Enghouse Interactive Delivers Solution for UtilitiesEnghouse Interactive Delivers Solution for Utilities

Control Center Client is designed for the highly regulated utility and power distributor markets, with a touchscreen interface for managing calls in a control center environment.

I started my career in the sales force at AT&T in the years the company was readying itself for the deregulation of the industry. Fresh out of business school, I was hired as what today would be called a system engineer, and later became an account executive supporting the retail segment. At the time, AT&T had organized its sales force around major industry groupings, and there in my resume was two years I had spent working in a major NY department store, Lord & Taylor, while in high school.

The time I spent supporting the Lord & Taylor account as it expanded from New York to Florida, Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC, were well-informed by my experience working in retail. In the past 30 years, I have watched businesses swing back and forth in terms of their emphasis on vertical industry expertise. Hiring people with industry knowledge is great, but building solutions that cater to the specific needs of a vertical is the next logical step that companies often promise but seldom deliver upon.

At CS Week last week in Charlotte, NC, Enghouse Interactive demonstrated an industry-specific version of its Contact Center: Enterprise solution.

Control Center Client is designed for the highly regulated utility and power distributor markets, and has a touchscreen interface for managing calls in a control center environment.

A newly designed user client features the ability to increase the amount of information seen and managed at the same time, and provides convenient access to recorded conversations. In line with the utility market's mandate to provide proactive customer engagement, Control Center Client features an Outage Notification System that pulls information from the Command Center based on a trigger that can be automated -- voice, email and SMS -- alerting subscribers to outages and when normal service has resumed. Field technicians also have access to an IVR system that allows them to complete their work more efficiently by using automated menus to collect information without waiting to speak to a controller.

Though initially designed for utilities companies, Enghouse says the design work behind Control Center Client allows it to adapt to any kind of control center, such as: energy suppliers/distributors, water suppliers, hospitals, or emergency services.

Could utilities use existing contact center solutions to personalize their deployment to mimic the capabilities of Enghouse's new solution? Certainly, but with the time and expense necessary for a custom-developed client. The key benefit of Control Center Client is that the tailored features required for a specific market have already been baked-in to the solution -- they don't have to be built from scratch.

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