Alcatel launches mid-market contact center solution providing unprecedented ease of use and business impact

Paris, February 21, 2006 — Alcatel (Paris: CGEP.PA and NYSE: ALA) announced today the launch of the Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition, a contact center solution designed to answer mid-market businesses needs. Alcatel’s latest contact center solution bundles the industry-leading Alcatel OmniPCX platform with Genesys 7 software, taking a “user-centric” approach that provides an advanced multimedia contact center with a fully centralized, graphical management environment that dramatically simplifies deployment and boosts customer value. In addition, it provides a set of advanced features that include an embedded solution for call qualification, management of real-time business conditions, and innovative collaboration capabilities that link agents, experts and customers.

As a result of intensive and active customer input, Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition is designed to be immediately and intuitively operated by the contact center staff, namely managers, supervisors and agents. Designed for contact centers with 20 to 150 agents, the solution provides an easy-to-use and role-based fully graphical interface – the Visual CC – dramatically reducing the training costs and “time to customer value” between implementation and the first call answered by an agent. Visual CC offers visibility and control at every stage, from design to operations, through real-time, color-coded interaction and call flows. For historical performance, Visual CC provides a comprehensive set of pre-defined reports to optimize contact center operations.

In addition, Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition offers a software-only call qualification solution through the full integration of the Visual IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to collect details and speed callers to their destination. Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition integrates a collaboration tool into the agent desktop. The agent benefits from presence awareness, instant messaging, application sharing, and audio/web conferencing, which immediately provide access to company knowledge and experts within or outside the contact center.

“Today’s announcement is a further step in Alcatel’s user-centric approach,” said Thierry Seignol, Vice President, Communication Applications, Alcatel enterprise activities. “Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition provides mid-market contact centers with unprecedented visibility and control at every stage of their operations. Customers experience a powerful and open multimedia solution that provides flexibility in agent staffing and increased time to value.”

Alcatel’s new contact center solution solves exceptional and unpredictable overrun issues when call volumes are higher than expected. At times during the year, Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition customers will be granted the flexibility to increase the number of agent seats needed to instantly handle unexpected peaks of traffic. As with all Alcatel contact center solutions, Alcatel OmniTouch Premium Edition offers pre-integration with leading CRM applications.

By addressing the fastest growing contact center market, Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition for the mid-market offers tremendous opportunities for Alcatel’s Business Partners to leverage training and integration skills. The Alcatel contact center solutions portfolio covers all enterprise market segments, including the Alcatel OmniTouch Call Center Office for SMBs, the Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center solutions for the mid-market, and the Alcatel OmniGenesys solution for large corporations, which features integration of the full capabilities of the Genesys suite of software, including advanced routing for customer segmentation.

Alcatel OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition is available today from Alcatel’s accredited Business Partners worldwide.


About Alcatel Enterprise solutions
With more than 500,000 customers, Alcatel is a leading provider of communication solutions to small, medium, and large enterprises, as well as to public sector institutions worldwide. Alcatel’s enterprise portfolio provides business communication applications, including Unified Communications and Contact Centers, an advanced IP Telephony offering, and IP Networking products. Alcatel’s enterprise solutions deliver an enhanced competitive edge to businesses of all sizes by increasing customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and operational efficiencies.

About Alcatel
Alcatel provides communications solutions to telecommunication carriers, Internet service providers and enterprises for delivery of voice, data and video applications to their customers or employees. Alcatel brings its leading position in fixed and mobile broadband networks, applications and services, to help its partners and customers build a user-centric broadband world. With sales of EURO 13.1 billion and 58,000 employees in 2005, Alcatel operates in more than 130 countries.

Contact Information

Stéphane Lapeyrade

Alcatel

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