News

Contact Solutions Opens Third Hosting Center to Support Explosive Nationwide Growth of Shared IVR Services

Sunnyvale Facility Rounds out Nationwide Build out of World-Class Hosting Centers

Reston, VA (February 7, 2008) - Contact Solutions (CSI), the leader in contact automation, announced that its third shared IVR (Interactive Voice Response) hosting center has opened. The new facility, located in Sunnyvale, CA, mirrors existing centers in Dallas, TX, and Ashburn, VA. The hosting centers are located in state-of-the-art facilities supplied with amenities required to ensure non-stop operation of CSI’s clients contact automation operations. The third center significantly expands the company’s capacity to support the growing base of companies and government agencies that have shifted to the shared IVR services model and away from the expense of unnecessary onsite customer premise equipment.

All three sites are each capable of supporting the total volume of the calls CSI receives on a daily basis without any degradation of service. In the highly unlikely event of a complete outage of either site, calls can be routed to another site immediately using advanced network features. This geographically diverse platform infrastructure, combined with the level of redundancy in each site ensures optimum uptime for client applications.

Contact Solutions Chief Executive Officer Paul Logan said, "The explosion in call volume into our IVRs, to the tune of over 30 million calls per month, is unprecedented and proof positive that leading customer-focused companies around the world see contact automation improvement through shared IVR services as the primary way to cut costs out of their contact centers. We are able to help our clients save millions by simply making minor improvements in their contact center automation."

Logan said that CSI’s mission is to continuously improve its clients’ contact automation percentages while maintaining the highest level of customer service. "Ensuring a state of the art technology infrastructure, coupled with the utmost attention given to the complete process, can make this happen."

From the company’s inception, ensuring non-stop telecom operations for its clients was one of CSI’s top priorities, which led CSI to build a world-class operation. The IVR platform is housed in state-of-the-art, carrier-neutral hosting facilities that offer the highest degree of power, environmental control, and security services available. All major telecom and ISP carriers provide peering services into the facilities so the platform can be cross-connected to the appropriate carrier with minimal lead time.

The hosting centers were designed to consider everything a contact center client would require in the area of contact automation, including:

Speech: CSI IVR’s make use of the most sophisticated speech recognition used today. When necessary, the proper use of speech allows for a superior caller experience and higher self service call completion rates.
Host Integration: Whether it is legacy mainframe integration or XML data transaction over the Internet, CSI IVR’s can access enterprise data and update it in real time with the results of the call.
Advanced Reporting: Use of web based reporting provides sophisticated reporting that allow clients to track critical business data being captured by their IVR.
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI): The IVR can be integrated with CTI technology available at the contact center allowing for data to be passed seamlessly between the IVR and the contact center.
Language support: The CSI platform supports commonly requested languages for speech recognition. Virtually any language can be supported in touch tone.

Application services at the facility are designed for fault tolerance. All processes are clustered across identical servers in a hot failover configuration. Storage is integrated with clustered servers with RAID 5 redundancy. Intelligent Disaster Recovery allows each IVR and server to be imaged for fast recovery. Network Management is handled by a dedicated staff located in an offsite Network Operation Center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All hardware and platform components are monitored. Applications are also capable of creating custom application events which flow through the same monitoring systems as native platform events. These events allow real time monitoring of critical application integration points. Eventually the third site will allow CSI the ability to run all sites at 65 percent and any two sites could handle the full volume of calls, not just one.

MAXIMUS President and General Manager, Health Services Operations, Bruce Caswell said, "CSI has given us way a new way of looking at using call automation to improve customer service while at the same time driving down costs. Working closely with our CSI partners, we are developing new and creative ways of proving high quality services to our clients and delivering greater value to our customers across the country."

About MAXIMUS

MAXIMUS is one of America's leading government services companies devoted to providing program management, consulting and information technology services. The Company has more than 5,200 employees located in more than 220 offices in the United States, Canada and Australia. In 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005 MAXIMUS was selected by Forbes Magazine as one of the Best 200 Small Companies in America for that year. Additionally, MAXIMUS is included in the Russell 2000 Index and the S&P SmallCap 600 Index.

About Contact Solutions

Contact Solutions (CSI) saves its clients millions of dollars by improving their contact automation significantly while uplifting customer satisfaction levels. Deploying time-tested shared IVR services, world-class IVR applications and procedures, and an industry-leading project management approach around six distinct Centers of Excellence, the company has helped the contact center industry redefine contact automation standards while striving for continuous improvements. Large enterprises such as American Express, Delta Airlines, Motorola and many public sector entities benefit from the company's focused, cost-effective contact automation approach. Contact Solutions is based in Reston, VA. Visit Contact Solutions at www.contactsolutions.com.