Applications

Contact Centres
The ‘contact centre’ is very much a new concept which is fast replacing the traditional call centre. This is because customer service teams are no longer simply dealing with telephone calls as a way of interacting with customers and prospects. Instead, they also need to manage other means of communication such as email, fax, SMS and web-chat. Incoming contacts, in whatever form they may take, need to be managed properly - and must be routed intelligently wherever possible, to ensure that the most appropriate customer service agent can deal with the enquiry. The contact centre applications across our product portfolio can help you to improve the way you handle communication with your customers, regardless of how they wish to make contact .

CTI
Within a contact centre environment, it is also very important for agents to know as much as possible about the person they are interacting with. High-quality Computer Telephony Integration can provide a huge benefit here, by searching your database for the customer record - based on incoming CLI, outbound number dialled or other identifiers - and then displaying this information on-screen instantly. The customer service agent is then fully informed and better able to deal with the call more efficiently. Annodata have a range of CTI solutions available which are fully compatible with our selected hardware platforms.

Unified Messaging (UM)
Unified Messaging (UM) is the integration of different streams of messages (email, fax, voice, video and so on) into a single Inbox, which is then accessible from a variety of different devices. UM differs from simple multimedia email, as these systems typically try to integrate telephone-based voicemail as well and then make the UM mailbox accessible from a conventional or mobile phone. Our solutions provide all levels of UM, from emailing voicemails as WAV file attachments to full blown ‘text to speech’ or ‘speech to text’ scenarios. Whatever system we implement for you, unified messaging will almost certainly be part of it in one form or another.

Microsoft Live Communications Server
Our communications solutions can be fully integrated with Microsoft LCS, meaning that you can benefit from full presence management capability. This includes instant messaging, whiteboarding, online collaboration and chat, plus all of the many other features which this easy-to-manage, enterprise-grade software delivers. Microsoft LCS allows both office-based and remote staff to find and communicate with people instantly in real time and to share critical and time-sensitive information. Which ultimately avoids delays and potential breakdowns in communication, delivering cost savings, improved business efficiencies and increased individual productivity.

Mobility and Tele-working Solutions
They say that work is no longer somewhere you go, but something you do. And this is becoming ever-more the case as organisations embrace the home working concept and also seek new ways to support field-based staff more effectively. There has been a noticeable shift towards home working in the UK in recent years and it is clear that this can actually increase productivity (yes, really!) and reduce costs considerably, as office premises no longer have to increase in size as a company grows.

Using broadband at home for voice and data communication with colleagues and head office staff is proving extremely popular with most businesses these days. The development of Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies has totally changed the communications world and now enables home-based and remote workers to have exactly the same communication capability available to them as they would have if they were office-based.

Our mobility solutions - using Blackberry or Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 devices – will ensure that your key staff are always contactable and able to maximise their working time to the full. In addition, mobile twinning (the ability to twin a mobile handset with a desktop handset) ensures that your employees can always be reached by phone, regardless of their location.

Video Conferencing
Remote working can provide increased productivity and cost-savings. However, it also reduces the face to face element of our working lives, which is not always a good thing. Add to this the complexity, cost and increased risk involved with travelling these days - and it is no surprise to see an increase in the take-up of video conferencing services.

But gone are the days where a large video conferencing suite in the boardroom, complete with its own ISDN trunks, was the only realistic way of providing this service. Video conferencing has at last come out of the boardroom and onto the desktop - and it is now very cost-effective and straightforward to provide personal audio and video conferencing services for individual staff members, allowing them to feel part of the organisation even if they do not visit the office on a regular basis.

Fax Servers
Organisations are being told to remove their humble fax machines and turn to new methods of communication. But despite rumours of its demise, between 300 and 400 billion fax pages are still sent every year, so how can you ignore fax totally with figures like these? The annual worldwide fax phone bill is estimated to be over £56 billion, making one thing is certain - fax messaging will be here for a good few years to come.

For most companies the fax remains an unruly, expensive and unmanageable beast. Traditional fax machines tend to demand a lot of resources, not just in the number of extra PBX extensions needed to connect them to the outside world, but also because they tend to be unreliable and require constant servicing. In addition, there is also a concern about how much time is wasted by individuals who hover around a fax machine when sending or receiving messages. To address these problems vendors have developed the fax server, which allows users to fax documents from the ‘print page’ menu within desktop applications such as Word and Excel. Alternatively it is also now possible to send an email to a fax number.

Fax servers are generally environment-independent and do not have to work with a specific platform such as Windows NT or Novell NetWare. Annodata offer a number of fax options which are designed to work with our voice and data solutions, including the market-leading RightFax product.