different gateways to different Media Director queues

give queuing priority to messages received from special customers

reject messages from certain customers and automatically email them that this has happened

only allow messages from certain customers to queue to a certain Media

Web Chat Gateway / Web Call Back

Web Chat Gateway interacts with the Simple Messaging Media Store to give internet-using customers the ability to interact with call center agents. Web chat functionality allows the customer, browsing the client’s web site, to click a URL and have a session initiated with the call center agent. Using this session, the customer and agent can exchange text-based messages allowing a simple conversation to take place.

MSN Instant Message Gateway

MSN Instant Message Gateway interacts with the Simple Messaging Media Store to give customers or business associates who enjoy using MSN Messenger the ability to interact with call center agents. MSN Instant Message Gateway allows you to blend MSN instant messages with inbound telephone calls. By using PRUDENTIAL’S existing computer telephony environment, they can enjoy the benefits of priority queuing and distribution to agents with relevant skills and knowledge.

Short Message Service Gateway

Short Message Service Gateway interacts with the Simple Messaging Media Store to blend SMS (short message service) messages with inbound telephone calls. Customers or business associates who like the convenience of mobile texting (and relatively cheaper way of using PRUDENTIAL’S mobile phone to communicate) can make contact with you and receive the same treatment as regular callers.

Blending in Outbound Work

The Preview Contact Media Store allows you to blend on-screen customer contact prompts with inbound calls, essentially using this work to fill in the gaps between peaks in inbound call traffic. Preview contact


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is defined as distributing a customer record to an agent so that the agent can initiate contact with the customer by phone.

Installed on a Microsoft SQL server, the Preview Contact Media Store retrieves contact details from a SQL database. The task to contact a group of contacts is defined in the database as a campaign. The campaign is prescribed to start at a certain date/time and run until another date/time. It can run over multiple time periods and may be recursive (eg. starting every Monday morning at 9:00).

Campaigns can be scheduled to coincide with:

different shifts

quieter times of the day (low-peak call times)

times of the day when it is easy to contact customers.

A campaign's configuration identifies which queue work items must queue to and their priority within that queue.

The Outbound Administrator is a standalone application that allows the creation, deletion and modification of various campaign data sets and the importing and exporting of contact data.


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Preview Contact Media Store

Preview dialing is distributing a customer record and allowing the agent to initiate contact with the customer.

The customer records are stored in an SQL database in an expected format.

Each contact is a member of a campaign.

Each campaign has one or more campaign schedules associated with it.

When a schedule is active the Preview Contact Media Store retrieves the customer records from the database and distributes it to the agents via the Media Director.

The agent initiates contact with the customer.

Contact notes and values may be written back to the database on completion of the contact.

Each contact may be assigned a preferred agent.

Each campaign may be assigned a priority.

Each campaign has a description and a prompt to aid the agent.

A schedule may modify the priority of a campaign.

A campaign may run from a start date/time to a finish date/time.

Campaigns may be recursive and start every Monday at 9:30am.

The agent may select from a list of available phone numbers to initiate contact with the customer.

A contact may suspended with a reason e.g. No answer, requested callback.

Completion of a contact is defined in one of four ways:

o Completed Success

o Completed Failed

o Completed No retry

o Failed

A free form notes field is available for the contact.

Additional information may be added to the contact in the form of Key/Value pairs.

Preview Contact Manager

Preview Contact Media Store uses the generic server manager.

This manager allows the administrator to:

o Start and stop the service.

o Modify the startup commandline parameters.

o View the Log files generated.

Note installing the Media Store in adirectory other than the default will require the Media Store Manager .config file to be modified with the new Logfile path.

Preview Contact Schema (Campaign)

Campaign Table is list of campaigns to be run containing:


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o Name and Dates

o The Media Director Queue ID contacts are to be delivered too.

o The maximum number of items that may be queued (May be overridden by the Campaign schedule).

o The Queue Priority (May be overridden by the Campaign schedule).

Campaign State

o Ready

o Active

o Stopped

o Completed

o Disabled

o Pending Deletion

Campaign Description, displayed in the Preview Contact form

Campaign Prompt, displayed in the Preview Contact form.

Preview Contact Schema (Schedule)

Campaign Schedule Table is list of Schedules to be run containing:

o Campaign ID

o Schedule Type

One off

Reoccurring day of week

o Resume Type

Resume - restart from where it last finished

Restart – restart from the beginning of the list

ResumeRestart – Resume from the last place finished and at the end restart the list again.

o Start and Stop dates

o Day of Week 0=Sunday…..6=Saturday

o Maximum number of queued items – may override campaign settings.

o Campaign Priority – may override campaign settings.

o Media Client action

No action

Preview Contact – The agent will initiate the contact when ready.

Initiate Contact – The Media Client will initiate contact using the first number listed in the contact form.


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Preview Contact schema (Contact)

The Preview Contact, Contact table contains:

o The customers contact details

o The Campaign Identifier

o A Notes field for free form text

o Current status

Idle

Queued waiting for agent

Deliver to agent

Pending Queuing

o Completion Status

Not completed

Completed failed

Completed, No Retry

Failed

o Last agent to deal with this contact

o Suspend details

o Preferred agent details

Application Management Service

The management and monitoring of all Contact Center Express media stores, License Directors and Media Directors is accomplished by the Application Management Service. This service enables you to:

View the status of servers

Configure servers in real time

Manage servers

Gather statistics

The Application Management Service consists of two components:

Application Management Director – An application that runs in a Microsoft server environment and gathers status and health information about Contact Center Express servers.

