Solutions

With proven credentials and accreditations in Unified Communications, Network Infrastructure and Contact Centre solutions, NSC transforms organisations to better meet the demands of a constantly changing business landscape. Whether we are delivering an end-to-end solution or layering convergent applications on top of an existing network, NSC successfully connects your business to an IP world providing you with a more effective way to communicate and collaborate.

Unified Communications

Unified Communications (UC), the convergence of business communications applications includes voice and video telephony, conferencing, collaboration, voice and video mail, instant messaging, email, calendaring and contacts.

The key advantage of Unified Communications is its ability to enhance the quality of the interactive experiences across an organisation. As the speed and efficiency of communications between stakeholders is enhanced, significant business benefits are realised including improved customer experience, increased productivity, more frequent collaboration, reduced costs and ultimately, competitive advantage.

As businesses worldwide convert their traditional voice and data communications infrastructures to IP networks, they are eager to leverage the unique capabilities of this technology to improve their operational performance and market differentiation. Unified Communications represents a powerful set of converged network applications that can directly enhance a company's market advantage.

There is no single strategy by which enterprises move forward with Unified Communications since each customer has a unique set of needs and existing infrastructure NSC understands this and partners with organisations to develop a Unified Communications strategy which supports complex and flexible work environments. The consultative process begins with a business assessment to understand the communication patterns within the organisation and identify relevant business processes.

A business assessment that evaluates communications patterns of the employee base is critical to successfully planning for Unified Communications. To identify opportunities for Unified Communications, business processes should be evaluated to identify where latencies exist due to human interaction and communication.

VoIP/IP Telephony

Whether we are delivering an end-to-end solution or layering IP Telephony applications on top of your existing network, NSC successfully connects your business to an IP world providing you with a more effective way to communicate and collaborate.

The traditional PBX has evolved into a sophisticated communications management platform that supports a wide range of devices including desk phones, wireless handsets, PC-based softphones and video phones and more.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has emerged as the universal blueprint for IP Telephony and unified communications in general. By supporting a wide range of media sessions, SIP allows users to engage in anytime-anywhere integrated business communications regardless of location, media type or device.

For enterprises, the benefits of SIP can be significant - accelerated business communications, improved information transfer and file sharing, enhanced worker productivity through conferencing and collaboration capabilities, and reduced mobile phone costs through the use of soft clients remotely.

From an IP Telephony perspective, SIP trunking technology can open the door to significant cost savings, while delivering exceptional voice quality and robust features and capabilities.

Unified Messaging

Unified Messaging  is the integration of different electronic messaging and communications  technologies such as e-mail, SMS, Fax, voicemail, video messaging into a single interface, accessible from a variety of different devices. With Unified Messaging all types of messages are stored in one system. Voicemail messages can be delivered directly into the user's inbox and played either through a headset or the computer's speaker. This simplifies the user's experience and offers new options for workflow such as appending notes or documents to forwarded voicemails.

UM solutions are generally used in the corporate environment  to enhance and improve business productivity while decreasing communication issues.

Video Conferencing

The implications of video for business are clear: customers, employees and business partners accept video as a valuable form of communication. Real-time video collaboration can increase team effectiveness, reduce decision cycles, enhance relationship building, and of course, diminish travel costs while limiting your organisation's carbon footprint.

Two-way video communication encompasses individual and group video conferencing, as well as telepresence and provides interaction among individuals and groups.

By expanding the typical audio and web conferences with video, participants feel much more engaged in the communication activities.

Desktop Collaboration

Desktop Collaboration allows anyone, anywhere to instantly share their desktop and ideas online with others. It enables organisations to extend their business, better meet customer's need, improve employee productivity and save valuable company time and resources

With today's desktop collaboration tools you can host your own virtual meetings, enjoy real-time collaboration with white board & annotation tools and use web conferencing for team meetings, presentations, online training, tutoring, brainstorming and more.

Microsoft Integration

To achieve the full value of unified communications, most enterprises have to integrate new communications solutions within existing infrastructures. As an Avaya and Microsoft business partner, NSC delivers their combined vision to make collaboration a reality. Integrating communications applications from Avaya with Microsoft business software applications results in unity of communications.

This unity removes the barriers of time, geography, isolated applications, messaging formats, communication modes and choice of device. Information and communications are liberated.

Enterprises are able to increase productivity in measurable ways by allowing:

• Click-to-communicate from familiar desktop interfaces;
• Integrate in-house audio and Web conferencing to reduce expense and make meetings more effective;
• Integrate e-mail, voice mail and calendars into a single client;
• Reduce total cost of ownership on server management;
• Extend functionality to mobile and remote workers;

Customers are able to achieve maximum value through a reliable and wholly integrated voice, application and desktop experience.

