Telecom Central is designed specifically to support the business requirements of the worldwide telecommunications industry. It is the result of Scopus' product leadership in award-winning customer care systems, expertise from the customer care industry's largest installed base of telecommunications customers, and partnerships with international systems integrators and third-party developers.

Telecom Central delivers a suite of software applications tailored to the wide-ranging needs of companies committed to providing high-quality customer care. Telecom Central integrates with traditional telecom operations support systems (OSS) to address the entire telecom business process model that links customers with the physical communications network. Through Telecom Central, service providers can now put their entire company on the customer care team.

"The $1 trillion worldwide telecommunications industry is engulfed in change and rapid growth," said Ori Sasson, chairman and CEO of Scopus. "The international dynamics of the past several years - deregulation, new competition, privatization, advances in technology and service bundling - have resulted in a fierce battle for market share. The ability to establish high-quality customer relationships is emerging as the single greatest opportunity for differentiation in the telecom marketplace. These relationships are critical, not only to customer retention, but to customer acquisition and the ability to sell additional services into the existing customer base."

Historically, telecom providers have focused on network management and operations in providing customer support. To create brand differentiation through high-quality customer care, telecom firms must focus on systems that manage and optimize the customer relationship. Insight Research predicts spending for customer care systems in the global telecommunications market will reach $10 billion by the year 2000.

As international telecommunications firms embrace critical customer service initiatives, they seek two key advantages for call center operations:

• A customer care solution that increases the effectiveness of customer service representatives (CSRs);
• A standards-based, open architecture system that sets the foundation for increasing call center efficiency.

Like all Scopus solutions, Telecom Central is an open-architecture, standards-based application that provides the systems flexibility required for telecom firms to quickly introduce new products and services and take advantage of marketplace opportunities. Through integration with CTI solutions and back-office systems for billing, finance and operations, call centers can leverage their existing IT infrastructure to automate service provisioning, speed call handling and eliminate manual workflows - measurably increasing call center efficiency.

"In the highly competitive cellular service business, customer service is the key to gaining a competitive advantage," said John Klustner, director of call center development at L.A. Cellular. L.A. Cellular is a partnership of BellSouth Cellular and AT&T Wireless, and is one of the nation's largest cellular providers. "The enterprise customer care solution from Scopus gives our customer service representatives the ability to provide customers fast, knowledgeable responses to their service and billing inquiries. And Scopus is focused on developing products specifically for the telecommunications industry, making them a natural partner for us."

"Scopus brings to global telecom companies a tailored customer care solution based on proven technology already deployed by more than 270 major companies around the world," said Jeffrey Bork, vice president of marketing at Scopus. "By combining Scopus' leadership in customer care with our broad experience in the telecom industry, Scopus has designed a fully integrated telecom solution focused on the specific needs of global service providers."

SupportTEAM is a customer service and support application that empowers CSRs to quickly and effectively log, prioritize, track, escalate and resolve service requests and problem reports. Scopus' built-in workflow engine automates complex business rules, workflows, tasks and ticklers, so service reps can focus on providing superior customer service instead of navigating cumbersome, error-prone business processes. Customer service information from SupportTEAM is seamlessly integrated with sales and marketing data from SalesTEAM, creating a strong foundation for future relationship marketing and sales efforts.

TeleTEAM integrates Telecom Central into the call center voice and data switching and automated call dial (ACD) environment, providing a full range of computer-telephony integration functions directly from Telecom Central applications. These functions include screen pops (synchronized voice and data transfer), intelligent call routing, and integration to interactive voice response (IVR) units, predictive/progressive dialers, fax servers and web/telephony integration. For example, TeleTEAM provides major gains in efficiency by instantly linking a customer's phone call to his/her complete profile and routing the voice and data to the best available agent in the customer care center.

