CosmoCom Debuts CosmoCall Universe Version 6

In what the company is calling its most extensive and noteworthy set of enhancements and additions to its unified IP contact center suite, CosmoCom launched Version 6 of CosmoCall Universe (CCU).  

The key enhancements in CCU Version 6 offer users capabilities and benefits in the areas of (1) unified customer communications; (2) contact center mobility; (3) real-time reporting and analytics; (4) virtual outbound calling; (5) screen recording and multimedia call recording; and (6) integration with Microsoft Outlook.

“This is the most far-reaching and significant collection of product advances that we’ve ever put into one release,” says Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president and co-founder of CosmoCom. “We do bring this with a lot of pride. It’s been a long time in the making and you’re not finding, in this economic climate, too much of this kind of bold, innovative, aggressive advances in the marketplace.”

In the area of unified customer communications, the release introduces two new user type licenses:

• readyreps, users who have responsibilities outside the contact center but still add value to the customer service process; and
• business users; users who are part of the contact center community, but not part of its automatic routing feature.  

“We’ve never been a [private branch exchange (PBX)] company; we’ve always focused on the call center,” Kowarsky says. “With this announcement, we’re not saying that we’re a PBX company, we are saying that we can cover the full range of enterprise communication needs in a way that is strongly focused on the contact center.”

“Now with agents, readyreps, and business users, we do provide a really complete unified customer communication platform,” he adds.

Also in the realm of unified customer communications, Version 6 introduces the company’s first hardware product, CosmoPhone—a telephone set that works directly with CosmoCall Universe and is fully synchronized with CosmoDesk PC, thus allowing users to adopt either interface and switch between the two.

“We make that distinction between unified communications—which is basically internal to an enterprise—and unified customer communications, which is a lot of the same technology that’s been developed in parallel in the contact center and really establishes that multi-channel communication between enterprises and their customers,” Kowarsky says.

Also included in the flurry of releases are CosmoGo—smartphone technology that extends contact center technology to mobile knowledge workers—and enhancements to real-time reporting and analytics capabilities via the new CosmoDashboard and CosmoAnalyst.

“CosmoGo is the ‘vision thing’,” Kowarsky says. “As you refine your product…you have to also bring things that reflect your vision leadership and CosmoGo is really [an example of this].”

The basic vision, he says, centers around increasing the availability of the four key benefits of contact center technology: automatic skills-based routing that directs calls to the right person; screen pops that provide information about the caller and the call; inquiry and transaction enablement for recurring subjects; and tracking and reporting that make the operation manageable.

“We want to cut the link between those four benefits and having a wired phone and a computer and desk,” he says. “And so what CosmoGo does is it extends those four benefits to the mobile knowledge workers…and it takes CosmoPhone and CosmoDesk and puts them all into this smartphone in your pocket.”

CosmoDashboard offers a significantly enhanced, highly customizable version of the company’s real-time reporting technology, while CosmoAnalyst is a customizable, online analytical processing (OLAP) database that provides data cubes designed for measurement of contact center performance that supports operations like slice, dice, drill down, roll-up, and pivot.  

Finally, the new release offers integration with Microsoft Outlook, a screen recording for CosmoCorder—the suite’s multimedia recording component—and virtual outbound calling.

“Everybody’s talking about virtual call center, but not everybody’s talking about virtual outbound. And when you scratch below the surface, it kind of doesn’t exist except in our platform,” Kowarsky says, noting that all of CosmoCom’s “high capacity, multi-site on-shore, off-shore, home-shore virtuality” can be applied to outbound campaigns.

According to Kowarsky, response to the release has been very positive.

“The customers are very excited about it,” he says. “They want it in their labs.  They wanted it in their labs as fast as they could get it.  And many of them have it in their labs already…And this is the system that’s shipping now.”