COSMOCOM NAMES HAMAMEDIA MASTER VAR FOR KOREA

We are happy to announce the appointment of Hamamedia as a Master Value Added Reseller in Korea. Hamamedia is a pioneering regional provider of contact center on demand platforms based on CosmoCom's flagship product, CosmoCall Universe. CosmoCom is working with Hamamedia to strengthen support for current customers in the region, and to create new opportunities for its unified customer communications platform.

Under its designation as Master VAR, Hamamedia in Korea will undertake both direct sales and channel development, for service provider platforms and enterprise implementations. In addition, it will work with CosmoCom to establish OEM relationships in the region.

Read more about Hamamedia and CosmoCom 

COSMOCOM STRENGTHENS AMERICAS SALES TEAM

Industry Veterans Poised to Achieve Strong Regional Growth

In last month's "View from the Corner Office," Ari talked about taking the exciting progress that CosmoCom is making in taking our presence in the Americas region to the "next level". On November 6, we announced the appointment of an AVP for channels and two senior account executives.

The contact center industry veterans -- David Zibelman, AVP Channels; William Frazier, Southeast Regional Sales Director; and David Webster, Northeast Regional Sales Manager -- will report to Ben Eisner, recently appointed President of CosmoCom Americas, to accelerate sales growth in the hemisphere.

"Our new team has dozens of years of call center, contact center, and VoIP experience," said Ari Sonesh, CosmoCom's Chairman and CEO. "They can explain the benefits of on-demand IP-based contact center technology and demonstrate the benefits of CosmoCom's superior contact center platform to potential customers and channel partners throughout the Americas."

To learn more about each of the new team members, read the full release.

COSMOCOMMUNITY 2007 UPDATE

It's official - the 2nd annual CosmoCommunity event will take place May 29 - June 1, 2007 on Long Island in New York. If you haven't already saved the dates, we urge you to do so and plan to be a part of this great event. If attendee and sponsor feedback from CosmoCommunity 2006 is any indication, 2007 will be an even bigger and better forum for learning, sharing and networking that will help the entire CosmoCommunity prosper together.

Online registration will be launched soon, so watch your e-mail for this announcement. Sponsors are already coming on board. If you would like to sponsor the event, please contact us at cosmocommunity@cosmocom.com to request more information, or to reserve one of the limited number of sponsorship slots.

We look forward to seeing you in May!

THE CALL CENTER IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE CALL CENTER

By Ari Sonesh, CEO -  I am an engineer, a technologist by education and at heart. While it's thrilling to create a new, elegant, cost efficient technology, it's truly exhilarating to create a technology that changes the way we live, interact and communicate, particularly when that technology dramatically improve our lives. It's even more exciting when technology changes disrupt the ways we always did things, creating a new and better way to achieve more.

Unified Customer Communications (UCC) is such a technology. I cannot stop thinking about this huge new market; a trend where companies are servicing their customers by the best fit employee, whether located in a formal call center, or anywhere within the corporation. What this really means is that the call center as we know it is disappearing, and a new breed of call centers is emerging, embracing all enterprise information-enabled employees into one unified, virtual Customer Service Process.

This is not the first time that I am writing about Unified Customer Communications. But, as I said, I cannot stop thinking about it! Here are some of my thoughts about how the unification of the call center is changing the way businesses communicate with their customers.

UCC enables access to the best matched employee in the organization. This increases the probability of first-call resolution, i.e. high customer satisfaction. In many cases, the best matched employee is one who knows the customer personally, the employee that handled the most recent inquiry, or the employee who possesses certain expertise, information or history with the customer.. This employee may not necessarily be located in the formal call center. This employee may be your friendly local branch account manager, the inside sales rep, or the receptionist at the front desk. Employees supporting customers can be physically located anywhere within the organization.

UCC facilitates unified access. A customer may initiate an inquiry by Instant Messenger, follow-up by Email, and then call by Phone, or may leave a Voicemail. The customer expects that his contact attempt will be handled uniformly, regardless of the media, and that he will be reaching a person who has access to that customer's historical information in all instances of contact, regardless of the media used. UCC enables every employee to handle all the media contacts via one single unified client. With UCC, the Customer does not need to be routed to several different call center employees, each handling one specific media; rather, because the integration is universal across all the different types of media, the customer contact is one efficient, concise, unified experience...an experience that the customer has come to expect .

