Here are 4 tips that we’ve found will dramatically increase the quality of phone system prompts:

1) Script each prompt word for word – Before any recording takes place, be sure you know exactly what the voice talent should say. This will dramatically reduce the time required to produce prompt recordings and make them sound much more confident and professional. It will also give your marketing team a chance to ensure consistent branding across the various media types a customer may encounter (phone, website, e-mail, etc.). Think carefully about what you want customers to hear when they call your organization. Read the scripts aloud as though you are the phone system playing the prompts to the caller. Do they make sense? Do they concisely and accurately convey the information needed by the caller?

2) Engage professional voice talent - Working with a professional who has recorded thousands of prompts will dramatically increase the quality of the end product… and reduce the time required to produce the recordings. Nobody is perfect, but only having to record a prompt twice instead of twenty times will save you lots of time and money. Also, don’t forget to do a bit of sleuthing within your organization. You might have some hidden talent in your employees. Perhaps consider a “Voice of XYZ” competition.

3) Use a professional recording environment - I’ve called a number of very large companies that had obviously recorded their prompts in the middle of their call center floor. Excessive background noise or poor recording equipment can result in prompts that are almost unintelligible. A very quiet room with minimal echo may be sufficient – a professional recording studio is definitely better.

4) Ensure prompt files are in the correct format - While prompts may be recorded at CD quality or higher, be sure to convert them to the format required by your phone system. While your phone system may be able to convert them on the fly, allowing this is a very bad idea. I’ve seen phone systems brought to their knees trying to convert CD quality audio to be played to calls waiting in queue. If in doubt, the most common standard is: CCITT µ-Law 8 Bit 8 kHz Mono.

Note: Depending on the application, you may also be able to find suitable libraries of professional prompts online that can be downloaded for free or purchased.

Regardless of the reason, dialing a number that does not connect can be very frustrating. After many questions and frantic calls for support, I decided to write this post to help dispel some of the mystery that often surrounds how telephone numbers are composed and dialed.

The Basics

Virtually all telephone numbers you will encounter follow the E.164 numbering plan and are composed of three basic parts:

1. Country code
2. Area code
3. Local number

How you dial each number is determined by where you are located.

Phone Numbers in the United States

The U.S. along with a couple dozen other countries participates in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) which basically states that numbers within it will use the following

+1-NPA-NXX-xxxx

1. + – indicates that an international access code will need to be added when this number is dialed from a country outside the NANP
2. 1 – the country code used by the NANP
3. NPA – an area code within the NANP
4. NXX – central office exchange code, the first part of each local number managed by a given carrier
5. xxxx – subscriber number, the final portion of each number assigned to a customer

While there are a variety of special classifications (emergency, information, toll free, etc.), phone numbers within the NANP will generally fall into one of three categories:

1. Local
2. Long distance
3. International

Dialing Local Numbers

Unfortunately, there is no set rule for how local numbers should be dialed. Each area will have its own rules. However, they will generally allow and/or require one of the following:

1. 7 digits – dial the exchange and the local number only to call another number within the same area code
2. 10 digits – in a region covered by more than one area code, it may be necessary to dial both the area code and the local number
3. 11 digits – in some cases, a one must be added to the beginning of the number followed by the area code and local number

Dialing Long Distance Numbers

In most countries outside the NANP, a trunk code of zero is required before any number not within the local calling area. Within the NANP, the number one preceding the area code is generally required as the trunk code to call a number outside of the local calling area. This can be especially confusing because the NANP country code is also the number one.

If dialed from within the NANP, the number would be written as:

1 (213) 213-2134

Note: the parentheses indicate that the area code may be optional when dialed from within its local calling area. In fact, (unlike many other countries), dialing the full phone number often will not work when dialing a local number.

If dialed from a country outside of the NANP, it would be written as:

+1 213 213 2134

Dialing International Numbers

In general, dialing an international number requires an international access code. For example, to dial a number in the United Kingdom, a U.S. caller would dial:

011 + 44 + area code + number

For calls placed from within the NANP to a country outside, 011 is the access code to indicate that the call is an international call and should be routed as such.

