Top 10 Contact Centre Software and Technology 2016

Genesys Demo Thursday Agent Superpowers box

Voting is now open in our 2019 “Top 10 Contact Centre Technology” awards. Click here to vote.

Here are the results of the 2016 Top 10 Contact Centre Technology Awards. Here are our most recent award winners.

Scorebuddy – Scorebuddy QA
Genesys – Omnichannel Engagement Center
mplsystems – IntelligentContact
injixo – injixo WFM
Intelecom – Multichannel cloud contact centre solution
Jabra – Jabra BIZ 2300 corded headset
EvaluAgent – EvaluAgent Gamification
Bright UK – Bright Navigator
Interactive Intelligence – Customer Interaction Centre (CIC)
Aspect Software – Aspect Zipwire

Thanks to the 350 people who voted. It makes these the most impartial of all the contact centre technology awards.

The Top 10 Contact Centre Technology

1. Scorebuddy

Product Name: Scorebuddy QA

Brief overview of product: Scorebuddy is a cloud-based quality monitoring software for call centres. It is designed to score customer service calls, emails and webchats. Stop worrying about your reports breaking (spreadsheets), everything is in one place and there’s customisable access for everyone. It’s easy to use and does not require an IT person!

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

Scorebuddy helps businesses to manage their QA process. Data is input via Scorecards. Simply put, you put data in and you take insights out.

A free trial is offered that is quick to set up, with no credit card details required, and there are no contracts.

Release details: n/a. Scorebuddy is constantly developing.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: Scorebuddy is used by 100+ call centres, managing over 20,000 customer service agents.

Typical customers: Microsoft, Ryanair, Air bnb, Allianz, AVG, boohoo.com, Halfords, WWF, etc.

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: £309

Visit the website to find out more: scorebuddyqa.com/uk

Comments from our readers:

“I have been a call centre leader for almost 25 years, and have NEVER had such a seamless and easy to use solution for QA. When I think of the endless hours I have spent running pivot tables and spreadsheets for executive meetings – and those hours are all gone since moving to Scorebuddy! I was recently asked to compare Scorebuddy to the competition and my honest answer was: there IS no competition for their product. My team’s productivity has increased almost twofold and the agents love having the dashboard and seeing the feedback in real time.”

“I have been doing QA for call centre teams for a long time and this is the best tool for providing feedback and doing calibrations that I’ve ever seen.”

“Scorebuddy is an invaluable tool for every call centre quality assurance”

“With Scorebuddy we are able to do a very thorough analytics of all Quality evaluations: the agent desktop also enables us communicate with our agents in real time which has improved feedback process and Quality. “

“Thanks to Scorebuddy our agents become more attentive, listening skills improve and faulty, bad or damaging outcomes are reduced. I fully recommend this to every manager.”

“The product’s flexibility and the fact it is another member of the team and not just a support tool. The time and motion savings it has given us cannot have a value attached to it.”

“The Scorebuddy system is user-friendly, has great data analytics and a fantastic technical support team.”

“Very user-friendly and has become an integral tool for our team when improving customer service.”

“We love the ease of scoring, reporting, and reviewing valid data; all without manually reviewing Google sheets! The Scorebuddy team is very responsive and quick to assist with any issues as they arise.”

“They have an amazing product, reasonable prices and are very easy to work with – it is quite simply the best product I have seen/used in my career and am happy to nominate them for this recognition.”

“They keep updating and improving their product and are really nice people to deal with”

“Reporting is easy as Scorebuddy does all the work in terms of trend analysis.”

“Quick and easy to deploy – no complex integration required, produces useful data quickly and easily.”

“Quick and simple to set up and customise to suit our business.”

“Ease of use, clear direction, can amend completely to suit your centre operational requests.”

“All can have access with varying access level.”

“Incredibly easy to use and to report from – enabling us to evaluate customer service in house as well as that provided by our agencies.”

“Keeps track of all of the information we need to keep.”

“Simplicity from an agent perspective in understanding how results are presented.”

“Support from scorebuddy team.”

How could the product be improved?

“It’s definitely a product for early adopters who don’t mind a bit of a learning curve. The UI isn’t very intuitive and requires a bit of trial-and-error to get used to.”

“It is difficult to change employees between supervisors, as it doesn’t appear to update automatically after the change.”

“Better permission settings.”

“It would be perfect if you could customise more, like adding fields according to the specifications of the account.”

“Keep track of audit requirements for individual and team.”

“Make the analytics available to the basic plan, or at least lower the price.”

“Maybe more options on reports that could be run.”