Contact Centres

Today's contact centres can have a tremendous impact on an organisation in areas such as revenue, costs, market intelligence and customer loyalty. To a customer, contact centre personnel are the voice and face of the company and these days handle every form of communication including phone calls, e-mail, faxes, online communication and written letters.

A good contact centre has a strong culture where people work from a common set of values and beliefs and are bound by a common purpose and a strong focus on the business objectives.

Contact centre technology is becoming increasingly integrated - thereby delivering improved processes and resulting in increases in customer satisfaction, efficiency and revenue generation.

NSC works closely with its customers to ensure the right combination of people, processes and technology provide effective business solutions to maximise customer satisfaction, cost control and revenue generation.

Analytics

While many businesses stay connected with their customers through advertising, loyalty programs, special events, surveys and other activities, they often overlook the value of the customer interaction data captured in their contact centres. Too often, this data is used simply to track internal performance metrics, which, while important, seldom provide insight into customer opinions and the overall customer experience.

Customer service analytics can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise customer service, driving down costs and building a cycle of continuous performance improvement across the entire customer service value chain.

While the sheer quantity of data about what is happening in the contact centre can be overwhelming, it often provides limited insight into why. Lacking this insight means organisations may have difficulty knowing which actions to take to prevent specific problems from happening again.

Speech

Speech analytics provides insight into the reasons customers interact with contact centres by converting conversations from unstructured audio data into data that is structured in an index that can be readily searched and analysed.

An effective speech analytics solution provides the ability to search unlimited terms and phrase combinations, categorise calls based exactly on how customers express themselves and mine specific categories and call subsets to automatically determine the root causes that drive these calls and impact overall performance.

Data

Data analytics should not be confused with data analysis - a typical activity in many contact centres, where spreadsheets are used to track and chart a wide array of key performance indicators. Unlike data analysis, a data analytics solution doesn't just track and report data - it provides new information from it.

Instead of simply measuring a KPI such as average talk time, an effective data analytics solutions will show what drives average talk time.

Compliance Call Recording

Contact centre recording is a critical component of compliance and liability management programs. These recordings provide information for handling disputes and verifying transactions as well as increase operational effectiveness, reduce liability, ensure compliance with regulations and guidelines and improve the customer experience.

Today's recording solution captures, indexes, and retrieves customer interactions in traditional TDM, IP and mixed telephony environments to help you comply with industry regulations and reduce liability and loss.

With the right system you can record and play back contact centre calls in their entirety, including audio and agent screens as well as retain recordings in accordance with your corporate and legal mandates, helping to ensure they are available when you need them.

Quality Monitoring

For more than 30 years, call centres have used quality monitoring to ensure their agents handle customer interactions properly. Although traditional quality monitoring has served enterprises well in the past, it falls short in today's Internet-enabled business world, where customer demands - and defections - are necessitating a new way of doing business.

Quality monitoring has become a critical task today due to three key drivers:

• Cost Control Pressures
• Executive Focus on Revenue and Profit
• Customer Expectations

These drivers are forcing contact centres to attempt to achieve the critical balance between effectiveness and efficiency. Ideally, an end-to-end quality monitoring system reliably captures, stores and retrieves customer interactions across multiple channels and sites.

The solution delivers high-volume recording functionality and advanced data storage, retrieval and presentation capabilities, along with tools to enhance agent training and performance. Flexibility is the hallmark of an end-to-end quality monitoring solution. Consequently, such a solution includes business-driven recording capability to capture and evaluate customer interactions.

Performance Management

Performance management solutions allows an organisation to track and analyse agent performance, as well as the performance of groups and the company as a whole. Role-appropriate scorecards and an extensive set of predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) help all levels of the organisation see how they're performing against their goals.

It allows you to:

• Measure agent performance to identify strengths and weaknesses.
• Use scorecard results to trigger targeted eLearning automatically.
• Refine your forecasts and performance goals based on the valuable data collected.
• Create your own key performance indicators.

Workforce Optimisation

Workforce optimisation is a convergence of four key contact centre functions that work together in support of a greater customer service advantage. Each function combines people, processes, and technology to achieve an end result:

• Quality assurance - Provides recordings and evaluations of the complete customer experience across multimedia touch points
• Forecasting and scheduling - Drives efficiency and adherence, aids in planning, and helps facilitate optimum staffing and service levels
• Reporting - Provides key performance indicators (KPIs) and scorecards that analyze and help identify staff strengths, areas for improvement, and trends
• Training - Includes eLearning, along with new information and protocol disseminated to staff online

Customer Survey & Feedback

For years, contact centres have used a number of techniques, including mailed questionnaires, interactive voice response surveys and live telephone conversations (either immediately after the transaction or later, via a call-back) to solicit customer feedback about the company, its agent, and its products and services.