Application Management Console – A component that 'snaps into' the Microsoft Management Console and then connects to the Application Management Director to display the state of currently available servers. Using the snap-in, a user can view and change configuration and operation information about currently monitored servers.

When Application Management Director starts up, it opens a connection to all running Contact Center Express media stores, License Directors and Media Directors it finds on the network. It asks those applications to forward information relating to their configuration and operation. The Application Management Console then displays that information in graphical tree structure.


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Interaction Data Server – The Workhorse of Contact Center Express

The Interaction Data Server (IDS) is a key component to the Contact Center Express suite of products. It monitors VDNs, splits/skills, trunk groups and agent extensions to gather detailed statistical information about all facets of a call. The IDS receives real-time information and, based on the regularity specified, calculates statistics such as talk and wait-time averages.

The Interaction Data Server is designed to receive information from one or more switches. This information will be managed locally in memory and also recorded to a transaction database. Applications connected to the Interaction Data Server can request information for a specific device on a specific switch. Multiple Interaction Data Servers (typically in multiple sites) can also share information between themselves. Application requests for information received by an Interaction Data Server can be passed to another Interaction Data Server to be serviced.

The Interaction Data Server will also allow applications to store multiple tag/data values to the transaction database against a call. This data will allow calls to be easily matched to customers or to agent activities. The IVR Server will allow the IVR developer to store script data, such as menu selections, directly to the Interaction Data Server.

Simple Configuration

In its simplest configuration the Interaction Data Server receives information about a single switch. Applications connect to it and request data about devices on that switch.

Complex Configuration


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In a more complex configuration, the Interaction Data Server acts as part of a network of servers that are receiving information from multiple switches. Applications are attached to any of the servers in the network. Requests received from an application are forwarded to the correct Interaction Data Server to be processed. The receiving IDS server will process the request then pass the response back to the original IDS server.

Call Event Logging

The Interaction Data Server logs all call event data received from the Telephony Server to a SQL database for future reporting. Logging may be turned on and off through initial configuration parameters or dynamically while the Interaction Data Server is running. The server uses the Universal Call ID and the switch identifier to store each event received from the Telephony Server. Either all or no events are logged for a switch. The Interaction Data Server also stores agent login and logout events to the database.

The Interaction Data Server receives event information from clients and stores it in the database as a client event. Each client event is in the form of a name/value data pair. Logging of call-related events to the Interaction Data Server database is independent of any other switch-related activity.

Call Routing Server – Intelligent Routing for PRUDENTIAL’S Contact Center

The Call Routing Server enables intelligent call routing for inbound calls. The routing is based on received call data matched with customer information, call center statistics or agent availability.

The Call Routing Server:

Manages the Avaya Computer Telephony connection

Monitors VDNs

Manages VDN licensing

Registers for routing services

Receives call events

Issues routing instructions

Loads (manages) generic extensions, such as the Generic SQL Extension, which gives the server access to SQL Server databases.

The Call Routing Server supports a single connection to a switch/media server. This connection can be backed up via a standby link.

Accessing Data

The Routing Server loads (manages) generic plug-ins, such as the SQL Plug-in, which gives the server access to SQL Server databases. The database could be a Contact Center Express database or any other type, for example, a Microsoft Access database.

Using a routing link extension, a call vector sends an adjunct routing request to the Telephony Server, which, in turn, informs the Routing Server that has registered the associated VDN. The Routing Server handles the request (usually to a database) for information relating to the collected digits.

The database passes back the extension number the call should be sent to (this could be a skill, split, agent DN, DDI or international number). The number is then processed by the Routing Server and a route selection request is passed to the Telephony Server and onto the switch/media server.

If the switch/media server doesn't receive the call destination within the wait-time specified in the vector, it processes the next command in the list.


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Configuration Server – Ease Installation and Maintenance with Centralized Configuration

Configuration Server is a central repository for all configuration data belonging to Contact Center Express applications and is an alternative to ini files residing on every workstation. Configuration Server allows a contact center or network administrator to change an application's configuration without needing to go to individual desktops. All the information processed by the server is stored in a backend database.

License Director

License Director is a central repository for all Contact Center Express run-time licenses. License Director manages licensing by accepting license requests from Contact Center Express applications. It only issues the number of licenses that have been purchased or made available for trial. If the number of licenses requested exceeds the number purchased, the request is denied.


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License Director has no direct user interaction once it has been installed. License information is added, deleted and modified using the Application Management Service.

XML Server – The New Standard for Information Exchange

The XML Service consists of the XML Server, which converts the existing CSTA II interface of Avaya Computer Telephony software to CSTA III XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and XML Client, which allows developers to build CTI applications in .Net.

The CSTA XML-over-TCP interface presented by XML Server complies with the international standard for computer telephony interfacing as set by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA): ecma-269, ecma-285 and ecma-323 (specifically as described in Annex G of the Standard ECMA - 323 June 2001, XML Protocol for Computer Supported Telecommunications Applications (CSTA) Phase III.)

SQL Plug-in – Integrating Relational Databases

The SQL Plug-in is a simple plug-in mechanism that allows you to integrate Avaya Contact Center Express server applications with any SQL Server database without the need for new development on the server. This plug-in can be plugged in to any Contact Center Express server application that supports the Plug-in Manager, such as IVR Server and the Call Routing Server.