“More guidance on applying and amending weightings – although the help pages and YouTube tutorials are very good….it’s more me being technically challenged!”

“The team are very interactive in seeking to implement additional options to the platform when suggested by their customers. If possible, I would probably wish for some of these upgrades to happen within a shorter timeframe.”

“Would like to see a variable overall rating system beyond red, yellow and green.”

“Nothing – anytime I ask them for improvements/additional facilities they are already building it!”

2. Genesys

Product Name: Omnichannel Engagement Center

Brief overview of product: Omnichannel customer engagement solution that combines orchestration and journey management to provide a multichannel contact centre across all channels and touchpoints.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

The Omnichannel Engagement Center solution proactively orchestrates consistent, personalised interactions and journeys across the customer life cycle. The Genesys Omnichannel Engagement Center solution serves as a system of engagement to consolidate disparate technologies, and extend current enterprise architecture for customer engagement.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: ~100

Typical customers: Atom Bank, BT, M&S, Welsh Water, NSPCC

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Pricing is determined by the functionality required.

Visit the website to find out more: www.genesys.com/uk

Comments from our readers:

“The Agent Desktop and administrative interfaces are best in class. The robustness of their call-routing capabilities is also top notch.”

“For us the most important KPI –> the system needs to be available at all times and that’s what we are able to do with Genesys.”

“Over the years, Genesys has proved again and again to be a stable but continuously evolving platform, capable of providing for our ever-changing contact centre needs. “

“It allows us to seamlessly manage our multimedia channels in one place, In addition, the SDK allows us for easy integration with the rest of our systems.”

“They are always in the front of implementing new technologies and have a powerful product that can suit most of a customer’s needs!”

“Very user friendly and provides a complete omnichannel experience utilising all contact centre channels.”

“The product is providing all contact channels we need and makes integration with other systems possible.”

“All channels included. Continuous development.”

“Diversity and the ability to stay up to date with the latest contact centre technologies.”

“Flexibility and customisation.”

“Integration, support and availability.”

“It’s far away from its opponents regarding call centre technology.

“Many configuration options, easy to support.”

“Modularity of the solution and the Genesys company looks with their feature to the future.”

“Strong vision and ability to execute. Open platform which gives all possibilities to connect other environments/systems, like CRM, online and mobile. “

“The system is highly reliable and the HA is one among the best I know so far.”

“Transparent set-up.”

“Very good application and support.”

How could the product be improved?

“Allow more customisation.”

“Better documentation on all the configuration options.”

“Better real-time metrics tracking for large numbers of users. Performance suffers in this area.”

“Easier management environment.”

“Enhanced and easier reporting solutions.”

“Flexible pricing models to suit small contact centre deployments.”

“More flexibility when smaller changes are required.”

“Provide a web-based, thin client desktop application.”

“The ability to cross-check within the system in order to keep programming errors from occurring.”

“The documentation for the features and troubleshooting steps may be easily made available to end support specialists.”

“They could improve on the management tools used by technicians and super-users.”

“Variation in licence models.”

3. mplsystems Ltd

Product Name: IntelligentContact

Brief overview of product: IntelligentContact provides an omnichannel contact centre solution for all contact channels including voice, email, webchat, social media, text and mobile. The platform incorporates all the ingredients of the traditional contact centre, including ACD, skills-based routing, IVR, call recording and workforce optimisation, along with an advanced analytics engine and a flexible business rules engine to enable contact centre users to set up complex workflows and case management rules. This is combined with a Customer Service and Sales CRM on a configurable Unified Agent desktop application. Available as both a premise and a cloud solution.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

In 2015 mplsystems added the intelligentResponse module to the platform to provide the seamless blending of self-service and automation alongside agent-assisted service. The module uses natural language processing to identify, respond to and process front- and back-office requests such as account changes, refunds, appointment changes and debt collection.

Release details: The latest release of intelligentContact includes the the ability to create live dashboards. We also combined advanced real-time scheduling and routing of field service technicians in our last applications

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 70

Typical customers: Babcock International, Aviva and Iceland.

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Prices start from £40 per agent per month for call centre functionality, up to £90 for full multichannel and advanced CRM Unified Agent Desktop applications. The basic voice price includes full CTI, IVR & Voice recording as standard features.

Visit the website to find out more: mplsystems.co.uk

Comments from our readers:

“Absolutely fantastic! Love it! Brilliant company, love the simple layout and ease of use.”

“It’s the team behind the solution which is the icing on the cake for us. No idea is a daft one and they are always thinking of ways to improve efficiencies.”

