CosmoCom Launches Six Products in One Month

In what Melville, N.Y.-based CosmoCom is calling the most extensive and noteworthy set of enhancements and additions to its unified IP contact center suite, the company has launched version 6 of CosmoCall Universe (CCU). 

The key enhancements in CCU Version 6 offer users capabilities and benefits in unified communications, contact center mobility, real-time reporting and analytics, virtual outbound calling, screen recording and multimedia call recording, and integration with Microsoft Outlook.

“This is the most far-reaching and significant collection of product advances that we’ve ever put into one release,” says Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president and co-founder of CosmoCom, which last month introduced the latest version of the solution it first rolled out and patented in May 2000.

According to Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, CCU Version 6 increases CosmoCom’s versatility. She notes that people, particularly competitors, will need to rethink their perceptions about the company.

“One often thinks of CosmoCom and hosted in the same breath,” she says. “We sort of need to rethink what little box we put them in.”

In unified customer communications, the release introduces two new user type licenses:

• readyreps, who have responsibilities outside of the contact center, but who still add value to the customer-service process; and

• business users, who are part of the contact center community but are not part of its automatic routing feature. 

“Now with agents, readyreps, and business users, we do provide a really complete unified customer communication platform,” Kowarsky says.

CCU Version 6 also introduces the company’s first hardware product, CosmoPhone—a telephone set that works directly with CosmoCall Universe and is fully synchronized with CosmoDesk PC, thus allowing users to adopt either interface and switch between the two.

“We make that distinction between unified communications—which is basically internal to an enterprise—and unified customer communications, which is a lot of the same technology that has been developed in parallel in the contact center and really establishes that multichannel communication between enterprises and their customers,” Kowarsky says.

McGee-Smith says the introduction of the company’s first phone allows CosmoCom to expand its competitive footprint. “Prior to this release the only way you could work with CosmoCom was with a soft phone,” she says. “And there is certainly a piece of the addressable market that is still interested in having a hard phone.”

Also included in the flurry of releases are CosmoGo—a smartphone technology that extends contact center capabilities to mobile knowledge workers—and enhancements to real-time reporting and analytics capabilities via the new CosmoDashboard and CosmoAnalyst solutions.

“CosmoGo is the ‘vision thing,’” Kowarsky says. “As you refine your product…you have to also bring things that reflect your vision leadership, and CosmoGo is really [an example of this].”

The basic vision, he says, centers around increasing availability of automatic skills-based routing that directs calls to the right person; screen pops that provide information about the caller and the call; inquiry and transaction enablement for recurring subjects; and tracking and reporting that make the operation manageable.

“We want to cut the link between those four benefits and having a wired phone,  computer, and desk,” he says. “And so what CosmoGo does is it extends those four benefits to the mobile knowledge workers…and it takes CosmoPhone and CosmoDesk and puts them all into this smartphone in your pocket.”

CosmoDashboard offers a significantly enhanced, highly customizable version of the company’s real-time reporting technology, while CosmoAnalyst is a customizable, online analytical processing database that provides data cubes to measure contact center performance with operations like slice, dice, drill-down, roll-up, and pivot. 

Finally, the new release offers integration with Microsoft Outlook, a screen recording for CosmoCorder, the suite’s multimedia recording component—and virtual outbound calling.

“Everybody’s talking about the virtual call center, but not everybody’s talking about virtual outbound. And when you scratch below the surface, it kind of doesn’t exist except in our platform,” Kowarsky says, noting that all of CosmoCom’s “high-capacity, multisite, onshore, offshore, and home-shore virtuality” can be applied to outbound campaigns.

According to Kowarsky, response to the release has been very positive. “Customers are very excited about it,” he says. “They want it in their labs...And this is the system that’s shipping now.”

And that is something that McGee-Smith finds refreshing. “I think it was a great overall release,” she says, noting that many companies fail to deliver products when making announcements. “It’s kind of refreshing to have somebody announce something and [make it available] today.”