A common mistake is to include (or even dial) the trunk code as part of the international number. For example, a London caller might dial something like the following as a local number:

020 xxxx xxxx

It should NOT be written or dialed as:

+44 (0)20 xxxx xxxx

This is because the zero immediately preceding the area code is ONLY dialed from within the United Kingdom. From the United States, this number would be dialed as:

011 44 20 xxxx xxxx

Also keep in mind that newer phone systems and many mobile phones would allow this number to be stored in the following format so that it can be dialed from anywhere in the world:

+44 20 xxxx xxxx

More Information

If you are unsure how to dial an international number, I highly recommend visiting howtocallabroad.com

Bottom Line – Customer Service as we know it is going to change.
“Customer service as we know it is often frustrating because it’s run for the convenience of the servicing organization, not the customer.” – Don Brown
Today, control is shifting to the consumer and it’s turning the way we serve our customers inside out.

Technology innovations that he predicts are on the horizon that will help contact centers meet those increased expectations.

The ACD, 2.0
One of the most exciting aspects of his talk was on one of the most fundamental elements of a contact center. The ACD. He quipped, “Here we give you 2300 dials and levers for you to tune how your ACD delivers customer interactions to the correct agent. And when it doesn’t work correctly, we as vendors point our finger at you and say, you didn’t have your ACD dialed in correctly.” The future ACD will use software driven artificial intelligence techniques to do the heavy lifting for you. “That’s going to happen” and it will raise the level of customer service.

Customer Intent
On the horizon, he mentioned the importance of recognizing customer inten … He also mentioned some of the breakthrough work that Interactive Intelligence has been doing in the realm of speech analytics, which includes intent and customized word spotting, on both the customer and the agent side. Beyond speech analytics, he predicts that in the future, software will be more automated and will further be able to recognize patterns based on demographic information…

Business Efficiency
Another point that Dr. Brown made was that people in charge of the contact center were in the perfect position to impact the rest of the organization. He said that by taking the elements that work well in the contact center and applying those best practices to the rest of the business have the potential to make a big impact. He jokingly said, “we know how many times a day that a $20/hour contact center agent goes to the bathroom but have no visibility into tasks that business people perform such as corporate Lawyers or the HR department.” Dr. Brown said that organizations need to apply the same level of rigor to other business functions. He also gave a short demo on how Interactive Intelligence’s Interaction Process Automation can route “work” throughout the organization, beyond the typical boundaries of the contact center.

So, is the goal of your contact center to drive organizational efficiency or serve your customer in the way they want to be served?

When heading back to the classroom, one of the most important items on the list is to bring the right textbook. The Interaction Center platform includes a whole library of great “textbooks” that we highly recommend. It is called the IC Documentation Library and is available either on your Interaction Center Server or can be installed on client workstations. If you aren’t sure how to access this wealth of information, ask your system administrator or send us an email..

Here are a few reading recommendations for each level of education:

Elementary School – For your users, be sure to take a look at the Quick Reference Materials. These PDF documents cover all kinds of fundamental topics, including:

– Voicemail quick reference cards
– Interaction Client user guides
– and more

Many of these materials can be ordered from Interactive Intelligence as documentation you can distribute. But, why spend the money when you can print them yourself from your server? That’s a quick “A” on your report card!

Also remember to watch our Interaction Client “Did You Know…” Video Series! Request a free copy here.

High School – Supervisors and system administrators can take advantage of documentation for:

– Interaction Administrator
– Attendant
– Supervisor
– and much more

Get AP credits with your diploma by watching our Interaction Supervisor Video Series! Get Free copy here

College – These are the heavy-duty textbooks of the system. Look through the Technical Reference Documents. Perhaps start with:

– Data Backup Recommendations
– Interaction Center Security Concepts
– and Security Precautions

These will ensure that your system is secure and protected against data loss.

Post-Graduate – Begin your graduate studies with documentation for the System APIs. The IC Documentation Library contains a wealth of information on:

– Client COM
– IceLib
– SOAP
– XML integrations
– and more

There you go…a full curriculum for Back to School. If you need any tutoring, be sure to let us know. Here’s wishing you a successful and productive academic year!

One more thing, ININ is offering a 10% discount on their Online Passport (comprehensive computer based training) Until September 30th.

A quick Google search for call troubleshooting tips returns a few possible first steps:

• Everything is true, look for what isn’t
• Keep an open mind
• Maintain complete objectivity
• Trust your data

But my favorite is “Assume nothing.”

