So after laying a firm technological and commercial foundation in the first years of operation, we now began looking for business services that could be made more cost-effective and flexible by being moved into the network.
After analyzing the market, we decided to target the contact center market. Contact centers are big business and are realized via enterprise equipment for telephone systems (PBX), automatic call distribution (ACD) and interactive voice response (IVR), meaning each contact center has to buy all this kit and install and maintain it on their premises.
Providing a network-based contact center solution presented us with a number of challenges. If contact center services had to be part of the basic platform itself, the two would be intertwined and every time we added or changed something, there'd be programming and re-testing. We needed to separate services from the network layer and make it easy to set up, test and simulate them without any programming knowledge.
In a first step, we developed a web-based graphic service creation environment for the definition of interactive voice response (IVR) and call routing. This evolved into our effECTive® Visual Call Flow Builder which lets contact center agents set up even very complex IVR with call distribution, call recording, conferencing, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and more.
We soon acquired two of Europe's former incumbents for our new solution, BT in 2003 and Belgacom shortly thereafter. These early customer installations developed over the years and are still being used very profitably today. Out of these experiences grew our state-of-the-art effECTive® Network-Based Contact Center. This product has proven to be very profitable for ECT and our customers. It replaces a mass of enterprise equipment at the premises, thus lowering the customer's CAPEX and OPEX. As the carrier provides this functionality in his network, he can also ask a premium price and make a much higher margin, while his customer still saves money compared with the costs incurred for enterprise solutions. A WIN-WIN -WIN for us, our clients and their customers.