UCC further promotes excellence in the customer experience by the use of conference and transfer in a unified approach. UCC allows for collaboration on answering the customer needs, seamlessly providing access to and sharing of all pertinent customer information related to the call. So, now you have reached your friendly account manger, who, if he feels it necessary, can immediately involve one or more experts wherever they may be within the organization. But even better, the UCC environment will intelligently recognize the customer's next contact and facilitate the connection to the expert best suited to handle the contact.

Until recently, the location-confined call center based on a TDM ACD was the only effective and efficient way to provide customer service. Not any more. Now the Multimedia VoIP ACD has enabled the creation of the distributed, virtual customer service environment, efficiently providing better-than-ever customer experience and satisfaction, Thus, the new ACD benefits both the top and bottom lines of a business. The ACD as we knew it is dead, but long live the new ACD, the ACD for the entire enterprise.

As both engineer and technologist, I am proud that CosmoCom is both the visionary and the leader of this movement toward Unified Customer Communication. It is very satisfying to know that CosmoCom's revolutionary technology is making its mark and contributing so vitally to a greatly improved customer service experience!

 

IN MEMORY OF LIOR KALET

This newsletter is usually a place to read about new and exciting things that are happening at CosmoCom and in the industry. However, with great sadness, we pause for a moment to to announce, and to mourn the passing of a great colleague and friend, Lior Kalet, who died suddenly and unexpectedly last week.

Lior had been a member CosmoCom's development team in Israel since March, 2004. He was a major contributor to the new messaging platform in the upcoming CosmoCall Universe 5.0, and became one of our leading VCS developers. Lior was a VOIP expert, and he had recently been designated as the development project manager for one of our major service provider customers.

For all of us, and especially for the team in Israel who knew him best, this is a great loss of a colleague and a true friend. We will always remember him for his warm and easy smile and for the help and support he generously gave to his colleagues. His kindness was extraordinary; it warmed the very atmosphere of our daily lives at work.

Lior, we will miss you!

THE 800 POUND GORILLA

At the beginning of every quarter, Ari assembles the entire CosmoCom team at a company-wide meeting to share the results of the quarter as recently presented to our Board of Directors and to open the floor and the line to discussion. It is a great way to keep the entire company informed and moving forward as a team.

This year the meeting just happened to be on Halloween morning. In the traditional costume-oriented spirit of the holiday, and as a metaphor for the growth we are experiencing, Ari addressed CosmoCom employees wearing a gorilla costume.

Why a gorilla? Ari wanted to express that we are well on our way to becoming the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the unified customer communications and CCOD spaces.

We're already the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to CCOD platforms for service providers, but we are now seeing rapid growth in our service provider partners, with increasingly larger hosted implementations, as well as major premise-based sales through the same service provider channels.

The strong growth is not limited to service providers. We are experiencing a rising tide of interest from current and prospective strategic partners who see CosmoCom's technology and vision as an opportunity for mutual success.

We are also seeing growth in customers with highly distributed implementations. When always ask new customers why they chose CosmoCom, and we often hear that CosmoCom was the only company that could meet their requirements.

Ari also invited Ben Eisner, our new President of the Americas, to address the company for the first time since he joined it. Ben enthusiastically shared his plans for the Americas and the progress he has already made, including our expanded sales and support team.

CosmoCom believes that sharing information is an important success factor. We always look forward to the quarterly meetings, even if our CEO doesn't always wear a gorilla suit. We also look forward to sharing our thoughts, perspectives and progress with the readers of CosmoChronicle.

In that same spirit, we invite you all to mark your calendars for May 29 - June 1, 2007 at CosmoCommunity 2007.

JOIN US AT VON ENTERPRISE IN ATLANTA

The first VON Enterprise show is taking place in Atlanta Georgia at the beginning of December. CosmoCom is pleased to be exhibiting at the event which takes place from Dec 4-6 at the Cobb Galleria. Be sure to visit us at booth 19 to talk with us and see how our leading-edge contact center technology can unify your customer communications.