“This is an extremely versatile and robust product and it works really well within our ever-changing business environment.”

“Very intuitive and customisable, and MPL’s ability to react and provide same-day feedback and updates to the CRM puts iContact head and shoulders ahead of anything else in the price bracket.”

“A comprehensive, rounded solution, with a real awareness of the future for customer contact too.”

“Excellent communication and assistance from the initial set-up to ongoing support.”

“It supports our business requirements very well and it was flexible to what we required in terms of business process.”

“Reliable service, always new exciting updates. And in the unlikelier event that the system is down, MPL are quick to fix the situation for us. Very lovely staff.”

“Very thorough. As a team leader I have the ability to call record/ listen and look into the details of each call, such as where it came from.”

“Gives all the relevant information required on one screen and is easy to use.”

“Clearly experts within the contact centre environment.”

“Flexible self-service model.”

“Good configuration options.”

“Has all the functions required on one platform.”

“I like how we can say how the call went so that our company can follow up and improve our services.”

“Integrates with our other solutions remarkably easily.”

“It has been easy for my staff to use and collates the information exactly as I wanted.”

“It’s easy to use, efficient and constantly changing to suit our needs.”

“Our agents like the desktop and voice integration. It is easy to manage and easy to support.”

“Product is flexible, web-based, open to new features.”

“Quick & reliable. Easy to navigate. Responsive.”

“The ability to control the majority of the functions through the intelligent contact console.”

“The assimilation of all relevant data in one place so it is easy for our customer service representatives to make quick decisions with our customers. This has greatly improved business with our customers.”

“The desktop is really good as all the information is in one place.”

“We can use it for phone calls, emails, chat. It provides the option to have two separate sessions open – one for email, one for call. It is very customised and reflects our specific needs.”

“We only use a small part of the product but it suits us exactly.”

How could the product be improved?

“Improve performance: search for an item, confirmation box after having sent an email.”

“Additional campaign activities.”

“Better screen design.”

“Further enhanced report development.”

“Greater integration with phone system. However, MPL have already provided this, we just need to implement it.”

“If the call isn’t wrapped up properly to still be able to listen to it from the back end.”

“Larger development team to support changes.”

“Less processes.”

“Probably a slightly slicker email process.”

“Some operational issues: freezing fields.”

“The ipr GUI could be cleaner.”

“The next step for MPL would be to include agent performance metrics, including call stats, adherence to schedule, accuracy and customer feedback.”

“The product is excellent but the support service could be better.”

“We could be able to listen to calls without wrapping up.”

4. injixo Ltd.

Product Name: injixo WFM

Brief overview of product: injixo is a cloud-based WFM application providing workforce management for call centres and contact centres.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

Cloud based. Innovations such as the smartphone and tablet-friendly agent portal injixo ME.

Release details: As a true cloud application, injixo is subject to continuous enhancement. There is no need for an annual ‘big bang’ update project; enhancements are frequently deployed to the cloud.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: Approximately 200 UK contact centres, ranging in size from 25 agents to over 2,000.

Typical customers: Call centres and contact centres of all sizes and in all industries. Customers include Axa, Betfair, Care UK 111, Carphone Warehouse, Echo Managed Services, Jet2, The Law Society, Miele, The Book People and TomTom.

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: £900 per month, all inclusive (£9/user/month). There are no optional extras, no hidden charges and no set-up fees. As a cloud application there is no need for servers or an IT project to implement injixo and full training is included in the price.

Visit the website to find out more: www.injixo.com

Comments from our readers:

“Simple price structure, good value. Onboarding process works perfectly, due to focus and attention from the competent injixo team.”

“Very good efficient service with excellent customer service and the developers are always looking for ways to improve and develop their product.”

“You are able to tailor-make the system to your own requirements, speed at which forecasts are generated is fantastic.”

“I like how user friendly it is and the simplicity of use. It is easy to forecast and optimise. Another big plus for me is that the system understands multiskilling scheduling.”

“Subscription product, instantly scalable.”

“The forecasting tool is incredibly powerful and you can even factor in back-office tasks as well as phone queue priorities and of course Real Time Adherence.”

“The overall price and immediate support available. Cloud based is great too.”

“Its power! You can use it as simple or as complex as you like – just brace yourself for a steep learning curve if you’re unfamiliar with this type of tech. However, that said, once you’ve got it you’ll love it and never turn back.”

“Being able to view the live data coming through and schedules are easy to read for the staff and the online e-learning (great videos).”

“Easy to create optimised scheduled, easy to scale as it’s cloud based. Value for money.”