Today, my wife called me on my cell phone just as I was climbing into the car to head home. She was calling from her cell phone and is on the same carrier/plan that I am. We talked for a couple of minutes and then both clearly heard the announcement “This call is now being recorded.” We were both very surprised, and just a bit disturbed.

I immediately hung up and called customer support to let them know what had happened. I tried to be very polite and professional about it, but could tell that the poor fellow had definitely never had a report of such an issue. Clearly, an unauthorized recording would be very serious. While he frantically contacted the technical support team, their support team, management, and probably a few other people, I got to thinking… and pealing away my assumptions.

• At first, I thought that I may have incorrectly assumed that the message could not have been played by an application on either of our phones. However, I had previously done a fair amount of research to see if it was possible and could not find a way to do it — possible assumption, but unlikely. This message was more likely played at the “carrier” level.
• More importantly, I realized that I had assumed that the message would have been played by our cell phone carrier. Another quick Google search reminded me that my wife not only had my mobile number, but my Google Voice number. Sure enough, there have been a number of reports of this message being played in error. I confirmed my suspicions by having my wife check her call history and then informed a very relieved support representative.

So the next time you receive a frantic call reporting that a user isn’t getting voice mail messages, “Assume nothing.” Don’t assume that their voice mail is actually broken. Don’t assume that callers are actually leaving messages. Don’t assume that the user is correctly accessing their voice mail. But, just because only one user has reported an issue, don’t also assume that everyone else’s voice mail is working correctly or that the problem may only affect voice mail delivery.

Remember: “Assume nothing.”

Here are a couple of examples:

1. Most often, these problems are the result of user error, or a simple lack of understanding. For example: Every few months, I get a report that a user always receives two e-mail messages when a voicemail is left. A quick look at the user’s client configuration shows that the user has turned on voicemail/fax notifications using their business e-mail address. When a voicemail message is left, IC delivers it to the user’s mailbox and then another message is sent to the same mailbox with a notification that a voicemail has just been received. If not read carefully, it can appear to the user that the message was duplicated.
2. In some cases, the “unintended consequence” can be more severe. Let’s say the user sets a voicemail/fax alert to call a telephone number with a notification of a new message received, inputs their direct dial telephone number, and goes home for the weekend. An inbound caller then leaves a voicemail message which is delivered to the user’s inbox. IC places a notification call to the user’s DID and, because the user is not available, the call is sent to voicemail and a messages is again delivered to the user’s inbox. IC dutifully places another notification call, and the cycle continues until the user eventually shows up on Monday morning and answers a notification call… after finding over 5,000 voicemail messages in their e-mail inbox.

It gets worse…

Receiving 5,000 voicemail messages would be annoying, but hardly catastrophic. But keep in mind that while notification preferences are usually set in the Interaction Client, they can also be set remotely. If a significant number of user accounts were compromised and the notification preferences set to call their DID numbers, a malicious party could then leave each user a voicemail message and potentially fill all the phone lines with bogus voicemail notification calls – an effective denial of service attack.

Don’t panic…

Ok, so don’t be afraid to use advanced features just because they involve a certain amount of risk. Rather, be aware of the possible configuration options for a feature and its potential pitfalls or the consequences of different settings.

As a self-proclaimed food connoisseur I expert certain things when entering a restaurant that says they serve “fine” food.

Those things don’t include:

1) Being in a pole barn

2) Racing signs in the window that says “grab some buds”

It is easy to say that you serve fine food… it’s a completely different thing to deliver it.

What is your customer service promise?

Only 3% of companies are customer-centric according to the Temkin Group.

What does that mean for the 97% of companies who have corporate vision statements similar to these?

“Our strategic vision is to achieve total customer satisfaction”
“Our Promise is to deliver exemplary customer service”
“We will treat customers as they wish to be treated”
“We measure our success by the satisfaction of our clients”
You get the idea…

Most organizations proudly promise that they deliver exemplary customer service.

- Few measure the things that drive customer satisfaction.

- Few build customer service into their culture.

- Only 3% are truly customer centric.

If you truly want to be customer centric, here are a few questions that will begin to build customer service into your culture.

1) How many of our 4053 customers would recommend our products/services?
2) What is the incremental profit increase caused by a 1% increase in customer satisfaction?
3) What is your level of customer satisfaction by department?
4) What is your customer level of satisfaction by communication channel, i.e. phone, email, Twitter, self service?