SQL Plug-in uses Microsoft ADO to connect to a database and allow simple SQL functionality to be available to the controlling application. The plug-in's detailed configuration set allows named events to be received from the controlling application. The events and associated parameters are converted to a direct SQL statement which is then passed to the database for processing. Returned results are extracted from the returned record set and passed back to the controlling application via an associated return event.

Contact Database

The Contact Database is a SQL or MSDE-based facility for the storage and maintenance of telephone directory data. The database is currently used by the desktop application Attendant. Attendant displays the full directory of database contacts; however, the type of information on those contacts can be customized to suit the application's needs. The database column name structure is modeled on the configuration of Microsoft Outlook's Contacts folder, simplifying the inputting process for database administrators.

Failover – Supporting PRUDENTIAL’S Mission Critical Contact Center

Contact Center Express is supported by the highly reliable Avaya Communication Manager Call Center running on Avaya platforms with options for standard, high, and critical (fully duplicated) reliability. Reliability levels up to five 9’s are available from Avaya.


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Contact Center Express can accept configuration data for a primary and secondary Avaya CT server. When loaded, CCE will attempt to open a connection to the primary Avaya CT server. If this connection is successfully opened, client requests will be serviced via this connection. If this connection fails to open, CCE will attempt to open a connection to the secondary Avaya CT. If this connection is successfully opened, client requests will be serviced via this secondary connection. This process is only carried out when the application is started.

If there is a failure on the Telephony Server used by Agent, you must restart the Telephony Server as well as the Agent application. If you have configured a secondary Telephony Server for Agent and there is a failure on the primary Telephony Server, you need to restart Agent for it to connect to the secondary server. If you are running Media Client, you must close Media Client first, then Agent, and then restart both applications (Agent first). This is because Media Client uses Agent as a COM server to perform telephony operations and Agent cannot completely shut down if a client application is still running.

If you have configured a secondary XML Server for Media Director and there is a failure on the primary XML Server, Media Director automatically connects to the secondary server and continues to deliver work items. You do not need to restart Media Director. The length of time it takes for Media Director to connect to the secondary XML Server depends on the number of phantom stations you have configured. Each phantom station takes about 0.1 seconds. If you have not configured a secondary XML Server, Media Director recovers the connection with the primary XML Server when it comes up again. Media Director tries to recover the connection every 60 seconds. When the connection is recovered, Media Director continues to deliver work items.

Supported Platforms/Minimum System Requirements

Contact Center Express Platforms

Switches Contact Center Express(CCE) works with all Avaya media servers and media gateways running Avaya Computer Telephony and Application Enablement Services (AES).

Note: Contact Center Express R2.0 will only work with Avaya CT.

CTI CentreVu CT, Release 3.3, 9.1, 9.5, 10.1 and 11.1 (with Service Pack 3)

Avaya CT 1.2 and 1.3

Application Enablement Services (AE Services), Release 3.0., 3.1

IVRs Avaya IVR* Version 8, or Avaya IR 1.2

* Previously known as Conversant IVR.

Servers OS Either:

Windows NT 4.0 Server SP6a

Windows 2000 Server SP4

Windows 2003 Server (Enterprise & Standard).

A server operating system is recommended.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher.

Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 (Multimedia components).

Hardware Contact Center Express servers can run on the same hardware as the Avaya CT Server (see the Avaya CT Server Specifications table and the Contact Center Express on Avaya CT Server Specifications table).


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Any increase in processor speed or memory capacity will improve performance, particularly for the Interaction Data Server.

If the Interaction Data Server is running on a server with Avaya CT server software, a 2.4Ghz CPU and 512Mb of RAM memory are recommended as minimum hardware.

Databases Either:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000, minimum SP3a

MSDE 2000 SP3a

Administration OS

Either:

Windows NT 4.0 SP6a

Windows 2000 Professional SP4

Windows XP Professional in XP or Classic styles, minimum SP1a (for a Windows registry fix, see the Contact Center Express on-line knowledge base (http://support.AvayaContactCenterExpress.com).)

Agent Desktop OS

Either:

Windows NT 4.0 SP6a

Windows 2000 Professional SP4

Windows XP Professional in XP or Classic styles minimum SP1a

Avaya Computer Telephony client software, Release 3.3 Version 2.0 or higher.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher.

Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 (Multimedia components).

Agent Desktop Hardware

Contact Center Express desktop applications run on hardware that meets the minimum specification for the installed operating system.

Agent example:

A 266 MHz Pentium or higher processor.

At least 32MB of RAM memory (64MB for Windows NT 4.0, 2000 or XP Professional).

50MB of free hard disk space for the application, 10-18MB for online documentation (file sizes depend on the language you install), and around 2MB for client sample applications.

A CD-ROM drive.

A SVGA or better video controller, and monitor with resolution set at 800 x 600 pixels or higher.

A mouse or other Windows-compatible pointing device.

A TCP/IP LAN connection to the Telephony Server.

Note: System performance may be adversely affected by lower system speeds, processor model, and memory capacities.

Email Servers Microsoft Exchange 5.5 and 2000 (on supported Server OS)


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Note: Only POP3 is supported

Reporting Avaya CMS R9, R11, R12.1, .CMS Supervisor releases compatible with the CMS platform. Note: CMS Supervisor has been tested on Windows NT 4.0 and has no known issues; however, Supervisor on NT 4.0 is permissive use only since MS no longer supports NT 4.0.

Developer

Developer is a collection or ‘toolkit’ of ActiveX Component Object Model objects for Avaya switches. Developers can use these controls to quickly build CTI applications without Agent. Developer controls make it is possible to build the foundation of a soft phone with no coding required. Developer is the development tool used by Avaya to create Agent.


