Enterprise Connect 2013, Orlando, FL – March 19, 2013 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is to help enterprises transform their customer service strategies to accommodate current and future customer needs, along with business processes, with the introduction of a new technology platform, the OpenTouch™ Customer Service solution.

With today’s customer engagement coming via multiple touchpoints – such as personal interaction, telephone contact and, increasingly, social media – customer service is undergoing a dramatic transformation.

Alcatel-Lucent’s new OpenTouch Customer Service (OTCS) addresses these different channels of customer relationship management, expanding customer care to include ‘eReputation’ and brand management. The solution is made of software components that can sell independently to meet enterprises needs for deployment flexibility.

The new solution allows enterprises to choose what they need, add as they grow (in features and scale) and decide how it’s delivered. Full multimedia interactions are provided via open APIs, multichannel unified routing (for quick distribution management), and workflow management, and deliver a simplified system for businesses. The often complex components that make up a customer contact center are fully integrated in the OTCS, minimizing management issues and providing more efficient operations and lower costs.

Key features of the Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch Customer Service solution:

• Unified interaction management, unified routing and unified desktop solutions – Ensures operational efficiency to manage and display all engagement through a unified process and an ergonomic user interface. All components are tightly integrated to create one management system, optimizing the configuration and reporting processes for more efficient operations at lower costs. Agents can access all media and all channels from a single desktop, with clear pre-configured campaign guidance and answer recommendations.
• Management portal – Unifies the configuration into a single web tool, along with workforce and campaign management, and the real-time and historical reporting. Through a profile-based adaptive interface, it addresses the expectations for contact center management, operation and administration.
• Unified Dialer – This feature offers a best-in-class outbound campaign management, with preview, power and predictive modes. The award-winning predictive mode algorithm enables an unprecedented achievement in terms of agent productivity with 50 min of occupation per hour, with a nuisance ratio of three percent or less.
• Ability to integrate – OTCS integrates with all business critical tools like CRM, ERP and ecosystem of recording capabilities and speech recognition, expanding the reach of knowledge to serve the customer by leveraging native connectors and an integration server coming with an homogeneous and cross-module APIs layer and a complete design studio.
• Overlay add-ons – Addresses existing customers who can access new features like email outbound, IVR or others on top of their existing infrastructure.

The OpenTouch Customer Service solution complements existing Alcatel-Lucent Contact Center assets and is the foundation of the next generation of customer continuous engagement to enable enterprises collaborate with, rather than just speak or listen to, their customers. The solution allows the whole enterprise to act as one and to be entirely dedicated to servicing customers and is flexible and modular enough to adapt to business changes.

The announcement of the OpenTouch Customer Service solution leverages a technology relationship between Alcatel-Lucent and Altitude Software, a major player in the contact center market. Alcatel-Lucent has worked closely with Altitude Software to bring to market the OpenTouch Customer Service solution for mid-market companies, as well as meeting the expectations of large enterprises. As a result, Alcatel-Lucent’s business partners can now address a wider range of the enterprise market through simplified deployment schemes offering a complete feature-set and greater operational efficiency.

Quotes:

Sheila McGee-Smith, Principal, McGee-Smith Analytics, said:“The OpenTouch Customer Service solution brings the best of both worlds: an innovative customer service offer with all of the capabilities required by today’s business, including social and mobile integration, as well as sophisticated traditional capabilities, including predictive dialing. After a rigorous evaluation, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has made an excellent choice in partnering with Altitude Software for its new multi-channel customer service solution.”

Michel Emelianoff, President, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, said: “The new OpenTouch Customer Service solution drives customer interaction deeper into the business process and reaches a broader range of enterprises with its simplified platform. OTCS speaks the customers’ language and offers multimedia support from voice to social media. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise can offer an underserved market a tool that will support their customer service needs today and into the future. The solution ensures operational efficiency and costs containments to any enterprise ranking from mid to large segments in all industries.”

Additional information

• Product web site http://bit.ly/OTCSpr
• Photo of product
• Key words – Contact Center, Customer Service, Social interactions, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

Visitors to Enterprise Connect 2013 can find Alcatel-Lucent at Booth #1419 of the Gaylord Palms resort in Orlando, FL where the event is taking place from March 19-21