“Easy to read and re-schedule people.”

“Easy to use, always there with support; if in need of help you get a speedy response.”

“Speed of functionality, which allows for a good workflow.”

“The ability to drawn in various platforms and systems and have the ability to calculate and forecast workforce optimisation much more efficiently whilst still being able to have manual control if needed.”

“Very easy to manually enter shifts.”

How could the product be improved?

“It times out and I have to reboot it to make changes – It would be good if it just stayed editable all the time.”

“Increase self-service online training to include a searchable FAQ or Training database to allow for immediate answers to “how to” questions rather than having to ask questions in a member forum and wait for responses to come back.”

“Needs to be cross-browser compatible for the WFM side. It’s stuck on IE because of ActiveX plugins which it needs to move on from.”

“A little bit more flexibility in the functionality. e.g. Annual leave calendar dates cannot be changed. All customers set to Jan–Dec rather than being able to stipulate the business requirement for leave year.”

“The only improvement I can suggest is a bit or work on the meeting planner, then this product in my eyes would be perfect!”

“Customisation of reports would be nice, but report server access makes it possible to build custom reports anyway.”

“More automation of admin tasks such as holiday management.”

“There are a few improvements which could be made. Some examples are pop-up notifications for users and read-only access on schedules.”

“Ability to predict service levels would be useful.”

“Building rotations takes too long, automatic approvals of holiday requests are really needed.”

“To automatically complete forecast of data and rules set-up.”

“What if scenario environment would also be welcome.”

5. Intelecom

Product Name: Intelecom

Brief overview of product: Intelecom is a complete multichannel cloud contact centre solution. This means that agents have the flexibility to respond to phone, email, webchat, social media and SMS enquiries all within one purpose-built application and not a series of add-ons. Intelecom is known for its flexibility and scalability. It can be adapted to accommodate from one to several thousand concurrent agents using any device, in any location and integrates seamlessly with multiple applications.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

Intelecom has standard interfaces to the major CRM applications such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics to enable personalised enquiry handling and queue prioritisation.

In 2015 Intelecom was positioned as a ‘Challenger’ in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Centres as a Service, Western Europe.

Recent introduction of API-level integration to Trip Advisor, which enables clients in the travel and hotel sectors to respond to reviews in a more positive and timely manner, directly from within their contact centre technology.

Release details: Intelecom has three releases per year in April, June and October. In close collaboration with customers, new features are added and enhancements to the core product continually made.

For example, WebRTC softphone capabilities were added in April 2016. This allows agents to answer calls directly from their computer and removes the need to rely on external communications devices such as landlines or mobiles. Other product enhancements in the April 2016 release included, Chat Survey, Unified Service Desk for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Mobile App for Agents and a Secure Single Sign-on.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: In the UK there are over 100 contact centres using Intelecom with approximately 3,000 agents

Typical customers: Affinity Water, Domino’s Pizza, Capita, Dun & Bradstreet, Figleaves, Ombudsman Services, Oxford Brookes University, Scandic Hotels and SAS Airlines

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Our prices depend on whether one channel is purchased, or multiple. A wide range of additional services and features which will affect the price.

Visit the website to find out more: Puzzel.com

Comments from our readers:

“Its flexibility and the level of control it gives customers. It’s extremely configurable and easy to integrate for enhancing other services and processes. I very much enjoy using Connect.”

“Support of the Intelecom staff Helpdesk staff.”

“Easy, user-friendly, stable and minimal downtime, quick support and on the supply side in terms of developing new solutions.”

“The flexibility of the solution. It allows for a good range of combinations of multichannel handling.”

“Meets our business needs, simple to operate, flexible.”

“Product offers everything we are looking for to deliver excellent customer service. The IT support offered by Intelecom is excellent.”

“Simple to use and quick to get up and running.”

“Flexibility and price.”

“Ease of use and reliability.”

“Flexibility – in particular around business continuity.”

“Reports available.”

“Simple to use. Helpful organisation and support.”

“The capabilities.”

How could the product be improved?

“Customisations can be a bit challenging. Support could be faster for tickets not regarded as high priority.”

“More language support in back-end.”

“Better ux design on statistics and reports.”

“Standardised reports should have some more detail. In particular, we would like to have better data on calls handled in callback.”

“If this is to be marketed as a multichannel solution, having one licence per channel per active agent is counterproductive. This increases the pressure to have fewer channels per agent, again reducing the flexibility of the solution.”

“The last upgrade to the Social Media module is a step backwards in usability compared to the version that was phased out recently.”

