Pivotal on Call

To support what it feels is a hugely underserved market, Pivotal has recently launched Pivotal Contact Center, which will target centers with 25 to 100 agent -- about 90 percent of the market. Another driver for its call center push is the current success that 50 Pivotal customers are having using its CRM software in their centers. "We're focused on making the application as easy as possible for agents, " says Steve Soechtig, Pivotal's vice president of contact center and integration. Pivotal Contact Center is fully integrated with the Pivotal CRM suite and, like the CRM suite, is built for the mid-market. Its flexible architecture includes a smart desktop that supports multiple channels and integrates easily with existing enterprise applications, transactional systems, telephony infrastructure, and data sources. Pivotal Contact Center consists of three main products (or options): a call center desktop, a CTC edition, and a CIC edition. These options allow the product to be installed as a stand-alone desktop application, integrated with existing telephony systems, or built as an IP-compatible, multichannel solution on a unified platform. The first option, Pivotal Contact Center Desktop, is a standalone application that integrates with all back-end applications and data sources. It includes sales, marketing, customer service, and customer support functionality in one interface. The CTC edition (an OEM of Intel's Dialogic CTConnect), is for companies that need to integrate with existing voice, IVR, and PBX telephony systems, as well as with telephony controls like dialers and information pushed to management. CIC edition (an OEM of Interactive Intelligence) features pre-integrated, multichannel capabilities and a universal queue. It is an IP-compatible software, and like the CTC, includes the Pivotal Contact Center Desktop. "The mid-market doesn't have the tolerance, time, or resources to go to various vendors, so we provide a serious [end-to-end] solution," Soechtig says. "Our main competition is apathy and skepticism, because in the past so many vendors have come in and stated that they can take their rigid, best-practices-based software and build a contact center that conforms to the customer's needs. Instead, you need to conform the application to how the contact center does business. If you don't it will drive up costs-and every second counts in that business."