The inbound capabilities can help you increase customer satisfaction by delivering customers to the appropriate resource the first time, segment customers, enabling appropriate service prioritization, deploy agents cost-effectively independent of location and manage session initiation protocol (SIP) voice over IP(VoIP)-based agents and PSTN-based agents from a single, all-in-one contact center platform. Also, advanced skills-based routing matches contacts with the most knowledgeable available agents and can increase first-time call resolution, ultimately leading to higher customer satisfaction.

Advanced features include:

• Ask an Expert - Uses Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 to enable agents to search for experts with unique skills who can assist with specific types of customer inquiries and then engage them via instant message (IM) or phone
• Skills-based Routing - match contacts with the most appropriate available agents
• Rules-based Routing - route interactions based upon a robust set of contact center defined business rules
• Data-Directed Routing - prioritize, manage and route customers based on CRM or other back-office database queries
• Multisite Routing - create a truly virtualized contact center to route and deliver the contact to the best-suited agent in the enterprise
• Queue Optimization - give customers the choice to be called back based on their estimated time in queue or at a later time of their choosing
• Abandoned Call Recovery - automatically capture the phone numbers of customers that hang up via a recovered call list efficient trunk usage and reduced call duration costs
• Controlled Call Connection - enable agents to have the ability to accept or decline inbound interactions

And, the inbound functionality supports critical, high-volume inbound customer contact strategies in both traditional circuit-switched infrastructures and software-only IP environments, helping contact centers streamline their customer-facing business processes.