DUBAI, November 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Straightforward social media integration with new version of Solidus eCare™  

Aastra, a leading company at the forefront of the enterprise communication market, has added social media as one of the channels available in its all-in-one contact centre. Solidus eCare can now easily be integrated with social media. It empowers contact centre agents to communicate with customers via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, complementing the other multimedia options they have at their disposal such as email, Instant Messaging, SMS and telephone.

According to Krishna Baidya, Industry Manager, ICT Practice from Frost & Sullivan, "Social media is rapidly emerging as the next big frontier for customer engagement and interaction. Contact centres can benefit by using it in many ways - to engage customers, improve collaboration and deliver improved customer experience."

Social media integration with Solidus eCare is simple. The new Open Media Connect provides smooth and instant integration with popular social media sites. As social media is fully integrated into the contact centre, companies will benefit from advanced, real-time reporting and analytics from their social media interaction to gain a thorough insight into customer requirements and agents' responses.

Open Media Connect's easy-to-use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and support for open standards also make possible a seamless integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Workforce Management (WFM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to offer total-solution services.

Bo Stenlund, Head of R&D for Solidus eCare  from Aastra comments, "The new release of Solidus eCare enables contact centre staff to engage in the most effective way with customers, whether they wish to communicate using social media or more traditional channels. Social media is shifting the way the people communicate and, by fully integrating social media into a contact centre, businesses can improve customer interaction as well as customer satisfaction."

Other key features added to the new version of Aastra's Solidus eCare include:

• New Personal Call Routing
• Improved outbound capabilities
• New UC desktop client - BluStar Agent
• Full support for virtualisation, including High Availability and Fault Tolerance
• Smartphone app enabling managers to view contact centre status updates from wherever they are
• New web portal with ready-to-use scripts (for the IVR, emergency notifications…).

Solidus eCare is a fully integrated contact solution with a low Total Cost of Ownership.  Available globally,  Solidus eCare provides all contact centre needs such as multi media support, IP enabled, mobility for agents, virtual contact centre for distributed sites and also multi-tenanting. Solidus eCare™ can scale for businesses with up to 12,000 agents and handle 400,000 calls per hour and supports a multitude of languages including Arabic.

Open Media Connect is available with Solidus eCare release 8.1 from November 2012.

For further information, visit http://www.aastra.com/solidus-ecare-contact-center.htm

About Aastra Middle East and Africa

Aastra Middle East and Africa is the regional business unit of Aastra Technologies Limited, (TSX:"AAH"), a leading company at the forefront of the enterprise communication market. Headquartered in Concord, Ontario, Canada, Aastra develops and delivers innovative communications products and applications for businesses. With a strong focus on open standards, Aastra enables enterprises to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. Aastra's operations are truly global with more than 50 million installed lines around the world and a direct and indirect presence in more than 100 countries. Aastra is entirely dedicated to enterprise communications and offers one of the most complete portfolios of unified communications solutions individually tailored to satisfy its customers' requirements. These range from feature-rich call managers for small and medium businesses and highly scalable ones for large enterprises, associated UC applications, integrated mobility, multimedia call center solutions and high definition video communications to a wide selection of deskphones and cordless terminals. For additional information on Aastra, visit our website at http://www.aastra.com/mea

Media contacts:

Zak.evans@aastra.com

Aastra® is a registered trademark of Aastra Technologies Limited in the United States and Canada. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

SOURCE Aastra Middle East and Africa