If you haven't already registered, let CosmoCom save you some money with a special VIP discount pass savings of US $400 off the regular price of conference pricing or a free Expo Only pass. To benefit from this exclusive offer, register online at www.vonenterprise.com/register and enter COSMOCOMVIP in the Priority Code field to by December 3, to activate your savings. Print out this handy CosmoCom VIP Guest pass to help you register.

We hope to see you in Atlanta

COSMOCOM ISRAEL - PADDLING TOGETHER

It's not intentional, but it seems that a recurring theme in this issue of CosmoChronicle is teamwork and cooperation. Both are important to us at work and at play...

On a beautiful sunny day at the end of October, our in Israel embarked on a one-day trip to the North to enjoy some camaraderie among the rapids.

The day began early with the team stopping for a quick outdoor breakfast to prepare them for the vigorous day ahead. Then they continued straight to the rafting location to begin their wet journey, and wet it was. The three rafts that carried their CosmoCom crew did not encounter the most extreme conditions possible, but everyone fell out of his or her boat at least once.

When the course was over, the drenched colleagues dried off, packed-up, and concluded the day with a big lunch at a nearby restaurant. Everyone had a great time, and the day's recreation brought this close-knit group even closer.
 

 BITS & PIECES: SOME VOIP FACTOIDS

Contact Center at the Heart of the Organization
Datamonitor, in their recent strategy report on Solutions Providers observes that "For organizations that adopt more customer centric practices, the contact center has become more strategic. Consequently the contact center is moving closer to the heart of the organization, regardless of whether it is a cost or a profit center."

HQ HAPPENINGS

It's a Marathon Not a Sprint

On Sunday, November 5th, more than 38,000 runners took to the streets in Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs to compete in the famous New York City Marathon. Among them was CosmoCom's own Anthony Malley, Inside Sales Manager at CosmoCom HQ. Anthony trained diligently for many months in preparation for the grueling 26 mile run - many mornings running more miles before work than many of us travel to work. On the day of the run, he was out before sun-up, braving the unseasonably cold weather and getting "in the zone" for the challenge ahead. His hard work and dedication paid off with Anthony meeting his personal goal for his finishing time.

The New York marathon is an apt metaphor to express the dedication of Anthony and all of his colleagues. CosmoCom has been pioneering the unified customer communications and contact center on-demand space for more than 10 years. We've seen sprinters that lose steam before the finish line, and we've seen laggards slow to leave the starting line. CosmoCom's steady pace has gained ground without depleting the resources necessary to reach our goals. With dedicated employees like Anthony, we are confident that we will be in the winners circle.

NEW MEMBERS OF THE COSMOCOM FAMILY

CosmoCom Israel

Yariv Trabelski comes to the R&D team in Israel with more than 7 years of experience and a vast knowledge of VoIP Networks and related technology. He was recently in charge of the development department for Kayote, a VoIP company that develops and deploys its own VoIP/SIP and Billing Network. He holds a Software Engineer diploma from Hadassah College, Jerusalem.

Hagai Himelblau joins the Technical Operations team in Israel as system engineer. Previously at Tadiran Telecom in Israel, Hagai was a system engineer in R&D for the IP telephony solutions, working on IP telephony Tier 4 support and responsible for interoperability with 3rd party IP telephony and networking products. He graduated cum laude from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology with a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering.

TRADESHOW NEWS: COMING ATTRACTIONS

	VON Enterprise December 5-6, 2006  Cobb Galleria Center Atlanta, GA, USA http://www.von.com/enterprise06 See CosmoCom in Booth 19
	AudioCodes Channel Partner Meeting January 9 - 11, 2007 Herods Hotel Eilat, Israel CosmoCom is pleased to be a sponsor of this event.
	RECORDED WEBINARS
	View recordings of our Webinar events including "Hosted Contact Center for Outsourcers", "Contact Center On-Demand" and "Telecom Customer Care"

	SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION
	Please pass this issue of CosmoChronicle on to others who might be interested. If you are not already receiving the monthly CosmoChronicle you can sign up now. This and past issue are also available in the CosmoChronicle Archives.

	LIAISON PROGRAM FOR CONSULTANTS
	If you are a call center industry consultant, join the CosmoCom Consultant Liaison Program for access to our consultant extranet, a dedicated newsletter for the consultant community and more...