Spescom has had a lengthy involvement with Avaya, stretching back as far as 1995, when Spescom was the sole distributor of AT&T technology in SA. This connection continued as Lucent Technologies took over from AT&T, eventually creating the new company Avaya in October 2000.
Over a year ago, the process was started to award Spescom DataFusion Gold Certification, although the procedure was suspended while Lucent restructured and became Avaya.
With a new application made this year, the Gold Certification was finally awarded by Avaya in a mere six weeks, making Spescom DataFusion the first company in Africa to achieve this.
Paul Fick, business unit manager of Spescom DataFusion's customer contact solutions division, explains the factors that resulted in this rapid approval. "The three key elements that led to Spescom reaching this high level of certification are the skills level of our team members, our long experience in providing products for enterprise-level customer contact centres and the business processes we apply in implementing these solutions with full service support.
"Spescom's close relationship with Avaya has produced mutual benefits. As our market has broadened, we have gained a considerable base of skills and experience for implementing Avaya solutions. More importantly, our exclusive focus on Avaya products has given us a competitive edge over other value-added resellers.
"For our company, the benefits are the potential for joint marketing ventures and extensive access to technical support - both of which ultimately offer advantages in cost savings and service levels for our customers."
The business focus on a single vendor's range strengthens Spescom's role as a specialised vendor of Avaya products, while the depth of product options and ongoing innovation meets almost any need that Spescom's customers might have. "The Definity call-centre platform is one of the most reliable and flexible in the industry," says Fick. "Beyond that, there are many value-added products to handle interactive voice response, such as Conversant, and extensive interfaces with Spescom's CRM solutions to provide an end-to-end business information system - essential for any large company with constant customer contact.
"The future will see the introduction of even more useful technology such as predictive dialling and VOIP (voice over Internet protocol), which will allow an even greater level of integration of a company's telephony and data networks. The gains in efficiency are self-evident, but the ultimate winner is the customer, who receives a far better level of service as a result."
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Spescom Limited is an information and communications technology (ICT) company listed on the JSE Securities Exchange SA, with operations in US, UK and SA.
The group is active in two main areas of the world IT market, namely offering product and solutions to connect to the networked economy, and the provision of software solutions to manage information and knowledge.
The strategic focus is on the convergence of knowledge, document, configuration and voice transaction management technologies.
Spescom holds the controlling interest in US-based Spescom Software Inc (formerly Altris Software Inc), a Nasdaq-, OTCBB-listed company, and developer of the award-winning eB software.
In SA, Spescom, in alliance with world-leading companies such as Cisco and Avaya, provides a range of customer contact and intelligent network solutions to its blue-chip customer base.
The company is a leading supplier of communications solutions and products to network operators and service providers on the African continent.
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