ice Contact Center for Microsoft Lync

by ComputerTalk

App Type:
On-Premises and/or Online Application
Business Need:
Customer Service, CRM, VoIP/IP Telephony, Infrastructure, UC, VoIP - Custom Applications
Works With:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Microsoft Lync Server 2013, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Standard
Industry Focus:
General - Applicable to All, Government, Healthcare

Application Description

ComputerTalk’s ice Contact Center is a Lync qualified all-in-one contact center that runs as a native part of the Lync topology. It enables organizations to bring Lync unified communications to their contact centers, and to extend the power of contact center applications to the rest of the enterprise.

The market offers several Microsoft Lync contact center products, each claiming to deliver a solution that “leverages Lync”. ice goes beyond simply leveraging Lync to being fully embedded.

What is special about being Lync embedded?

ice runs as a native UCMA application. For example, if you already have SIP trunking set up for Lync, ice can take advantage of the same SIP trunks. In the same token, Lync gateways, server pools, database clusters, and redundancy can also be utilized by ice.

If you have multiple sites configured in Lync with least cost routing, ice takes advantage of that.

ice applications use Lync features including automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, video, audio record and playback, DTMF, call control, instant messaging, web chat and presence information display.

What about ice?

ice is an all-in-one product and is the only contact center for Lync that offers a wide range of features without third party offerings. ice features include contact routing and distribution, a full IVR designer, call recording, historical reporting, real-time monitoring, skills-based routing, and media-specific interactions.

The “UC Workflow” designer is an easy-to-use, Visio-like graphical editor for building self-service and complex routing applications utilizing IM, voice, email, web-chat, Twitter, and Skype (native in Lync 2013, via gateway in Lync 2010). These functionalities can now be delivered to all Lync users, beyond contact center agents. In addition, ice can route calls to any endpoint that Lync knows about, for example cellphones, landlines, and common area Lync phones. You can also route IM to public IM clients.

ice is software only, runs on commodity hardware, and can be deployed in any physical or virtual machine environment, be it on premise, or in a dedicated or multi-tenant cloud. ComputerTalk is a major service provider of ice contact center and Lync in a PCI compliant cloud.