Customer Service — the competitive edge The problem a CentralTouch solution solves is the time and productivity customers lose contacting their suppliers organization to install, repair or upgrade, a products or service. Our solution will enable customers to increase the “up time” of the product or service, reduce the number of support incidents and increase first call resolution of support incidents. Not only will the customers be happier, so will the vendor because of the significant reduction in overall support costs. A recent study by the SSPA determined that the best ways to reduce support costs are by reducing the call time and increasing the number of incidents resolved on the first call. CentralTouch estimates that deployment of our Remote Monitoring solution will eliminate the escalation of problems to contact center in the first place. This could have an even more dramatic effect on reducing overall support costs and improving customer satisfaction. CentralTouch contact centre solutions reduce the number of incidents that need to be reported, reduce the call time and improve the number of incidents that are resolved on the first call. The old adage that it costs five times as much to obtain a new customer as to retain an old one has never been more relevant than it is to day. CentralTouch has combined the functions of a multi media contact centre with a real-time remote monitoring and control system. A combination that will improve the service and support provided to customers at a much lower cost, and increase your customer retention rate. A CentralTouch solution begins with the addition of a service software module to a product or service. A software module that communicates in real-time with the CentralTouch provided full function multi media, multi site contact centre. This module provides information to a central database and monitoring service and is made up of Contact Centre staff and the equipment required to support the customers. This unique marrying of the service and support staff with a real time monitoring service will dramatically improve the way customers are serviced and supported. The CentralTouch solution embeds a software user agent (UA) into the hardware or software components of a product or service. This UA will constantly monitor the performance and status of the hardware or software. This UA can on a scheduled basis send performance information back to a central server which would analyze the information and determine if preventive action is required. In the event the server determines action is required, or the software or the device fails, the UA sends an alert to the server which can either try to automatically fix the problem or place the problem in the queue for the contact center where a technician would interact with the customer to resolve the problem. With CentralTouch technicians and support staff can work from home, customer sites or in a centralized call centre. Because a CentralTouch solution is based on a standard (SIP) communications platform it can traverse common internet routers, gateways and firewalls which block most proprietary based real-time protocols.