An alternative is to engage with customers. After establishing rapport with a customer, the agent tells the customer the company values his or her input and invites the customer to provide feedback. The agent then passes the customer to a customer feedback system. This approach is much "warmer" and typically has much higher response rates than the IVR survey. The higher the response rate, the more meaningful the data.

Because the objective is to identify when a problem is putting a customer at risk, an alert process must be in place to ensure appropriate corrective action takes place.

Customer feedback can also be sent immediately to the owner of the root-cause issue. In most cases, this is someone outside of the contact centre. This not only helps the organisation correct faulty processes, but also fosters a collaborative relationship between the contact centre and the rest of the organisation.

Speech Solutions

Speech recognition has arrived as a mature technology delivering business value into the global market.

A convergence of technology, improved design capabilities and business opportunities over the last few years has allowed for the implementation of a range of quality speech recognition solutions providing value for both business owners and their customers and thus proving out the inherent value in the technology when deployed appropriately.

The ability to implement a quality natural language speech solution is now a real possibility for businesses across industries and across businesses of various sizes, from the enterprise to the local small business. Solutions are built to agreed industry standards, eliminating the traditional lock in to proprietary hardware and software solutions, further de-risking the option to implement speech.

Pre-Packaged Applications

Customer Call Back Module

Manage the peaks in your call volume by automatically taking calls via a speech application and giving your customers the choice of a time to be called back.  This significantly helps to reduce the stress on your agents during busy times and flattens the call volume throughout the day. 

Solution Impact:

• Abandon Rate
• Average Speed To Answer
• Call Arrival Patterns

Customer Surveys

This speech enabled survey model enables organisations to understand immediately what their customer thinks of the service they provide. Net Promoter Score (NPS), Verbatim Responses, Branching and full reporting come out of the box with the application.  Surveys can be used either inbound or outbound using a dialling list and a call initiator

Business Impacts:

• Customer Service
• Net Promoter Score Results
• Reduces Complaints
• Reduces Churn

Locator Service

If your customers call you to ask you where your store is, what time your opening hours are, where the nearest store is for them then this module is for you.  Used for national retail outlets, pizza chains, retail energy store locations either at a suburb level or a street level,   this module is perfect for making sure your customers can easily be connected to the right location and service.  The application comes with detailed reporting regarding who is asking for what suburb that can provide valuable marketing data in terms of where the next store should be opened.

Business Impacts:

• Reduced contact centre call volume
• Ideal for keeping consistent brand
• Reduces customer confusion

Campaign Manager

Outbound surveys, collections, bill payment reminders or emergency outage notifications, the Campaign Manager application allows you to contact more of your customers.  This application uses an outbound call initiator to reach out to your customers.  On detecting voice, the speech application can either play messages or allow your customer to interact with a speech application.  This application is completely scalable from 2 ports to 1000 ports.

Business Impacts:

• Reduce agent headcount
• Improve collections capability
• Improve outbound survey saturation

Corporate Directory

The corporate dialler is there to welcome your customers in a friendly and consistent manner and quickly route them to the right place, first time.With a simple web interface, it allows a business to manage and maintain that important front door to their enterprise real time. Update names, departments, opening hours, modes of contact and many other variables to make it easier for callers to reach their desired end point

Business Impact:

• Reduces the need to have fully managed switchboard
• Provides consistent branding

Network Infrastructure

Today's high-performance businesses demand a high-performance network infrastructure that provides fast, secure and reliable delivery of the applications to drive business processes. With each part of the modern enterprise being scrutinised or fine-tuned for maximum efficiencies, the requirement for high performance networking has become paramount.

NSC, together with its partners, provides a new approach - an innovative suite of solutions allowing our customers to spend less on their network infrastructure and service costs and more on revenue generating and productivity enhancing  parts of the business. We help make the network a profit centre and reduce operational complexity.

The main areas of focus for NSC Networks Solutions include:

• Multiservice Access Products
• LAN Switching
• WAN Routing
• Security Firewalling
• Security Management
• WAN Optimisation

Our breadth of understanding for all things IP and TDM enables us to develop a roadmap for the successful adoption of technology designed to benefit an organisation's bottom line.