6. Jabra

Product Name: Jabra BIZ 2300 corded headset

Brief overview of product: Jabra’s BIZ 2300 provides good quality sound with durability and a comfortable and stylish corded headset.

Breath-resistant air-shock microphone to eliminate unwanted breathing noise, with noise-cancellation and HD Voice
Kevlar-reinforced cord, improving bend and pull force to withstand typical call centre wear and tear
360 degree freespin boom-arm rotation for optimal position with the risk of breakage
Answer/End, Volume, Mute, Hold/Resume
PeakStop instantly removes any harmful loud sounds before they even reach an agent’s ears.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

The light headset, weighing only 68g (Duo) for increased all-day comfort and agent satisfaction
Break-proof FreeSpin boom-arm with 360-degree non-stop rotation, to improve product lifetime and reduce the total cost of ownership

Release details: Globally launched on 1st October 2013

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: Over 30,000 units have been sold in the UK&I alone, across both large-seat and smaller contact centres and call-centric environments, such as customer service teams, advisors and public sector

Typical customers: Sitel – global deployment

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Costs depend on the size of deployment/quantity being purchased. Currently being advertised online from £64 + VAT.

Visit the website to find out more: www.jabra.co.uk

Comments from our readers:

“Top product. Premium quality. I would suggest the Biz 2300 to all the companies that use the phone in their every day life.”

“I love the styling.”

“It’s fantastic sound quality and very comfortable.”

“Great value for money and quality.”

“Quality of materials.”

“Its ease of use and versatility.”

“Easy to use and set up.”

How could the product be improved?

“Detachable cord.”

“In my view the product is perfect and don’t see any areas it needs improving.”

7. EvaluAgent

Product Name: EvaluAgent Gamification

Brief overview of product: EvaluAgent Gamification uses game mechanics like points, leaderboards, and social-media-style news feeds and interactions to simultaneously motivate call centre agents, maintain KPIs, increase efficiency and deliver a great customer experience.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

It’s a reward and recognition platform designed specifically for call centres.

Release details: Web-based and releases are updated once a week.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 3,500 seats across 15 UK contact centres

Typical customers: Outsourcers like Atos and Worldline. Finance services like Investco and NS&I. Retail brands like John Lewis and Premier Inn. Travel and leisure businesses like Avios

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Licences at £1,500 per month. £15 per month per user.

Visit the website to find out more: www.evaluagent.net

Comments from our readers:

“The product is incredibly simple and easy to use, but hugely effective. Since we brought in Evaluagent to our contact centre around 7 months ago, staff engagement around quality scores has improved and we’ve experienced increases in quality scores too.”

“The support team were friendly, professional and made the whole experience an absolute pleasure.”

“The system is a great tool and is easy to use. It provides instant feedback to agents and does increase motivation and involvement.”

“Evaluagent was a comprehensive package combining, agent evaluation, gamification, recognition and rewards.”

“The product is absolutely fantastic and absolutely does what it says on the tin. We proved an increase in employee engagement, productivity and customer satisfaction. This really helped people to see and achieve their goals. It is also an excellent tool for team leads and higher levels of management to see what is going on at a glance.”

“Simple and effective design.”

“Helped improve coaching skills.”

“Keeping details of all relevant activity.”

“The ease of the product and how much insight this can provide as a business.”

“The reporting tool is useful and saves loads of time.”

“User-friendly, built-in reporting tool.”

How could the product be improved?

“Would be useful if an evaluation could be saved to go back to later.”

“Being able to view whole audit on page, currently have to scroll down (tiny issues).”

“If it had a call-recording section or could bridge into other software call recording so the points are applied automatically.”

“Links between the screens within Evaluagent.”

“More information to the agent on what points were awarded for.”

“More MI and insight into activity of the quality team itself.”

“More options for manipulating data and nicer visual appearance.”

“Would be good if the OMG could be changed to something that meets our culture.”

“The product is being improved to make it easier to and more efficient so nothing comes to mind.”

“You can’t improve on perfection!”

8. Bright UK LTD

Product Name: Bright Navigator

Brief overview of product: Bright Navigator provides companies with an ability to capture VOC feedback at all parts of the customer journey, which is used to drive operational performance, improve service levels/satisfaction metrics (CSAT, NPS, CES) and helps engage the frontline workforce.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

The Navigator introduces technology that allows clients to find links, customer feedback, employee engagement and internal performance metrics. Using the correlation tool embedded in the software, companies for example have the ability to find (often counterintuitive) links between service levels and customer sat, productivity metrics and employee satisfaction, employee engagement and conversion rates. Verbatim categorisation is where all customer comments are transcribed in real time and categorised by theme and sentiment.

