Echopass, Genesys, and Salesforce.com Deliver Integrated Contact Center Solution

Echopass, Salesforce.com, and Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories have teamed up to deliver an enterprise-strength contact center solution for telemarketing, telesales, and customer service organizations. Through sforce, the Salesforce.com client/service application platform, Echopass Telecenter for Salesforce.com tightly integrates Genesys' customer interaction solution hosted by Echopass with Salesforce.com's customer relationship management service. The solution, which is available immediately, is aimed at small and midsize businesses. The three vendors claim this allows users to deploy fully integrated CRM and customer interaction capabilities at a fraction of the time and cost of a premise-based system. Echopass Telecenter for Salesforce.com is immediately available from $45 to $395 per seat per month. John Ragsdale, research director at Forrester Research, says it sounds like the trio is doing everything right from ease of use to pricing. However, he is not convinced that the mid-market is clamoring for this type of solution. "There is not a huge hole that isn't being filled," Ragsdale says. "These are capabilities that are required at the enterprise level, but I'm not sure that midmarket companies are asking for this. I don't think this is a market niche that is not being filled." The companies say the product offers a set of fully integrated features for Salesforce.com customers that are designed to boost the productivity of customer-facing organizations. New features include: one-click autodialing, screen pops that instantly provide agents with detailed customer data for both incoming and outgoing calls, call scripts that guide agents customer interactions, rules-based contact routing, and scheduled callback capabilities. For its part Genesys will provide hosted contact center services via its Genesys Suite, an open software architecture that supports management of combined voice, email, and Web-based interactions. Vincent Deschamps, CEO of Echopass, said in a prepared statement, "We recognize that most businesses can't spend the time or money required to implement on-premise contact center and CRM solutions. Echopass and Salesforce.com have taken the hassle and time out of the equation for small and medium businesses by delivering a fully integrated solution at a fraction of the cost. Customers can achieve the benefits of the Telecenter solution in just eight weeks from order to implementation."