Multiservice Access Products

NSC recognises the market drivers changing the landscape and the migration to VoIP, IP Video and Web enablement. The often low operational cost of these packet networks also drives this market trend.

A significant investment has been made by industry and our customers in PDH, SONET, TDM and ATM networks and these networks with existing infrastructure and extensive installed base will continue to operate well into the future.

NSC partners with RAD Data to provide an extensive range of solutions to these "legacy meets next generation" projects. Multiservice platforms enable us to engineer solutions that can include both TDM and IP voice in the same footprint, or even Gigabit Ethernet and low speed serial connections on the same backplane. We have the ability to transport Ethernet over PDH or TDM over packet, whatever the convergence challenge NSC and RAD have a solution.

Data Centre Connectivity

Rapid growth in storage volumes and the growing dependency of enterprises on their data are driving enterprises to look for reliable and cost-effective backup and data protection solutions. Through its partnership with PacketLight Networks, NSC addresses the emergence of these needs by providing data and storage connectivity between separate SAN islands of the enterprise using the existing Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructure.

NSC offers reliable, carrier grade CWDM/DWDM solutions that ensure access to most business critical data while protecting your investment with scalable, pay-as-you grow architecture. We provide a wide range of Wavelength Division Multiplexing optical networking products that allow transport of any mix of services from 2Mbps up to 10G over dark fibre and WDM networks providing for the entire set of the most demanding CWDM/DWDM network infrastructure needs.

LAN Switching

NSC's philosophy to LAN switching is to provide the best-for-purpose solution. Every customer has a different set of requirements and challenges. Many vendors attempt to solve them with the same set of products. NSC embraces an approach that can deliver either complex or simple solutions from distributed branch office to data centre.

The products we select represent a new class of high-performance Ethernet switch for the enterprise. We believe in advancing the economics of networking by delivering secure, carrier-class solutions for converged networks, enabling high-performance businesses to lower capital and operational expenses and invest in more revenue-producing and productivity-enhancing technologies.

WAN Routing

Routing is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic. It sounds simple and it should be, but somehow the market seems to have been overcomplicated. NSC's approach is to select the most powerful and high performance set of products with the most flexibility and have all the products operating on the same software operating system. From large service provider to the small branch office.

Our router families are designed for the demanding connectivity needs of the data centre, regional office, and head office. Built on highly stable, modular, and powerful  Software, delivering high throughput with the flexibility to easily add advanced features for routing, QOS, security and management without performance impact.

Security Firewalling

As threats to the network grow more prevalent and destructive, securing the infrastructure is critical to maintaining a viable business. Attacks come from multiple sources in a variety of forms. Enterprises and service providers need more than just a security device; they require a comprehensive, reliable security solution.

NSC partners with the industry leaders in providing firewall, anti span, virus protection and access control.

Integrated security devices are purpose-built to perform essential networking security functions. Optimised for maximum performance and feature integration, they are designed on top of robust networking and security real-time operating systems.  Designed from ground up to provide the superior networking and security capabilities, these operating systems are not plagued by inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of general-purpose operating systems.

NSC offers a  range of purpose-built, high-performance solutions that provide for strong security, access Control, user authentication with Attack Protection at the Network and Application Level.

Security Management

Security is seen as so important to the modern enterprise that legislation now exists to prosecute businesses that fail to implement it correctly. The act of securing a network is only the first step, the important piece is actually "being" secure. The only way to ensure this outcome is to manage the security situation of the network.

NSC's approach is to provide visibility to what applications are being used by which user for what purpose and how much bandwidth is being used. We detect attacks on day zero and we remove the false positives that can overload tracking systems that then miss the important attack information that require action.

WAN Optimisation

"Nothing in life is more certain than death and taxes" or so they say. Perhaps in the modern world a few more things can be just as certain and one of them is the desire for more and more speed out of the network, the Internet and applications. Should a business provision a 10Mbps connection today, then it is certain when the carrier contract is renewed in one or two years it will buy more speed. Whatever bandwidth is given to users they will use and still want more.

The smart approach is to do more with what you have now and accelerate your bandwidth now, not in two years time.

The NSC solution is application acceleration, or WAN Optimisation. We provide a scalable approach to accelerating the delivery of client-server and web-based business applications and services - including ERP, CRM, e-mail and file services as well as voice, video and terminal services such as Citrix - over the WAN. Based on algorithms needed to accelerate applications over wide-area links and optimise WAN performance, our WX products help businesses make the most efficient use of their existing WAN resources and improve application response times by providing a more  LAN-like experience for branch office users accessing centralised applications.