Release details: Bright Navigator has recently added a number of new features including:

Integrated coaching tool – allowing managers to utilise performance, VOC and VOE data to better inform training needs and engage frontline teams.
Thematic categorisation and sentiment analysis 2.0 – allows companies to analyse feedback and report on findings without the need for manual intervention.
Branch and field service surveying proposition.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 40

Typical customers: TUI, Barclays, Transport for London, Littlewoods, Which, The White Company, Domestic & General, South Staffs Water, Genesis Housing, Daily Mail Group

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: £2,300 per month.

Visit the website to find out more: www.brightindex.co.uk

Comments from our readers:

“A great system that is easy to use and great for displaying all our company’s information so that we can share this with everyone.”

“Real-time satisfaction results, including alerts for both great and poor service factors, allowing both management and user to see what customers think of their service; leading to both proactive and predictive activities based on the invaluable insight gained.”

“The ease of use and the information that down to advisor level we can receive from Bright Navigator really helps us to improve.”

“Good up-to-date information as we need it. Quarterly reviews. Prompt response to requests.”

“I love that when you log in it has a dashboard feel and I can see exactly where the business is at a glance.”

“Its usefulness and simplicity and of course the team that support it.”

“Real drivers for business change and keeps the customer at the heart of the organisation.”

“Real-time information regarding customer sentiment and the ability to respond to low rating scores immediately to enable service recovery opportunities. Alerts are sent to team managers for both low- and high-scoring calls so they can respond accordingly. The call agents are able to view their own scores, whenever they want to, encouraging corrective learning. Call ratings are linked to calls so agents and team managers can easily retrieve and listen to the rated calls. Reporting is easy and enables healthy competition across the call centre. Benchmarking can be applied across internal teams as well as pan-sector. Customer comments are captured in text for analysis and feedback to call agents and service areas, driving improvements. We have worked with Bright to link ratings and comments to our wrap codes, further supporting our service improvement plans.”

“Relationship Manager quarterly reviews adding to the insight and helping enhance the product offerings in line with business needs.”

“Simple matrix views across a range of indicators allow for direct comparison in key functional areas to target improvements and best practice.”

“The ability to listen to customers’ comments and the performance module, enabling us to understand how our key contact centre metrics impact customer satisfaction.”

How could the product be improved?

“At the moment we are working on improving the balance of our surveys.”

“It would be good to have the customer sentiment integrated with our CRM.”

“Some reworking to allow for summarised insights that are currently having to be done manually.”

“The alert email could hold more info about the alert – useful if you have more than one manager picking them up.”

9. Interactive Intelligence

Product Name: Customer Interaction Centre (CIC)

Brief overview of product: Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) is an all-in-one omnichannel customer engagement software suite designed for mid-size to large contact centres.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

All-in-One, Omnichannel Platform – seamless channel blending
Simplified administration and reporting due to applications built on a single platform
Open, Standards-based Architecture
Broad Set of Applications – including UC apps
Cloud Migration – No need to rewrite applications, retrain from on-premises version (CIC) to cloud version (CaaS) due to shared code base

Release details: CIC was first released in 1997. CIC has been deployed at more than 6,000 organisations worldwide.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 186

Typical customers: ao.com, Identity & Passport Service, Arvato, Domestic & General

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: £350,000 will provide a functionally rich CIC solution with new phones, CRM integration, Installation, Education, Onsite-Training and Go Live support.

Visit the website to find out more: www.inin.com

Comments from our readers:

“Instead of wondering how to do it, we can say to client: what do you want?”

“Best UC/CC solution ever!!!!”

“All services integration without deployment headaches.”

“Ease of use.”

“Multichannel features.”

“Simple management.”

“Stability.”

“The flexibility to meet our needs.”

How could the product be improved?

“Price reduction for easier accessibility.”

“Try to make the configurations easier.”

10. Aspect Software

Product Name: Aspect Zipwire

Brief overview of product: Aspect Zipwire is a feature-rich, cloud-based contact centre interface.

Deployed on Aspect’s fully redundant, geographically dispersed cloud architecture, Aspect Zipwire uses the cloud to deliver the reliability and capacity needed to manage omnichannel customer interactions across voice, email, SMS, web-based messaging and video, with the capability to integrate social media and mobile apps.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

Aspect Zipwire enables businesses to deploy and manage a pure cloud contact centre or Help Desk with premium features at a competitive price.

