Tellme enhances its VoIP capabilities
Tellme is mixing its Speech apps capability, Aspect’s contact center solution, and Global Crossing’s carrier VoIP services to offer a turnkey VoIP contact center solution to enterprises. While Tellme integrates with Global Crossing’s network using SIP technology, Tellme customers have a choice: integrating with Global Crossing with either VoIP or TDM interconnections. Transition from TDM to VoIP is possible at a later stage.
Since Tellme operates as an on-demand service, the new capabilities are immediately available to enterprises across the company’s platform.
Although Tellme has been on the radar of several large VoIP carriers like Level 3 (due to Tellme’s capability to generate voice traffic), it was Microsoft that acquired the company some time back.
There are a couple of on-demand (VoIP oriented) speech application platform start-ups in the market. These include Twilio and Ifbyphone. The success of these companies depends upon their ability to serve enterprise customers with complex IVR needs, sometimes with hundreds of toll-free numbers accessing different voice applications for a single client. A typical Tellme customer, for instance, handles over 10 million calls a year on the Tellme platform.
On the minutes-of-use side, Tellme will probably not face many problems. Global Crossing has a large carrier grade VoIP network in place. The integration with Global Crossing provides Tellme customers low-cost toll-free service and an opportunity to leverage local service to take per-minute costs out of our telecom spend, which according to Tellme is typically one of the single largest cost in contact center environments. Additionally, the Tellme-Global Crossing solution provides the capability to blind transfer calls to customer contact centers without additional fees.
Global Crossing is the first carrier that has been able to offer Tellme an integrated local number DID solution, allowing customers to answer not only toll-free calls on the Tellme platform but local calls as well. Customers with local branches or stores will be able to examine consolidating call traffic from many local numbers to a central voice service on the Tellme platform.