What’s your action plan to improve those numbers?

Organizational priority is placed on things that are measured, discussed, and improved.

Is your organization customer centric?

If you are like me, there is never enough time or money to attend conferences to learn more about the industry. Lori’s summary of the recent ACCE conference (held in June) will give you a run-down of the biggest topics and the latest trends. I encourage you to read Lori’s article and check out NACC’s newsletter. Here’s some great learning without leaving your desk!

I just returned from the ACCE Conference in New Orleans, one of the biggest and best contact center conferences of the year. While more people seem to be finding budget to attend conferences again, perhaps some of you are wishing you could have been there to attend sessions and talk to peers and vendors (and perhaps drink a “Hurricane” or eat some Gumbo!). So here are some tidbits to share.

Heads are in the Clouds
Call it what you want – hosted solutions, Software as a Service (SaaS), Communications as a Service (CaaS), cloud solutions – but regardless, it has arrived for both buyers and sellers. At least half of the vendor exhibits featured cloud-based solutions. Some offer full blown contact center solutions with routing, reporting, IVR, CTI, and performance tools (e.g., WFM, QM). Others were peddling targeted applications such as CRM, proactive outbound contact, web chat translation services, analytics, or voice of the customer surveys. The chance to get something done quickly, with little upfront cost, really seems to resonate with companies constrained by IT resources and budget dollars. In a knowledge exchange session I facilitated on the topic, attendees testified to implementations that maxed out at three months. No one could recall a premise-based implementation of similar technology that came close to that timeframe. Concerns seem to be security, reliability, and negotiating and managing service level agreements – all topics that can be addressed with the proper due diligence in project processes.

You Can Optimize Your Desktop
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a contact center with an “ideal” desktop, but I know a lot of people who long for an improved desktop and applications. People need to capture interaction information and customer profiles (including the increasingly changing and elusive contact information – like cell phones and email addresses), and they want to make it easier for their reps to help customers. Enter today’s CRM solutions and desktop optimization applications. The former can be had for less pain through hosted applications and improved deployment approaches (configured instead of customized, with “easy” integration). The latter bring the metrics to see what is happening on the desktop, integration between applications to avoid the pain of cut and paste and notepads, and the process optimization to smooth interactions delivering shorter handle times and increased first contact resolution (which EVERYONE wants). Both deliver a desktop “portal” that truly transforms the customer and rep experience.

Performance Tools Cross Barriers and Channels
With the proliferation of analytics tools, customer satisfaction surveys, and eLearning and coaching capabilities, vendors are vying for the attention of call center leaders who want to take their staff and center performance to new heights. As centers mature, they yearn for these tools to meet the high demands corporate leaders place on them to improve customer service, cut costs, and drive revenue. Speech analytics has been the “hot” topic in the past few years, and seems to be settling in to the realities of where and how to use it – including the commitment of appropriate analyst resources to drive value from this powerful technology. And now with text analytics and cross channel analytics, companies can apply similar analysis to their email and web chat. Scorecards and dashboards were of great interest, as was desktop analytics coming from both the performance suite vendors and from those with desktop optimization solutions. The sessions the attendees flocked to (popular topic!) and vendors present (many choices for VoC) reinforce that there is no reason not to do voice of the customer surveys anymore to complement quality monitoring and other internal performance perspectives.

Still Room for Niche Vendors
While some of the big vendors anchored the event, it was also clear there is still plenty of room for niche players that help companies solve the specific challenges. Want to improve your reps’ keyboarding skills? There’s an app for that! Need to add proactive outbound contacts to your customer interaction strategy? Recover idle time to use for knowledge building with your agents? Improve your forecasting ability? You guessed it; there are apps for those too. Whether your needs are wide-ranging or targeted, whether you have a “suite” approach to technology or seek best of breed solutions, there are good options to consider.

Social Media Hype Continues and Takes a Reality Check
We heard and talked about “tweets” and “followers,” social media strategies and the role of marketing and the contact center in responding to these important interactions. From keynotes to sessions to vendor booths, social media hype flowed. But at the same time, the table and hallway conversations were flavored with some healthy skepticism on the fit of social media for various companies and their customers. Perhaps we’ve reached a point in the maturing of these new interactions where people will take a careful look at the role they play today and tomorrow. In a time where companies must make careful choices about priorities for their precious investment of time, money, and resources, the reality check is a healthy thing.

