Wednesday, December 5, 2007

MetaSwitch Enhances Automated Call Distribution Application Capabilities

MetaSwitch announced enhancements to its Hosted VoIP Solution, including new Automated Call Distribution (ACD) features that enable small-to-medium businesses to direct inbound calls to groups of users based on the nature of the call. With this ACD service installed, callers can be prompted to identify the purpose of their calls via the MetaSphere Auto Attendant application, that would then re-direct the calls to the appropriate groups - for example "sales" or "support." If all users in that group are busy, calls are held in a queue, and callers are played music or commercial messages using the MetaSphere Media-On-Hold application, which allows customers to upload files from the Web or record them on-site. When an agent becomes free, the next call from the queue is presented to that phone. Users can login to and logout from ACD groups by dialing codes on their phones.



Service providers can also provide regular usage statistics to customers' network administrators, providing detail on the activity of each ACD group and each of the agents that belongs to the group. Statistics include number of calls handled, average duration of calls, total time spent on the phone, average queuing time for calls as well as other data. The range of statistics available has been significantly increased in MetaSwitch's latest software release, providing business customers with much greater visibility into their agents' activity.



MetaSwitch said the ACD features complement its existing advanced telephony functionality for SMBs, including support for SIP attendant consoles, shared line appearance for key system emulation, one-touch call park and retrieve, and group features such as call pickup and multiple appearance directory numbers. http://www.metaswith.com