"By their very nature, 3rd party Call Logging and Management applications will always be a compromise. Most have been designed to work with as many telephone systems as possible and are therefore good at providing basic information and reports. But with no standard in existence for either the call logging output, or the data contained therein, getting to the real “nitty-gritty” information required to provide business critical reports and company wide analysis requires a close working relationship with each PBX/Unified Communications vendor and means that it would be impossible to deliver consistent and identical information across different platforms and suppliers.
Presentation apart, which is more a feature of what’s offered by the computer operating system they’re run on, these applications have changed very little over the years. Most simply don’t have the architectural flexibility to adequately adapt to meet the very different demands now being placed upon them by “pure” IP telephony and Unified Communications. Unification of multi-site networks, staff mobility and employees use of multiple handsets/numbers all readily spring to mind.
Call Management has always been an area where we at SpliceCom felt there was far more that could be achieved through tighter levels of integration between the telephony platform and the Call Management application, for the benefit of the customer and the channel. Its one of the reasons why we became the first vendor to integrate Call Recording with Call Management back in 2005.
Building on this we introduced SpliceCom Vision in mid-2009. A completely modular, web-based application suite, the initial release offered Call Management in the form of Vision Reports as the foundation to which Call Recording (Vision Record), browser based wallboards (Vision Live) and mobility control and presence detection for individual users (Vision Mobility) can be added as and when required. Vision’s been designed from the ground up by SpliceCom to work with maximiser – and only work with maximiser - sharing the system database so it can go into far greater detail and produce more meaningful reports than anything that’s gone before. An abandoned call list that also shows which of the callers have subsequently called back – or been called back – and whom they’ve talked to within the business, is one such example. Details of which Voice Processing applications are being used and when, ensuring that the correct number of channels can always be provisioned, is another example. And in line with our “one system” philosophy, a single Vision system can handle the Call Management and Call Recording requirements for a maximiser network spanning multiple locations.
As the only UK based manufacturer of Unified Communication systems, our product developments are very heavily influenced by feedback from our channel partners and their customers in this country. As such Vision version 1.1, which we’re currently Beta Testing, includes three new reports, which we’ve specifically added because of requests we’ve received in this manner. We’ll also be releasing a new inbound Call Centre module for Vision later this year.
We’ve built Vision to deliver the level of historical and real-time information that modern businesses are starting to demand, irrespective of their size. This allows them to verify the way they’re operating today, whilst delivering the data they require to plan for the future. And because its been both developed and supported by SpliceCom our channel partners have only one supplier to deal with and are confident in the knowledge that Vision provides them with a considerable competitive advantage at the point of sale – borne out by the month-on-month increase in maximiser system sales with Vision we’re witnessing. Finally, post-sale, our channel partners have a great excuse to keep in regular contact with their customers and sell them more value added Vision applications."