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Operational Effectiveness

Avaya Operational Effectiveness tools provide comprehensive real-time monitoring for faster, more informed management decisions, historical insight for accurate trending and planning, and enhanced efficiency for better overall business performance. Using the common reporting and analytic tools that integrate agent performance management capabilities and overall operational performance data collection, organization, archiving, and analysis can create great efficiencies for PRUDENTIAL’S contact center.

Avaya Call Management System (CMS)

The Avaya Call Management System (CMS) is an integrated analysis and reporting program offering real time monitoring, historical reporting, custom reporting, task scheduling, exception notification and threshold warning, administration and configuration, and long term data storage for PRUDENTIAL’S Avaya contact center.

Real-time reports can be updated as often as every three seconds and summarized as often as every 15 minutes. Over 100 standard historical reports are available in intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes; daily; weekly; and monthly summaries. Integrated reports include data for a specified start time in the past 24 hours up to and including the moment the report is generated. Both graphical and text-based reports are available. Standard reports can be customized. Reports can be run on demand or scheduled. Reports can be displayed on the PC, printed to local or network printers, saved to file, or exported to HyperText Markup Language (HTML) formats.

With Avaya Call Management System (CMS), customers can view live, real-time information—and see the immediate results of their adjustments. They can also use historical reports to analyze trends, establish performance benchmarks, and plan new marketing or customer service campaigns. Supervisors have access to real-time and historical reports to help them effectively manage the performance of their personnel. A powerful custom report package lets customers modify real-time and historical reports or create reports that fit their unique requirements. Extensive reporting of exceptions allows managers to quickly identify areas requiring immediate attention.

What's New?

Avaya Call Management System (CMS) 13.1 builds on the capabilities and provides additional survivability options and expanded capacities. This new release gives customers more options to ensure the availability of their contact center data and to support contact center consolidation plans.

CMS offers new capabilities and expanded capacities in conjunction with Avaya Call Center and Communication Manager call center software. These enhancements are targeted at helping customers more efficiently manage and report upon their call centers. They provide a clearer picture of the entire path that a call takes.

The release of CMS provides two product versions: the standard CMS product and the CMS Expanded AUX version. The CMS Expanded AUX product line adds support for 100 Auxiliary work reason codes in addition to all of the benefits of the CMS product line features.

Enhancements

With Avaya CMS, customers can view live, real-time information-and see the immediate results of their adjustments. They can also use historical reports to analyze trends, establish performance benchmarks, and plan new marketing or customer service campaigns. Supervisors have access to real-time and historical reports to help them effectively manage the performance of their personnel. A powerful custom


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report package lets customers modify real-time and historical reports or create reports that fit their unique requirements. Extensive reporting of exceptions allows managers to quickly identify areas requiring immediate attention.

CMS .1 builds on the capabilities of in conjunction with Avaya Call Center 3.1 and Communication Manager 3.1 software:

Administration for 2000 vectors

Administration for Call Center 3.1 vector enhancements

Survivable CMS

Performance assessment and update documented

Enhanced security for Supervisor

CMS offers new capabilities and expanded capacities to support Avaya Call Center 3.0 and Communication Manager 3.0 software:

Increase in AUX work codes to 100 (0-99) ( Expanded AUX option only)

Support for 3,000 logged-in agents per skill (both releases)

Support for Russian

Administration for vector enhancements in Call Center 3.0 via the command line interface

Support for the Sun Fire V890 platform

Simplified SSH Installation

Avaya CMS now comes with more features as part of the standard product instead of optional features. These additional standard features include:

IBM Informix ISQL (Informix sequel query language)

10 ODBC drivers for ease of data exportation

External Call History Authorized

Enhanced External Call History Authorized

Avaya CMS Supervisor now comes with more features also. These features include:

Report Designer

Network Reporting

Avaya CMS helps customers keep in touch with virtually everything that's going on-whether they want to evaluate the performance of one agent, a group of agents, a single contact center, or multiple locations around the world. It's ideal for small, single-location contact centers or large, multi-location applications, or anything between.

Avaya Call Management System Supervisor (CMS Supervisor)

Avaya Call Management System (CMS) Supervisor works in conjunction with Avaya CMS, providing user-friendly PC-based administrative tools and reports to help managers maximize contact center performance.

You can administer PRUDENTIAL’S contact center effectively with Avaya CMS Supervisor. CMS is accessible from direct, dial up, or LAN-connected, Windows-based PCs using Avaya Call Management System Supervisor software instead of (or in addition to) direct connected or dial up dedicated terminals.


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CMS Supervisor eliminates the need for a dedicated terminal, recovering desk space and reducing hardware investment, while delivering all the advantages of a Windows and LAN environment.

The CMS Supervisor interface provides the following features and benefits:

Windows Graphical User Interface allows you to monitor and move multiple agents easily with the use of a mouse versus a series of commands; it also has the familiar look, feel, and increased efficiency of traditional Windows features—point-and-click, drag-and-drop, and drop-down menus

Ability to run other PC applications while actively monitoring call center conditions. You can run a report minimized and be notified (through color/symbol changes) when an item has passed a specific threshold.

Enhanced, full color, graphical status reports can be generated in formats that are easier to interpret at a glance.

Customized threshold and exception alerting help call center managers rapidly respond to changes within the call center

Utilizing existing PC and LAN environments results in cost savings, recovery of desk space, and protects infrastructure investments by eliminating the need for a separate terminal. Allows users to print reports on any network printer for which the user has permissions.

