Zeacom is hoping to capitalise on ‘a very strong migration story’ combined with a changing communications story as the company launches the latest version of its Communications Center.
The Kiwi company, now part of Enghouse Interactive, has just announced version 8.0 of the Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (EICC), previously called Zeacom Communications Center.
The new version capitalises on Zeacom’s minimalist user interface, TouchPoint, which is developed in Auckland and now sits at the centre of Enghouse Interactive’s product portfolio. Multichannel handling has also been added, and the offering now supports nine languages.
David Gortner, Zeacom’s Auckland-based director of software development (pictured), says there’s a lot of opportunity around the TouchPoint aspect.
“It’s a completely different paradigm than we’ve been operating before. There is a huge opportunity in re-engaging our existing customers and showing them how their business could be working in the future.”
Adds John Cray, Zeacom director of product marketing: “It’s a really modern looking, different approach to contact centre interfaces.
“Contact centre people tend to use other applications on the desktop and their desktop can be very confusing when you have a bunch of windows popping up and things all over the place. One of our goals is to simplify the desktop with TouchPoint.”
He says not only is TouchPoint ‘very lean’ but it can run in the tray. “Hover over it and things appear or we can also put multiple applications inside it, so it is the single framework for UI.”
A single click within TouchPoint provides access to a suite of complementary Enghouse applications. It also runs on tablets, allowing supervisors and managers to move around a contact centre floor while retaining full access to contact centre management systems.
Cray says the communications market itself is experiencing change too, which has had flow-on effects for Zeacom.
“The traditional PBX is turning more into a unified communications story.”
He says the market is no longer about a PBX with phones attached, but about applications for communications.
“We used to provide a lot of unified communications functionality ourselves, as part of our application, now that’s more a part of the communications server environment with something like Lync and we integrate to it. So rather than compete with it, we integrate to it.”
Gortner says Zeacom’s resellers are becoming more sophisticated, representing ‘a broader scoped solution and having to think more about applications than they do about boxes’. “It’s making them have to go to the next level in terms of understanding their customer. And we try to help them do that.”
Cray says the company is telling a very strong migration story for resellers, many of whom have customers looking for alternatives to their 20 year old PBXs. “In today’s market, they don’t automatically switch to a new version of what they’ve got. Instead, they want to know what they can get to provide a broader scope communications platform and they look at things like Lync and more sophisticated presence or communications and collaborations tools.
The nice thing is that Zeacom is platform independent, and we can co-operate with two PBXs at once if needed.
“We’re also going to resellers with a broader portfolio. It’s not just Zeacom, you can sell QMS or the knowledge base or some of the other products [of Enghouse Interactive]. We’ve just acquired a predictive dialler in Germany and we’re marketing it here.
“We’re trying to change the story by saying we’re a portfolio-based story, not just an individual product story.”