Lori Bocklund, President – Strategic Contact
lori@strategiccontact.com

Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center® (CIC) 2.4 and Enterprise Interaction Center® (EIC) 2.4 products were scheduled to reach end of life (EOL) on June 26, 2011. Interactive Intelligence has extended the EOL date to December 31, 2011. ‘End of life’ status occurs three years after the last ship date of a product version.

As we’ve discussed in other blog posts, Interactive has announced CIC “Four.0”. There are some very exciting features coming. Here’s a link to some videos to give you a more detailed introduction to these features – including speech analytics, server virtualization, and many more. Some of you may be wondering, “Should we skip 3.0 and go straight to Four.0?” Great question – we can make a case both ways depending on your specific situation.

Let’s say you are a customer running CIC 2.4. Here are some things to consider:

•   Waiting for Four.0 will give you access to the latest features and most powerful functionality

•   We don’t yet have a firm release date for Four.0 and the initial release may not include all of the features your organization leverages (such as Interaction Recorder, Dialer, etc.). Those may come in the early service updates to Four.0. You need to take this into account in planning your schedule for your upgrade.

•   CIC 3.0 is currently a very stable platform. If you are running CIC 2.4, we highly recommend 3.0.

If you have any questions about your release or upgrade, please give us a call.

Interactive Intelligence released SU12 for its CIC 3.0 platform on Friday. We wanted to get a quick blog post out to let you know what you will find in SU12. Here are some highlights:

For Interaction Process Automation (IPA)

The product has been enhanced to support multi-page work items. This functionality allows multiple work item forms to be routed to a user via a single work-item interaction, without having to pickup each page of that work item.

For Interaction Feedback

1) Feature has been added allowing the score for a question to be ignored

2) Survey questions can now be weighted to be between 0 and 1. This means a question can be weighted to the right of a decimal point (i.e. 0.5) as is possible in Interaction Recorder.

For Interaction Optimizer

The scheduling engine’s algorithm has been changed to give agent schedule preferences higher precedence.

For Interaction Recorder

1) Interactive Intelligence has added enhancements to better support work-at-home agents. The bandwidth usage for uploading screen recordings has been reduced. There is a parameter that will allow system administrators to modify the amount of bandwidth used for uploading screen recordings.

2) Interaction Center Business Manager (ICBM) Interaction Recorder users can now see scorecards scored by users other than themselves. Up to now, users were only allowed to see questionnaire scorecards that they were in the process of scoring or had completed. Administrators will have the ability in SU12 to set a parameter giving permission to view other scorecards. This will allow, for example, a supervisor to view a quality analyst’s scorecard.

All of these enhancements are in addition to things added in SU 11 – like support for 64 bit faxing. There are more technical improvements in SU12 as well – but that’s a topic for a blog post from one of our engineers!

As always, please let us know if you have questions.

So, I pulled up their web page, there in black and white it stated that they were open for business. In the back of my mind I wondered why they hadn’t answered their phone but I figured that they must have been helping someone else at that moment…

Without a second thought, I hopped into my car and made the trek to the store. When I arrived, after an hour of driving, I discovered that the store had changed their hours and were closed…

THEY FORGOT TO UPDATE THEIR WEBSITE with their stores “new” hours.

It cost me two hours of my time, and… it cost them too.

The problem was that their organization was not consistent in the way they communicated with me (their customer) across their different communication mediums.

There are a new set of challenges that have emerged that are making it much more difficult for businesses to deliver exceptional customer service. What are the financial implications of delivering award winning customer service? According to Frederick and W. Earl Sasser, “a 5% improvement in customer retention can cause an increase in profitability between 25% and 85%.”

So, what new challenges does your business face?

1. Customer contact across your organization’s functional silos

2. The disintegration of communication channels

#1 is an age-old problem. However, #2 is exponentially magnifying #1.

Let me explain.

When all we had was a phone, life was simple(r). If you called with a billing question, you would be transferred to the accounting department. Then, they would (hopefully) resolve your issue. The challenge that your business faced back then was continuity on information between those departments (silos).

For example, if you received a special marketing promotion, and the accounting team didn’t know about that promotion, then there would obviously be a breakdown in customer service.

Now, let’s take a look at this problem in today’s context.

Businesses are communicating with their customers via phone….