Expanded mobility with access to CMS from the desktop or laptop PC, within the call center, or from remote locations via dial-up access or local or wide area network.

Access and monitor multiple call centers simultaneously. CMS Supervisor supports multiple windows as well as multiple instances allowing CMS Supervisor to connect to up to four different CMS platforms simultaneously. A single CMS can support up to eight Avaya Call Centers.

Automatic execution of CMS reports and ACD administration and other tasks with the Scripting feature. The Scripting feature provides another method to automatically schedule and print reports, make ACD administration changes, and perform other scheduled tasks. Scripting allows scheduling of call center tasks such as agent reconfiguration, report generation, and vector routing changes, with PRUDENTIAL’S PC scheduling package.

Fast, easy creation of customized reports with Avaya’s new Report Wizard, available with the optional Report Designer package, provides a wizard approach for easy, customized report creation.

Easy export of call center data to other Windows applications via clipboard cut and paste, exporting to a file, optional Open Database Connectivity, or exporting to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) for posting PRUDENTIAL’S results on PRUDENTIAL’S Intranet.

In today’s competitive environment, the performance of PRUDENTIAL’S contact center is critical to PRUDENTIAL’S business success. For many companies, customer service is their only market differentiator, making the contact center operation more of a strategic business asset than ever before. For other companies, their contact centers are mission critical operations that provide the key links to building strong, profitable customer relationships. In these and almost all other cases, the success of the contact center is dependent upon management’s ability to effectively and efficiently manage its contact center operations.

The call management system provides the information tools to help companies monitor and analyze the performance of their contact center operations, allowing managers to easily see where improvements are needed and to take fast, effective action. By fine-tuning customer service processes, companies are able to improve operational efficiency, build stronger, more profitable, customer relationships and achieve operational objectives.

With the Avaya Call Management System (CMS) you get the tools you need to create a contact center that delivers maximum performance.


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Integrated System Administration and Call Management

CMS is an integrated analysis and reporting program offering real time monitoring, historical reporting, custom reporting, task scheduling, exception notification and threshold warning, administration and configuration, and long term ACD data storage for PRUDENTIAL’S Avaya Contact Center. The Avaya Media Server or Avaya DEFINITY® Server sends status information to CMS while ACD activities are in progress. This includes specific event data on calls by agent, agent group, trunk, trunk group, queued calls, agent actions, vector, and Vector Directory Number (VDN). Real-time status and event data is passed via TCP/IP LAN connection and is tracked, compiled, and stored by CMS. Information may be retrieved in a variety of both real-time and historical management reports.

Real-time reports can be updated as often as every three seconds and summarized as often as every 15 minutes. Historical reports are available in intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes; daily; weekly; and monthly summaries. Integrated reports include data for a specified start time in the past 24 hours up to and including the moment the report is generated. Both graphical and text-based reports are available. Standard reports can be customized. Reports can be run on demand or scheduled. Reports can be displayed on the PC, printed to local or network printers, saved to file, or exported to HTML formats.

Real Time Monitoring

You can use CMS’ reporting capability to get real-time information—updated as often as every three seconds, depending on the user permission and number of active terminals and open windows—that will help you monitor ongoing performance and status so you can make any necessary adjustments quickly.

CMS Split/Skill Status Real Time Report

In the CMS Supervisor real time skill status display shown below the chart format and sorting order of agents has been changed from the pie chart shown above and the agents are sorted in ascending time order. Threshold highlighting is also illustrated showing agents spending excess time in Aux Work state, a Service Level Warning, and an Oldest Call Waiting caution level.


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CMS Split/Skill Status Real Time Report


Double clicking on an agent name in the report allows a supervisor to drill down and access individual agent information.

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CMS Agent Information Drill Down Report

Comprehensive Historical Contact Center Reporting

CMS statistics for agents, skills, trunks, trunk groups, vectors, and VDNs are stored in intervals PRUDENTIAL’S administrator defines (15, 30, or 60 minutes) for up to 62 days. Daily statistics are stored in 24-hour intervals for up to five years; weekly and monthly summary data can be stored for up to ten years. Up to 2,000 customer-defined exceptions are saved; and up to 15 days of Special Days forecasting information can be stored (optional Forecasting software is required). The raw historical interval data is stored and used for the generation of ad hoc historical reports covering any period of time within the storage intervals. The system supports expandable storage capacities to provide long-term data storage up to these system maximums. PRUDENTIAL’S individual configuration will be sized to meet PRUDENTIAL’S requirements.

In addition to real time monitoring described above, there are also many historical reports, compiled as often as every 15 minutes, depending upon the data archiving interval selected system wide. These reports may be used to analyze trends, establish performance benchmarks, and plan new marketing or customer service campaigns.

CMS provides over 50 standard historical reports. Each one is designed to help you achieve critical objectives in sales and customer service while boosting the productivity of PRUDENTIAL’S contact center employees and resources.


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Sample CMS Historical Split/Skill Report

The Split/Skill report shows the calls handled, agent time and assists, and transfers and holds for each agent in a split/skill. Only the time each agent worked in the specified split/skill is shown on the report. The report is available in daily, weekly, and monthly formats.

