Kodiak is also concerned about reporting from both productivity and regulatory standpoints. The company wants supervisors to monitor agents for efficiency, speed and type of calls received. We also rated the proposals on call recording, sampling and whispering capabilities. Sampling involves random recordings of whole or partial phone conversations. Whispering, or coaching, lets a supervisor listen in on a call and talk to the agent without the customer hearing the conversation. Only Genesys and Nuasis don't offer built-in call recording or monitoring, but both can integrate with third-party products. All the other vendors could record all calls or record on demand. We gave CosmoCom and Telephony@Work bonus points because their systems can randomly record calls; Concerto, CosmoCom and Telephony@Work support whispering/coaching.
Our final grading criteria included system price and maintenance. Siemens' and Avaya's proposals were the least expensive, solidifying their high rankings. Avaya gave us two price quotes; the first was for the contact-center system only, at $284,850; the second was an $865,880 quote for a complete implementation, including redundant hardware and a full-blown VoIP setup. The full system, including recommended transition to VoIP, put Avaya at the high end of the proposals reviewed, but not out of the ballpark. And Avaya included an extensive ROI analysis in its submission to help Kodiak IT justify going to VoIP across the enterprise. Shops that have Avaya or Siemens VoIP systems should consider staying with these vendors for the contact center.
In our final analysis, all the vendors offered Kodiak a similar core set of features. All can route multimedia messages in methods similar to telephone messages. Business rules can be shared across sites, and the setups support integrated blended messaging across e-mail, phone and fax. All the products offer secure messaging through third-party VPN connections but encrypt communications only between VPN concentrators. Avaya is the only option for endpoint-to-gateway encryption.
All the vendors support softphones, and all but Siemens support SIP for CTI. Avaya, CosmoCom, Genesys and Telephony@Work offer H.323 support. Although we've declared SIP the winner of the VoIP standards wars (see "SIP Packs a Punch"), our reader poll shows SIP still being used only slightly more often than H.323.
Kodiak would be well-served by any of the participants, but we gave our Editor's Choice award to Avaya. Its Interaction Center has the best mix of features, integration with existing systems and reasonable price. Check out all the vendor responses at ID# 1611rd1.
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