And…

• Email

• SMS

• Web Chat

• Social Media

• Web Portals

• Corporate Websites

• Social Media

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Communities

So let’s add today’s twist with yesteryear’s example. If your marketing department sends out a promotion, and your customer decides to ask your company about it… will they get the same response on Facebook as they would by calling?

If this is a challenge that your organization is facing today, here are a four tips to get you started.

What you need to start doing today.

1) Get the leaders from your main functional (i.e. marketing, sales, accounting, service, etc) areas of your business in the same room and get them on the same page about providing seamless service and communication to your customers across departments and communication channels (phone, email, web chat, Facebook, Twitter, etc).

2) Begin mapping your inter-department communication processes and channels.

3) If you have a technology gap that is preventing you from effectively delivering your communications across departments and channels, begin building a business case.

4) Begin consolidating your organizational information into a searchable central location that allows your employees to access consistent answers across functional areas and communication channels

Don’t leave your customer’s experience to chance.

While every effort can be made to secure a phone system against intrusion or abuse, there will always be methods that can be used to exploit a system. The Interaction Center platform is no different. Like all other phone systems, it has security precautions and necessary vulnerabilities. In other words, a lot of thought goes into how to secure an Interaction Center system against attack, but certain features of the system result in unavoidable insecurities or weak spots.

1) Someone with a desire to gain access for whatever reason (and who likely knows they are calling an Interaction Center server) calls a number that reaches the target system

2) The caller navigates through menus and identifies a method to login to the system remotely (this is allowed by the Remote Access node in Interaction Attendant)

3) The caller then attempts to login using various combinations of extensions and passwords, sometimes gaining a list of extensions to try from the dial-by-name feature

4) Once a successful username and password combination has been found, the caller uses one of several methods to place outbound calls to other numbers (often international), one method is to set the user’s status to Available, Forward at an international number, then call the user directly

If remote access to the system is desired (and it almost always is), the best method to protect against this kind of attack is to enforce a solid password policy. The default password policy in IC is often sufficient, but should be evaluated to be sure that it matches your organizations security policies. As a best practice, set a secure password when creating new users and don’t use 1234 or the user’s extension. Remember, It is always possible to crack even a good password with a brute force attack, but much less likely.

Our team was briefed by ININ product management the other day on some of the major components coming in CIC 4.0 which is slated to be released sometime around the end of June… We won’t be able to cover everything we learned; however, here are some of our key takeaways:

Things that we like:

1) CIC servers will finally be able to be virtualized along with some of the other ancillary sub systems and components with the exception of media servers, which can’t be virtualized

2) ININ adds Real-time speech analytics capabilities to Interaction Recorder

3) Upgraded multi-media handling for chat and email

4) New Report Structure – should alleviate some of the reporting/analytics challenges and will be more flexible. In addition, it will collapse 171 reports into more useable sets

5) ININ will now be offering a concurrent licensing model, providing more flexibility for you

Good news / Bad News

1) While we applaud the support of Windows server 2008, (good) it does present some upgrade challenges. You will not be able to just lay 4.0 on the same servers currently running 3.0. This could affect your budget requirements for 4.0 (bad)

2) (Bad) Not all customers are going to have the ability to upgrade soon because of the delayed release of additional products in the early SU’s i.e. Interaction Dialer, possibly Optimizer and other add-on products.

3) (Good) HMP is being eliminated from the IC servers. (Bad) However, for large conferencing environments, you will still require an HMP media conferencing server.

Things that we were hoping to learn more about that were left out of our presentation

1) Evolution of media servers and localization

2) Bulls eye routing

3) New licensing cost model

4) 4.0 Release Plan/Schedule; we were led to believe that the initial release may be limited to a few customers and true GA to come later

As we continue to learn more, we will continue to keep you updated.

So, what does that mean to support of your current BCM50 or BCM450 system? You can depend on support from CPI / Avaya for about seven more years. Avaya will provided parts and labor for that system until March 1st, of 2018.

Since you already have an investment which will last for about seven more years, you are not forced to change your system. You may want to investigate upgrading to the IP Office to get some of the advanced capabilities like Unified Communications and the built-in conference bridge. Avaya continues to protect your existing Nortel investment by allowing you to keep your telephone sets should you upgrade to the new IP Office.

If you need more detailed information on the Avaya BCM, we are happy to help!