Call Management System (CMS) on Netra 210


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Avaya Call Management System (CMS) Sun Netra 210 Platform

CPU 1.3GMHz UltraSPARC® IIi processor with 512 KB Level 2 cacheMemory The standard ship in the platform is 1024MB. Expand to 2 GB in 512MB increments.Graphics card Sun PGX64, 2-D graphics with 8 MB of SGRAM.Monitor 17” (16” viewable), .28 mm dot pitch color monitor

Ethernet connector RJ-45 10/100 auto-sensing and auto-switching

Hard Disk One internal 73 GB EIDE 7200 RPM hard drive. Two internal 80 GB hard drives with Disk Mirroring.

CD-ROM drive DVD - Read only

Tape Drive External tape drive DAT72 single drive. Tapes 5 each DAT72 4mm 36GB.

PCI slots Quantity 3 33-MHz PCI slots.

Power Supply 250 watt AC power.

Input Devices USB Keyboard, USB Mouse

Modem Sportster 33.6 KBps External Modem (U.S.A. and Canada only)

Software Version (Effective date: June 13, 2005)

Avaya Visual Vectors – A Graphical Routing Administration Option

Avaya Visual Vectors can be used with the Avaya Call Management System (CMS) to provide a graphical routing administration interface. With Avaya Visual Vectors you’ll be able to build even the most complex call-handling paths very quickly and efficiently. Instead of working with traditional vector routing tables, you’ll be creating a graphical “map”—a visual representation of PRUDENTIAL’S call distribution, with familiar icons and graphics.

The Avaya Visual Vector Editor screen provides a palette of available functions and steps that are grouped in logical sets. To build PRUDENTIAL’S call vector, you simply drag the desired step or function into the appropriate place on the vector display grid. To help you build the vector correctly and logically, the software automatically prompts you to complete the logic of each step. If you add a decision or test-type step, for example, the software will automatically create two or more branch paths for you—which must be completed for the vector to be valid.

Comments can be included with vector steps. For example, the text of an announcement can be input as a comment for the announcement step. Comments can be displayed for all steps, or can be viewed for a specific step by pausing the cursor over the step icon. Free-floating comments can also be ‘pasted’ onto the vector display grid, which can be useful when explaining the vectors to others, or simply as development notes.


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Avaya Visual Vector Editor

Avaya Visual Vectors is a Java-based application that runs on standard desktop or laptop PCs, and communicates with the ACD through an Avaya Call Management System (CMS). You can use Avaya Visual Vectors in a standalone mode to brainstorm, design, or adjust PRUDENTIAL’S call vectoring off-line—at home, hotel, or office—then save (upload) it to an Avaya CMS server whenever it’s ready to implement. Offline vector creation allows vectors can be created anytime, anywhere, independent of switch connection and configurations.

For multisite call centers, call vectors that you create for one of PRUDENTIAL’S call centers can be easily saved to PRUDENTIAL’S ACD in another center. There’s no need to construct or copy a new call vectoring table. That can be especially helpful if you use the same complex routing sequence in a group of widely-dispersed call centers. With Avaya Visual Vectors cut-and-paste feature, you can easily make all the sequences consistent, so PRUDENTIAL’S call routing will look the same across all call centers.

In addition to helping you design vectors more quickly, Avaya Visual Vectors makes it easier to administer and manage PRUDENTIAL’S call vectoring. Steps or sequences that you use frequently in PRUDENTIAL’S call vectors—such as time of day tests, or music loops—can be stored in Avaya Visual Vectors, and quickly ‘pasted’ into new vectors as needed. Template vectors can be created for common call handling situations and complex routing sequences.


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Avaya – The Recognized Leader in Contact Center TechnologyAvaya has in excess of 32,000 ACDs installed, including nearly two thirds of the Fortune 500 companies, and over 25 years of Call Center market experience. Avaya Inc. has been a premier provider of ACD products and a leading ACD vendor (integrated or standalone) for over a decade.

We provide customers with a consistent, superior experience through a truly “unique collection of assets:” The marriage of best-in-class IP telephony and communications software applications with the most comprehensive, in-depth multi-vendor services capability in the industry. It’s this combination - the whole being greater than the sum of the parts - that differentiates Avaya. Avaya represents a trusted choice because of:

Our focus on the enterprise and understanding of customers’ business needs

The breadth and depth of our relationships

Our superior technology, rich applications and strength in services

Our global reach and local presence

The enthusiasm and motivation of our people

The knowledge and resources of Avaya Labs

Avaya Inc. designs, builds and manages communications networks for more than one million businesses worldwide, including more than 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500®. Focused on businesses large to small, Avaya is a world leader in secure and reliable Internet Protocol (IP) telephony software applications, systems and services. Our offerings include converged voice and data networks, customer relationship management, unified communications, traditional voice communications, as well as a comprehensive services organization.

NICE PERFORM recording system

Gain Insight from Interactions with NICE PERFORM™

Everyday, Contact Center receives thousands of calls loaded with information vital to their company’s operation. While agents have perfected the art of listening, are they really all ears? They try to absorb all that is said, but the high volume of calls makes it difficult. These calls contain layers of information that must be peeled away in order to get at the essentials. NICE Perform™ offers tools that capture unstructured multimedia interactions, extract hidden insights, and drive business performance. As a result, Contact Centers become the direct link to PRUDENTIAL’s success.

Advanced Solutions For Improving Business Performance

NICE Perform provides leading Quality Management (QM) and analytics solutions. It contains a comprehensive set of Web-based tools for extracting, processing, analyzing and effectively visualizing information from customer interactions on a large scale. This unique solution ensures that all data is rescued from isolation in stand-alone information silos (such as add-on audio analysis solutions, external customer feedback tools, etc.) and fully integrated into an all-inclusive system. Its exceptional capabilities enable it to analyze multi-dimensional aspects of every interaction, flag calls for further analysis (e.g. from customers at risk), and help improve business performance. These capabilities help the organization improve campaign effectiveness, reduce inefficiencies in a contact center’s operation, knowledge and skills and much more.

