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A Publication Featuring The Information
Services Technology of Maine State Government
| Volume VII, Issue 2 | February 2004 |
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The State of Maine was recently highlighted by one of our key suppliers, recognizing the advancements being made in the state relating to voice services. Two areas highlighted included our Call Center technology, as well as our trials and plans for deploying Voice over IP technology. Avaya recently posted a five page article describing the installation of their equipment at the State of Maine on their website (http://www.avaya.com/). The below is an except from their article, entitled Benefiting from IP Telephony Without Reinventing Your Network which quotes BIS Voice group employees David Rodrigue and David Asselin extensively. |
Call Center Management Services
“… The Maine Department of Labor has actually been a national trendsetter in deploying advanced call center applications. They use a combination of CTI and skills-based routing to enable a particular citizen’s calls to go to the same counselor whenever possible. The people of Maine really like that capability because it means they don’t have to always explain their situation to a new person every time they call. The Avaya DEFINITY servers also support multi-language routing, which is very useful since we have a large French speaking population.
This capability to intelligently route traffic provides another important benefit for us. The weather in the northern part of the state can get pretty wild in the winter. If snow or ice shuts down one of our centers, we’ll just shift the traffic
to an alternate location. Incoming calls continue to be handled – it’s completely transparent to the citizens.”
Choosing a Path to the Future – Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
“… The technology blueprint endorses the integrated approach to voice and data networking. We’ve already begun VoIP1 trials here at BIS using Avaya S8700 Media Servers running Avaya MultiVantage™ Software. We’re viewing these initiatives as in-house deployments and are using a mix of analog, digital, and IP sets. On the IP side, we’re running both hard phone and softphone clients. We love the Avaya 4620 IP Telephone with its big screen. A number of the staff are using soft phones as their primary telephone set and they have proven very popular. From a performance and end-user acceptance perspective, the trials have been overwhelmingly successful. The Avaya S8700 Server is a very strong system.
Our general approach to new technology is to trial it first here at BIS. Once we feel we understand the performance and economic ‘ins-and-outs’, we will prepare a recommendation for the different State Agencies.”
“ … A year and a half from now, I think we will be well along the path to VoIP straight through to the desktop. I would guess we might have as many as 25% of all Agency end-users on IP sets. Given the sizable investment that the State has in the embedded network, the reality around any replacement technology is one of progressive deployments.
There are very few situations that warrant wholesale retirements of still-serviceable gear. With that said, we see the combination of an Avaya S8300 Server and Avaya G700 Gateway as representing extremely strong investment protection in terms of versatility, adaptability, and scalability for new applications.”
The entire article may be read at: http://www1.avaya.com/enterprise/testimonials/lb2059.pdf. A flash demo about the State of Maine's implementation is also available: http://www1.avaya.com/enterprise/resourcelibrary/testimonials/default.htm.
1. Voice over Internet Protocol