Scopus DataBridge significantly increases a CSR's efficiency and effectiveness by accessing customer-related data from mainframe computers, service bureaus and other sources across an organization, consolidating that information and presenting it directly to the CSR from within Telecom Central application screens. This frees agents from jumping between a variety of different and often confusing applications to obtain the financial, billing, rate plan, equipment or other account data they need to sell and service customers. DataBridge provides a toolkit to support the integration of technologies important to call centers, including data mapping, interface tables, batch data movement, and real-time bridges between application programming interfaces (APIs).

SmartScript Call Scripting Engine is a powerful, versatile call scripting application that allows the creation of sophisticated call scripts or call guides for sales and service operations. These scripts can include rules-based branching, as well as flexible pre- and post-question handlers, for objection handling or cross-sell and up-sell recommendations. SmartScript authoring is designed to be used by non-technical business managers or analysts, and it is fully integrated with the Telecom Central application environment. As a result, answers to questions can automatically drive changes to data and workflows within applications. The answers to a scripted question, for example, can automatically enter service activation data into an order entry form.

Billing and Order Entry Modules within Scopus Telecom Central prepare, accept and complete service orders to reduce errors and simplify the billing process. The modules allow call center agents to initiate billing inquiries and provide them the flexibility to deal with billing problems, including adjustments. Additionally, the modules give agents a billing/order history of a customer's purchase habits, enabling CSRs to more effectively track order status and predict accurate due dates. Built on top of DataBridge, the Scopus Billing and Order Entry Modules deliver integration to industry-leading billing systems such as CBIS MacroCell and Saville Systems.

"Saville is pleased to be working with Scopus, the leader in enterprise customer care solutions," said John Kiley, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Saville Systems. "Saville's proven strength in delivering convergent telecommunications billing and customer care solutions fits tightly with Scopus' enterprise customer care expertise. Together, we can provide comprehensive, seamless customer care solutions to existing and emerging global telecom leaders."

Contract Manager sets up, tracks and maintains complex service level agreements (SLA) - including multi-level agreements with third-party service providers - allowing call center agents to quickly verify a customer's entitlement to support services. Contract Manager establishes and registers multi-site SLAs and provides call center agents reports on SLA violations. Agents also can quickly obtain information on service entitlements, such as coverage, SLA duration and service validation rules. Using telecom industry metrics, Contract Manager provides detail on network outages and service response times.

ScopusWorks toolset provides a powerful and flexible software environment that allows telecom companies to grow their customer care systems to meet new and emerging business demands while lowering the cost of ownership and protecting existing investments in systems technology. Because Scopus' architecture stores the application components - layouts, objects, properties, workflow and logic - as objects in a database, telecom providers can easily customize and modify their applications without complex programming.

ScopusWorks provides easy point-and-click customization, including the ability to:

• Design, layout and configure forms, fields, buttons and menus
• Modify workflows
• Establish and modify business rules
• Specify replication rules for distributed servers
• Easily add OLE 2.0 objects to forms
• Generate Web-page versions of forms

Scopus is an established leader in developing complete, flexible customer care solutions for telecommunications companies and already counts among its key customers some of the industry's foremost telecom providers, including Deutsche Telekom, Omnitel, Infostrada and Alcatel in Europe; Bell Atlantic, PCS Primeco and US Long Distance in North America; and Fujitsu Network Communications in Japan.

"Scopus' strategy for addressing the international telecommunications market aligns with our European clients' expectations for call centers and enterprise customer care," said Jean Louis Previdi, program director for the META Group's Europe Global Networking Strategies Service in Paris. "Scopus Telecom will become an essential tool for the telecom industry in enabling call center agents to build and maintain customer loyalty, particularly in the Scandinavian and Anglo Saxon markets, which are already open to competition."

"Telecom Central from Scopus gives telecom firms a fast start in delivering full-service customer care," said Duncan Brown, senior consultant at the Ovum Group in London. "Scopus' delivery of a knowledge-base targeted at specific vertical markets - combined with the integration of billing, accounting and provisioning systems with data warehousing, CTI and other service technologies - is an important and innovative step for telecom providers that are fully automating customer-facing operations."

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