Contact centers providing added value to the enterprise


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NICE Perform brings out the hidden potential of Contact Centers and highlights the added value they bring to PRUDENTIAL’s business. With NICE Perform, Contact Centers are able to identify interactions where sales opportunities were successful and understand the reasons for this success. It also provides Contact Centers with content analysis for assessing customer reactions to company events and news,and identifying new trends. With this newly defined information in hand, Contact Centers help management focus on important issues necessary for their business operation - thus proving their value to the enterprise.

Enter The Age Of Precision MonitoringPrecision Monitoring focuses on important calls in order to identify trends and the root-causes of contact center issues. Using advanced rules, NICE Perform automatically scores every recorded interaction, identifying calls that do not meet pre-defined quality requirements - such as long holds, multiple transfers, silent periods, use of inappropriate language by agent or customer, and even high emotion levels. Once the system scores these calls, it alerts managers to take immediate action. This might entail bridging an agent’s knowledge gaps, or getting to the root of a problem and resolving it. Very often, a problem’s cause is beyond the reach of the agent or Contact Center. NICE Perform enables users to focus on the cause of the problem rather than the outcome itself and resolve it.

TP Knowledge Management (KM)

TP Knowledge Management provides the ability to obtain and transform knowledge into an energy for action is the ultimate competitive advantage for Prudential.

KM Objectives:

Pooling of corporate information/knowledge so that it becomes an asset

Creation of a corporate culture

Replacement of “master leading student” style of information conveyance method

Encourage employees to volunteer information and to retrieve knowledge

Reduce corporate training time and effort

Utilizing technology to reduce costs of corporate

knowledge provision

Management of the channels and content for corporate information

KM, Functions & Features:

Support multiple knowledge source

o Microsoft Office Document

o Word

o Excel

o Power Point

o HTML

o MHTL

o PDF


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Knowledge Interaction

Hierarchical Category Management

Batch Document Import Tools

Full text search

Statistical Reports

Specific Search Criteria

Application Customization Support

Access security management

Version Control Tools

Knowledge Relationship Support

Supports international languages

KM Knowledge Types:

Simple Knowledge

o Articles with fragments and notes

o Create article relationship

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Interaction Knowledge Management Tool

o Step by step problem navigation

KM Management Tools

Hierarchical Category Management

Security Control

Version Control

Reporting

KM Security Control

Role based Privilege Control

o Reader

o Contributor

o Administrator

Operation Authorization

o Read

o Edit

o Print

Record Level Access Control

o Search


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o Folder

o Article

KM Version Control & Team Work

Version Control

o Knowledge Version

o Version Label

o History

o Rollback

Team Work

o Check in

o Check out

KM Batch Import & Batch Job

Batch Import

o Directory Mapping

o Key words, Title, Author Mapping

Batch Job

o Automatic Task

o Import

o Rebuild Index

o Report

KM Usage Statistics & Reports

By Access Volume

By Access Frequency

By Contributors

By Modified

KM Powerful Search Tools

Full Text Search

o Specific Search Criteria

o Title

o Author

o Text and content

o Summary

o Keywords

Category and catalog search

Scheduling for Index Generation


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Highlighting of Search String for Online Post Documents

KM Article Relationship

User Defined Relationship

Automatic Keyword Relationship Matching

Article Version Relationship

KM Customization Support

KM Online Editing Function

Simple online editor

Automatic version update

Supports pictures and sounds

Supports attachments

Spell Check (English Only)

3. Service Management

4. Implementation Plan


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5. Pricing (Please see Appendix A)

6. Additional Information

a. Proposal System Total Diagram:


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7. Proposal Conclusion

1 No. Prudential Question Avaya Solution

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1.1 Please provide a management summary detailing an overview of your proposed solution.

- The proposed solution is Avaya latest IP contact center technology, which is ranking No. 1 in the world

- The proposed solution’s applications and contact center features are designed from Avaya sophisticated system

- The proposed solution’s applications and features are opened for customize in future

- The proposed solution’s applications and features are very easy to operate and management

- The proposed solution’s applications and features are very user-friendly for agents and supevisors

- The proposed solution’s applications and features are appropriate for Vietnam market

1.2 Please provide an overview of the services covered or not covered by your proposal.

Yes, the services covered by this proposal. We offer the services supported by an Avaya experience team and Sun Ivy certified engineers.


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1.3 Please provide an overview of the reason why you believe Prudential should use you as the supplier for the in scope services detailed in this RFP and what you see as the benefits for Prudential.

Avaya can be the supplier of a professional contact center for Prudential because:

- Avaya contact center technology: leading in the world

- Avaya contact center market share: No. 1 in the world

- Avaya contact center implementation experience: No. 1 in the world

- Avaya local services business partner: Sun Ivy has over 15 years experience in VN and install over 250 Avaya systems, included over 10 call centers.

- Benefits for Prudential:

- The implementation of contact center will be done by an experienced team from Avaya and Sun Ivy

- Avaya hardware and software are very stable in operation. This is because Avaya is a hardware based company for over 100 years.

- The trouble shooting in future will be very quickly and accurately because of Avaya and Sun Ivy experienced team.

