Alcatel-Lucent enhances call center capabilities for CJSC “NCC” with Genesys SIP solution

Paris, June 2008 - Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that Closed Joint Stock Company “NCC” (NCC), an affiliate of the Volga region’s incumbent operator Volgatelecom, has chosen its advanced IP Contact Center solution based on software technology from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company, to upgrade and enhance NCC’s existing call center capabilities in Russia. Alcatel-Lucent will provide systems integration, testing and deployment services for the existing call center consolidation to make the modernized call center fully operational in June 2008.

According to the terms of the agreement, the transformation of NCC call center will enable the operator to unify operations of its customer care services in six regions of Volga district in Russia. NCC will introduce advanced call routing and prioritization functionality to intelligently distribute incoming calls among agents, forwarding important calls to the most experienced agents. The state of the art contact center will also provide NCC customers with new information and offers through proactive customer service, helping NCC to offer the highest level of customer care and significantly increase its customers’ loyalty level.

Genesys leverages the SIP standard (Session Initiation Protocol) in its contact centers. The deployment of SIP is significant because it is a key indicator of how IP technology continues to gain momentum as businesses invest in next generation customer service solutions. According to the most recent market assessments from Gartner (Gartner Dataquest – “Market Share: Contact Centers,Worldwide, 2006” by Drew Kraus, May 2007), Internet Protocol (IP) agent shipments worldwide grew by 67.9 percent between 2005 and 2006 to represent 38.7 percent of the worldwide contact center market in 2006. During this same period, Genesys increased its worldwide IP agent shipments by 153.9 percent.”

The key advantages for NCC of using the Genesys SIP solution include:

Removing the barriers to excellent and efficient customer service imposed by traditional telephony systems
Letting organizations leverage the entire enterprise including branch, home, and expert users to achieve differentiating customer service
Enabling flexible customer service operations that can react dynamically to changing customer needs
Incorporating the contact center into mainstream IT operations, separating the telephony layer from applications, and reaping the associated cost savings
Avoiding rip and replace to ensure customer service continuity and maximize value of existing investments
“We considered several offers for our contact center modernization project and the Alcatel-Lucent solution best enables us to continue to deliver high quality communication services to our customers, while reducing operational costs,” said Mikhail Petrov, General Director of NCC. “Alcatel-Lucent’s Genesys solution enables our distributed and home-based agent structure, unified call routing monitoring and reporting. We can therefore decrease the cost of human resources as well as IT and maintenance costs.”

The IP contact center solution includes Genesys SIP Server, Genesys Customer Interaction Management platform (86 agent seats), Genesys Outbound Voice subsystem for outbound phone campaigns (15 agent seats), and Alcatel-Lucent services on project management, consulting, installation, commissioning, software integration and maintenance.

The pure Genesys software solution operates on standard off-the shelf server and VoIP hardware, reducing maintenance costs and allowing NCC to harmonize its IT infrastructure in accordance to corporate standards.

“We are proud to expand our position as the partner of choice for NCC, one of the largest mobile operators in the Volga region,” said Alexander Tikhonov, Vice-president of Alcatel‑Lucent’s activities in the CIS. “We have been supplying our solutions to NCC since 1994 and the operator’s contact center modernization is yet another step in our long-term business relationship. With the broadest communications solutions portfolio in the industry as well as our extensive experience of complex project deployments, Alcatel-Lucent is ready to meet any request from our customers.”