Post-interaction surveys for speedy and measured customer satisfaction
Skills-based routing
Blending of outbound and inbound queries, across multiple channels
Agent access to important data during interactions, such as Oracle and Salesforce, as well as Aspect’s Cloud Suite

Release details: Aspect Zipwire was released in September 2014 across most regions

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 16

Typical customers: Working Links, Open Doors

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Pricing dependent on functionality.

Visit the website to find out more: www.aspect.com/uk

Comments from our readers:

“Futuristic technology.”

“Capability.”

“Effective.”

“Cloud features!”

How could the product be improved?

“Pricing model needs to be reviewed, maybe introduce a beginner to advance model.”

“It’s great as it is, possible version for Mac users?”

The following companies are Highly Commended (in alphabetical order by product name):

Company: Ultracomms

Product Name: AMD+

Brief overview of product: This is a patent-pending cloud-based innovation in answering machine detection (AMD). AMD+ reduces the call centre administration required in monitoring abandoned outbound calls, helping to simplify Ofcom compliance and reduce the risk of significant fines for companies breaching acceptable levels of abandoned or silent calls.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

Rather than attempting to remove all answerphones with an accepted level of inaccuracy, it only removes calls from being presented to agents when it is confident of the answerphone outcome. The company has developed a unique set of data-mining algorithms, which, in combination with accuracy testing against historical data covering over one million calls, enables AMD+ to automatically identify and prevent calls where an answer machine is detected as being presented to agents.

The company has identified an average of 9% improvement, with some clients achieving 40% in certain campaigns.

Release details: May 2015

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: AMD+ is available to all our customers.

Typical customers:

Uncle Buck
PSS
LeadX
Brightside
Brunel Franklin
Freedom to Insure
LifeSearch

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: AMD+ is provided to all Ultracomms clients at no additional cost. The feature can be enabled or disabled by the client at any time.

Visit the website to find out more: www.ultracomms.com

Comments from our readers:

“We like the fact that the support team are very responsive and effective. They are always willing to assist us and help with the set up of new campaigns. They all go the extra mile to ensure that we’re happy and ready to go!”

“Reliability and customer service.”

“The service is fantastic but the support is even better.”

How could the product be improved?

“Allow customers to develop their own reports would be a good next step.”

“I don’t believe it can be as it offers everything I need and more.”

Company: NICE

Product Name: Real Time Authentication

Brief overview of product: NICE Real-Time Authentication provides end-to-end authentication in the contact centre. Using voice biometrics, it combines a full set of technologies, real-time decisioning capabilities and unique know-how to automatically verify the caller’s claimed identity during the first few seconds of every call and, if needed, trigger agent guidance or fraud-protection actions.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

By streamlining the authentication process, NICE Real-Time Authentication allows agents to focus on providing the service and significantly shortens the Average Handle Time. It also eliminates the operational challenge of customer enrolment and consent management

Release details: Version 6.5 is released at the end of June 2016

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 3 contact centres. Each with ~1,000 agents

Typical customers: Financial institutes, telecom operators, health organisations.

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: The pricing structure is modular and takes into account various parameters such as number of seats\calls, option to enhance with real-time fraud protection, level of agent guidance, and multiple data centre support.

Visit the website to find out more: www.nice.com

Comments from our readers:

“Shortens handle time, helps improving customer satisfaction by skipping security questions.”

“User friendly.”

How could the product be improved?

“Expand the service to other channels, especially IVR.”

Company: Rostrvm Solutions

Product Name: rostrvm

Brief overview of product: From simple ACD queuing and routing of telephone calls to complex multi-site, multimedia contact handling. the Rostrvm call-routing engine ensures contacts are delivered to the most appropriate resource. For outbound contact the rostrvm outbound suite, including predictive dialler, progressive & preview dialling combined with email and text message campaigns.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

Rostrvm Solutions Limited is an innovative UK-based company that designs, develops and supports customer service hub software available both as an on-premise solution and from the cloud.

The desktop optimisation tools for call centre agents and back office teams support business processes and bring together multiple data systems.

Release details: The current release is rostrvm 10

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 70 contact centres supporting over 6,000 agents

Typical customers:

Nottinghamshire County Council
Midland Heart
EDF Energy

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: £8,500 per month as a cloud deployment

Visit the website to find out more: www.rostrvm.com

Comments from our readers:

“I like the freedom that using rostrvm gives us to continually improve our phone service. The ease of using the system means that should something urgent come up we can make changes in seconds if needed.”

How could the product be improved?