1.4 Please provide an overview of the capital and operating costs for the duration of the contract. Please also provide the total cost for Prudential for the duration of the contract.

The info will be provided info later.

1.5 Please provide an overview of key milestones and timescales if Prudential were to elect to move forward for the scope of the services.

The info will be provided info later.



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2.1 Please provide a detailed technical design for the Contact Centres solution showing equipment and third party services. The design must cover the scope specified in Sections 3 of the RFP. Please note a demo or site visit may be requested by Prudential.

- Avaya Call Center Elite ACD with Expert Agent Selection famous features kit

- Avaya Contact Center Express with latest version provide a single view of user interface and come with a bunch of applications such as Agent Desktop, Sreen Pop Up with customizable fields, Email Handling, Webchat, Web Call Back, Outbound Campaign Kit, Contact History

- Avaya Interactive Respone System provides a professional selftservices solution

- TP Knowledge Management, provides the ability to obtain and transform knowledge into an energy for action wich is the ultimate competitive advantage for Prudential

- Nice Perform Recording system provide the professional recording and morintoring system for a professional Contact Center

2.2 Is there any business requirement as outlined in Section 3 that is not covered by the proposed design.

No, in section 3, this proposal was cover all



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3.1 Please describe your proposed incident and problem management process and specifically explain how this process will add value to the Prudential. Your answer must include two examples of where similar value has been delivered to comparable customers.

- For any incident and problem, customer call to Hotline 24/7 and the call will be processed as follows: - For emergency cases: support engineer will be on site within 30 minutes (in city) and support the parts to replace if needed. - For normal problems: support engineer will instruct customer on the phone and remote support. The on site time will be in 2 hours.- The hotline will be openned 24/7 and the spareparts for replacement is ready 24/7- The call from customer will be answered by an engineer who can consult, support directly and quickly - Example 1: Last week AIA got a problem of rectifier in night time at 10pm and call to our Hotline in our Customer Support Center (CSC). After received the call, the support engineer realise that the problem may come from the 3rd party rectifier and he immediately call the rectifier supplier and go on site. The problem was solved immediately

3.2 All incidents will be forwarded to the supplier via help desk. Please describe how your service desk will operate, skill levels of your service desk staff and how you propose your service desk to interface with Prudential.

We will have the help desk computer on line 24 hours and can be linked or received info from Prudential easily. The proposed solution provide an “on line monitoring software” for tracking the system problem automatically.


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3.3 Please state the service desk service levels that you typically meet (i.e what services will be provided to the Prudential, and what are the service cover hours for each service) and confirm that you would be willing to accept these as SLAs.

I/ ON SITE SERVICES:a/ Tier I Status:(emergency cases) 1/ System Ceases Operation

2/ Attendant console is defective

3/ Power Unit is Defective…

Dispatch Engineer to Customer’s Site within 1/2 hour

b/ Tier II Status: (normal, not emergency cases) 1/ Music on hold is defective

2/ Change in software

3/ Ordinary phone or wiring is defective…

Dispatch Engineer to Customer’s Site within 2 hourII/ REMOTE SERVICE AND ON-PHONE SERVICE:The support engineer will do the remote service and on-phone service any time any where within 15 min

3.4 Please describe your field locations, including local skills and number of staff, and estimated time for an engineer to arrive at each location to repair faults or make emergency changes.

Our CSC located in District 1. We got 10 engineers to support. For Prudential office in HCMC, the engineer can be on site within 30min-1hour


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4.1 Please provide your project plan for the project and supply dates for the completion of each key milestone. Please include the following:Equipment delivery timescalesInstallation/Configuration time for each componentSoftware development timeFunctional testing carried out by the supplierUAT carried out by Prudential

Equipment delivery timescales: - 6-8 weeks after contract signed

Installation/Configuration time for each component- PABX, CMS, IVR, Recorder installation: 2-3 weeks

Software development time- Application development: 3-5 weeks

Functional testing carried out by the supplier- System Testing: 3 days

UAT carried out by Prudential


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4.2 What resource and roles will you provide for the project?

- Resource is provided from Avaya and BP- System customization and installation will be done by Avaya expert and Sun Ivy certified engineers.- Maintenance services will be done by Sun Ivy- Maintenance spare parts will be provided by Sun Ivy

4.3 What schedule risks do you expect during implementation. How do you propose to mitigate these risks?

If there is any risk, Avaya will provide experience expert to help and an alternative system is also provided


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5.1 Please state any and all assumptions that you have made to complete the pricing.

please see the quotation attached

5.2 Please provide initial set-up costs required to deliver the system. Also provide on-going maintain costs for a period of 5 years.

Annual Maintenance cost is 5% of system value from the 2nd year

5.3 Please provide the total cost of ownership assuming a contract period of 5 years.

Annual Maintenance cost is 5% of system value from the 2nd year

5.4 During the contract term will there be any additional charges that have not been factored into the pricing which might be payable by the Prudential. If so, please provide details.

- The quotation not included cabling system

5.5 Please mention your desired payment terms - 30% down payment after contract signed- 60% after equipment delivery- 10% after commissioning

5.6 Please provide a copy of your standard contract.



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6.1 Please provide any additional information you feel is essential to support your proposal that has not adequately been identified in previous questions for your response.


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Avaya and the Avaya Logo are trademarks of Avaya Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Trademarks identified by ® and ™ are registered trademarks or trademarks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. unless noted. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.


contact center express proposal

Documents

avaya contact management

avaya advantage

avaya virtual routing

avaya visual vectors

management system cms

service management

proposal overview

recording system