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Editor Questions:
What is your "ideal" customer?

Zeacom: Zeacom is the missing link (or bridge) between Avaya and Microsoft Lync.

Zeacom's ideal customer is an organization that is leveraging Cisco, Avaya or NEC PBX, and is either considering or implementing a Lync solution for communications.

What are your top 3-5 advantages of your product/solution?
Zeacom:

- Zeacom is a Microsoft-centric organization; we're an All-Microsoft shop internally, Lync Sharepoint, Outlook - etc. We know what works and doesn't and can be there for any customer situation.

- Zeacom provides the connectivity and multi-telephony environment at the same time, as well as provides the migration strategy.

- We don't do too much - we don't do PBX...if PBX is the plumbing, we are the faucet.

- Zeacom is very focused on SMB; contact center from 20 - 250 seats. We can serve up to 800 seats, if necessary, but we are not trying to do all things to all people. Conversation is as much functionality, as it is architecture - and we're functionality focuses.

Zeacom is big enough to deliver and small enough to care about our customers. Contact Centers get very personal; our size and our strategy make us ideally suited for this environment.

Editor - What are your competitive advantages - why buy from you?

Zeacom: Here are out competitive advantages:
• Singular focus on contact center solutions
• Veteran Process automation team
• Good, knowledgeable sales team
• Zeacom sells only through channels; VAR partners

• Specific training; the Zeacom team is subject matter (contact center) experts for VARs
• Zeacom is a multi-platform solutions provider
• For the Contact Center: we have everything - routing agent, third party integration, auto-attendant, SBR, user interface, screen pops, etc.

The following is a Zeacom & Microsoft Lync Server Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Server Integration Corporate Overview

Click here for Zeacom-Microsoft Solutions Brief.
Zeacom, (www.zeacom.com) a leading global provider of contact center software, announced today that its contact center solution, Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC), will interoperate with Microsoft® Lync™, providing customer service agents and console operators with extra tools that measurably improve service quality and efficiency.

From the 1st of June, 2011, Lync users will be able to seamlessly interoperate with ZCC, a fully featured, industry-proven contact center solution. ZCC's modular, highly scalable, multi-functional design is in demand internationally in key vertical industries including financial services, local government and housing, transportation and utilities.

"Microsoft is delighted to be working with Zeacom to deliver a powerful Contact Center solution," said B.J. Haberkorn, Lync Group Product Manager, at Microsoft Corp. "The combination of Zeacom's contact center management application and Microsoft Lync Server 2010 enables our mutual customers to combine contact center capabilities proven in traditional environments with presence driven unified communications.
This allows them to improve the productivity of agents, managers, and other employees, and to simultaneously improve customer interactions."

"We've been successfully designing and delivering contact center solutions for over 17 years," says Miles Valentine, CEO of Zeacom. "With more than 3500 customers around the world, our success is built on the fact that we listen to what our customers need. Microsoft's software-based approach to telephony and communications now gives us an unprecedented ability to quickly respond to those customer needs, and supports our vision for ZCC to be at the forefront of contact center innovation worldwide."

http://crosstalk-techtionary.blogspot.com/2011/04/microsoft-lync-contact-centers-part-3.html

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For example, Zeacom's Social Media Queuing provides email alerts generated by social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube or social media monitoring tools directly into your contact center queue. This enables you to manage and handle social media mentions via the contact center and provide 360° customer care (Phone, Email, Fax, SMS, Web Chat, Social Media).

How it works

Social Media Queuing is an integrated part of Zeacom's multimedia contact center environment which offers agents a single interface for managing all media types. Social Media Alert Queuing uses Zeacom's Email Queuing module.

An email alert is generated by a third party social media networking site or monitoring tool, notifying of a new page activity that has occurred or that a keyword has been found.

Zeacom Communications Center then feeds the email notifications generated by the social media site or monitoring tool directly into a predetermined contact center queue, delivering it to the next available agent or user.

Agents can respond to a notification directly by replying to the email, from within the social media monitoring tool or may choose to respond via the specific social networking site shown in the notification.

The key benefits of contact center Lync social media integration are:

- Create a 360° view of your customer, aiding problem resolution and supporting cross selling

- Establish a "listening station" for managing your brand reputation

- Get a real-time snapshot of consumer opinions on your brand, products, and services

- Streamline operations by automating and routing social media alerts just like email, chat, fax or phone calls

- Identify the social influencers for marketing outreach

- Analyze conversations around competitive brands

- Leverage insights for strategic planning and market research

- Identify emerging issues that require immediate response

- Gauge effectiveness of marketing campaigns

Click here for Zeacom Social Media Fact Sheet.

UCMA Application from Zeacom

When Zeacom's project design team considered the best methods for integrating with Microsoft Lync Server platform, the Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA) was decided on as the ideal method of choice.

We considered creating our own SIP Proxy and extracting the call off of the Lync platform in an attempt to apply our own call control methods, but then decided against that course as it would not be consistent with what, in our opinion, the Lync platform was intending to provide from a telephony perspective.


UCMA 3.0 empowers the Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC) to leverage Trusted Conferences as an anchor for each contact center call. Once a call is established we can invite other endpoints to the conference session. This ease-of-use and simplicity allow ZCC to perform many functions, such as:

· Escalations of instant messages or voice calls to screen sharing

· Data-direct routing of queries to available subject matter experts (SMEs) both within and outside the contact center

· Provide automated help services, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

· Customize the User Interface to provide more detailed agent functionality, reporting and dashboards, which provide real-time visibility of contact center performance.

By leveraging Lync's inherent telephony functionality, we could continue to deliver our solution via 3rd party call control, which means ZCC did not need to physically own the call as would it remain on the Lync Server. This architectural strategy allows ZCC to connect to multiple telephony platforms at the same time, which will be of the utmost importance to organizations that have traditional PBX's and are migrating to Lync over time or by department.



http://crosstalk-techtionary.blogspot.com/2011/04/microsoft-lync-social-media-integrated.html