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3 Enghouse Customers Share Contact Center Stories

As I wrote for No Jitter a couple of months ago, Enghouse Interactive offers three distinct contact center solutions, one each for the mid-market companies, enterprises, and cloud service providers. To further support its position that no single contact center solution meets the needs of all end-user companies, Enghouse arranged a two-hour analyst briefing during which users of each platform explained how they came to be customers and how they use the company's solutions in their businesses.

Here's a recap of the presentations.

Contact Center Enterprise (CCE) at 'EnergyCo'
The director of global customer support for a division of an energy management company high on the Fortune Global 2000 list (I'll refer to it here as EnergyCo) spoke about the company's longtime use of CCE, a scalable, multichannel contact center solution for use on premises or in private or hybrid cloud configurations. EnergyCo began using CCE in 1999, when Apropos Technology owned the product. Syntellect, which Enghouse purchased in 2002, acquired Apropos in 2005.

Sixteen years is a long time with a single contact center solution, but when EnergyCo recently decided to move from its original analog technology platform to SIP, it stuck with Enghouse. Why CCE? EnergyCo is bringing different business unit brands onto the platform, moving the implementation from approximately 225 agents to 350. For CRM, one of those business units is connected to Siebel and another to SAP. CCE allows EnergyCo the flexibility to support both of these integrations as well as multiple locations with ease, the director explained.

Contact Center Service Provider (CCSP) at Telus
Chad Wormington, Strategic Director, Contact Center Technology and Services, for Telus, spoke about the carrier's use of Enghouse's CCSP solution. Cosmocom developed the CCSP technology, which Enghouse acquired in 2011. Telus, which Wormington described as the second-largest telco in Canada, is working to expand its contact center service not only across its home country but also globally.

CCSP use is a key selling proposition for Telus International, the company's onshore business processing outsourcing (BPO) unit. Because Telus owns the CCSP solution and has deployed it in its own data centers, the BPO is able to support the data sovereignty requirements of financial, healthcare, and government customers and prospects. In hosting CCSP and delivering contact center services in Canada, Telus can completely control the customer experience, Wormington said. In addition to voice interactions, Telus has deployed email and chat handling on CCSP for use by the Telus BPO and outside customers.

Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (EICC) at 'InsureCo'
In 2006, a division of a consumer insurance company (referred to here as InsureCo) considered replacing its Avaya telephone system, reported a company executive. Instead, it found that it could extend the life of that system, plus get the contact center features it wanted, by implementing EICC (then owned by Zeacom) in conjunction with the in-place Avaya PBX.

Over the years InsureCo, which now has 500 agents in multiple locations on EICC, has added new features, including voice and screen recording, workforce management, and callback. Nine years since its decision to add EICC rather than rip out its telephony system, the company is once again considering a move -- this time to a Cisco platform. The company applauds EICC's flexibility in allowing a seamless migration to a new communications platform seamlessly. "Agents don't need to know that anything has changed," the InsureCo executive said.

Enghouse, with which he meets weekly, is the "most catering" of all the IT vendors with which the company works, the InsureCo executive said. "It's a little luxurious to feel so taken care of. To feel that we are important has been great."

In his presentation, the executive highlighted themes that popped up across the other case studies as well. InsureCo didn't notice a decline when Enghouse acquired Zeacom, for example. "Support stayed the same. I was a little sceptical, but it hasn't been a problem at all," the executive recounted. Also worth noting is that each of these customers has added functionality that only became available on its purchased platform through technology gained in other Enghouse acquisitions.

Enghouse's acquisition and portfolio strategies seem to work not just for the company, but for these long-standing customers, too.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story identified "InsureCo" by name. Per the company's request, we have removed that identification. None of the information or insight provided by the company executive has changed.

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