“Nothing springs to mind. When we find something we feel is worthwhile to improve, the guys at Rostrvm are fantastic at listening to their customers. Most of the time they will either make it happen if it’s a small change that only affects us or bringing it out in future releases if it has wider benefits.”

Company: Content Guru Ltd

Product Name: storm CONTACT

Brief overview of product: storm CONTACT converges channels such as email, IM (Instant Messaging), WebRTC, SMS, social media, video & voice on a single platform, enabling customers to engage with businesses however they like. CONTACT combines mass-personalised automation capabilities with live agents. Its iACD (intelligent Automated Contact Distribution) technology brings together all channels in a single blended queue, ensuring that every enquiry is connected to the best available resource.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

storm CONTACT supports a wide range of channels, additional services (such as secure payments, speech recognition and call recording), and third-party integrations – including CRM (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Zendesk), WFM and ERP – through a single converged system. One of storm’s key differentiators is its ability to scale according to need, across multiple channels. This capability is deployed in a number of mission-critical environments, such as utilities, healthcare, travel and government, which are frequently subject to large and unpredictable surges in contact volume.

Release details: storm CONTACT was originally launched in 2009. Additional channels have been added gradually ever since in a continuous development programme, most recently incorporating WebRTC in early 2016.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: Not disclosed.

Typical customers: EDF Energy, Scottish Power, UK Power Networks., Jurys Inn, National Rail Enquiries, Thomas Cook Group, TUI Group, Public Sector: Northgate Public Services, BBC Children in Need, Down District Council, St Albans City & District Council, KPN, Sodexo, Chubb, G4S, Legal & General, Progressive Building Society, Stadsbank Oost Nederland, HAP Zeeland, Abercrombie and Fitch, Travis Perkins, King’s College London, Holiday Lettings, Rightmove plc, Moneypenny, Tata Consultancy Services.

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Highly competitive.

Visit the website to find out more: www.contentguru.com

Comments from our readers:

“I like the quality and flexibility of the products, alongside the willingness of Content Guru / Radius to incorporate new features in their product to meet your specific requirements.”

“Their project delivery team and account team also do a great job. They’re good people to work with, open and fair – which helps us get the best out of their product for our own business.”

“The flexibility to model within a multi-location environment. The customisation is very user friendly as well.”

“Integrated omnichannel experience. PCI compliance.”

How could the product be improved?

“We’d like the agents to see more information, for instance a summary of their team’s queue status in their own web browser, and also how long they’ve been in a specific status, e.g. their break, or wrap-up – to help them get a fair balance of their time, helping their morale.”

“The reporting side of the product is too rigid when comparing with the other features.”

“Slow support who fail to recognise serious issues for their customer base.”

“Stability.”

Company: NICE

Product Name: Workforce Management

Brief overview of product: The NICE Workforce Management (WFM) system has provided workforce management and workforce optimisation solutions for over two decades – since 1988. With specific tools and terminology for contact centres, back office and branches, NICE WFM offers the flexibility to fit forecasting and scheduling to specific environments. While NICE WFM can operate as a standalone solution, it serves as a foundational component of NICE’s broader workforce optimisation platform.

What about the product is innovative, interesting or different?

Employee self-service rules-driven tools delivered via a web browser. Tools such as Meeting Scheduler, Schedule Optimizer, and change schedule wizards make schedule modification simple. Intraday views give real time updates on forecast KPIs as schedules are modified and as ACDs deliver data. Plans can be adjusted on the fly and site managers’ plans are updated automatically, and work can be reallocated with a couple of clicks to match work volume to staff capacity. Embedded multi-skill simulation and self-learning algorithms create improving efficiencies.

Release details: The current release of NICE Workforce Management is 6.5 and was made generally available in April 2016. Each release is a blend of customer feature requests, platform upgrades and support and new functionality. For example, this release adds functionality to make the use of workforce management in the back-office environments easier for the back-office team.

Approx. number of UK customers using the product: 156 named customers; 315 (serial numbers) with approximately 175K licences

Typical customers: Financial institutes, telecom operators, health organisations, insurance, travel, utilities, retail

Some examples: Barclays, Sky, BoA, Admiral, RSA, EE

Typical price for a 100 agent solution: Undisclosed

Visit the website to find out more: www.nice.com

Comments from our readers:

“Front-end interface is very easy to use. Group actions so you don’t have to make manual adjustments one agent at a time.”

“Possibilities for multi-skilled scheduling, reporting options and capacity calculations.”

“User-friendliness.”

How could the product be improved?

“Back-end administration could do with some work. Not very intuitive.”

“Making the projects can be simplified.”