Israeli company AudioCodes offers a the Mediant line of enterprise session border controllers (E-SBC), presently available as appliances in the Mediant 9000, 4000, 2600, 1000, 800, 500 series editions.
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Genesys PureConnect (discontinued)
Score 6.1 out of 10
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Genesys PureConnect was an omnichannel contact center platform that offered cloud-based or on-premise deployments. It featured a SIP-based architecture with VoIP capabilities, allowing companies to connect legacy voice systems and use existing phones. A legacy product, new users are encouraged to investigate Genesys Cloud.
The E-SBC works well in situations where you are working with multiple carriers and/or multiple phone systems and need to route either by IP, sender info or inbound phone numbers.
I find that companies that require faxing to go through the E-SBC seem to be a little less stable than competitor devices.
CIC is best suited for business models that rely on heavily leverage Data Integration especially one like ours that require real-time and high-speed data access for billing and customer integration. CIC is not well suited for small organizations < 50 where they are only answering phones in the course of doing business VS. the business is the phone.
I believe the help files need to have more information about why certain options should be used rather than just a list of possible choices. Some choices obviously require a wealth of information or experience, but having just a bit more info in the help file would save research time.
I'd like to see a user side option to be able to ping and trace route testing without having to be in another admin interface.
The message log function is great for watching SIP packets stream but needs more options for pausing to capture when there are a lot of calls coming through.
In my opinion, the route tables & configurations for proxies and groups need some massaging. The normal config options could be placed on one screen and then have a choice to go to "extended" mode for less-used items. This would make implementation faster as there are so many options now that it can be hard to see the few that are needed for general configuration.
I would love to see a screen that would allow the formation of a "SIP Ladder" where you could enter a source and/or destination IP and have the gateway show you the communication rather than pouring through logs. This is something that various carriers and even Wireshark are doing now but it would be great to have this option from the gateway's perspective as it would make it easier to compare with the outside traffic diagrams without having a senior network tech having to help.
We are so embedded on Pure Connect that we like to progress with it. For instance, we are looking into ways to provide different solutions to our customers, help our business to succeed, and work in a better CX.
One of the biggest advantages is that all is in one platform.
The interface is only semi user-friendly on almost every front. Agent experience is lacking and we have found many limitations within the system. Workforce forecasting is not as robust as expected. Quality continues to be a struggle. Interaction searches are not robust.
The application itself uses a hub and spoke model that can help isolate errors in one section of the application from the rest, creating a much more stable overall program. Of all of the outages that we've had with our contact center platform, I can count on one hand how often it was truly a Genesys issue rather than a network issue, server issue or issue with a platform relied upon for an integration (web services, db calls).
Some of the client applications take a bit of time on initial load, but with the move towards web based applications that issue is alleviated. You can tell that effort really isn't putting into the desktop apps any longer and that the client development effort is being put into bringing Interaction Connect closer to feature parity with the desktop (and bringing wholly new features to Connect). As far as IVR operations, web service calls, database operations: they all operate reasonably.
Some cases are resolved quickly others are taking longer and the reseller sometimes has to chase support several times and explain the issue seen several times. While being a direct customer before, I recognise this and it seems that when a case moves to another engineer they don’t read the previous case notes or don’t understand what has been done. This, from a customers perspective, slows down resolution times.
I liked the setup of the whole class. The instructor knew the topic well enough to answer questions from entry level to a more advanced one.
Instructor encouraged participation of the whole class and was able to engage every one. Also provided "real live" examples so everyone can relate to it.
The online training itself is good. You are provided resources and can self study to a certain point, but the pacing always felt off. Either snails pace or like trying to drink from a fire hose. I think this easily could have had to do with course material and my personal preparations, though. I would say my main gripe is that since the acquisition the team responsible for actually booking training is very unresponsive and often not knowledgeable about the courses they offer. Booking my last training was a real chore.
Don't try to go the perfect solution as a first target. Work on answer the more needs with a simple solution. Then analyse and try again to answer the most needs with adding a bit if complexity only if require. No needs to customise straight from the beginning or deployment takes too long.
Call Manager, you had to buy all the components that are out of the box for PureConnect. The licensing model is more expensive on the Cisco side vs the Genesys PureConnect side. Lastly was on the Cisco side since you have to connect/integrate all the components on the cisco side you have to have so many vendors to install those parts. This drives the cost up even more so it was not worth going that route for our organization.
Genesys PureConnect's core and adjunct model allows for fairly easy growth in satellite locations via off site session managers, remote located media servers, remote content servers, etc to allow you to spread the infrastructure out while not pushing as much network traffic to your core data centers.
Positive - My company has been able to retain business due to the low cost of the AudioCodes devices when compared to the other brands that some customers purchase through other vendors.
Positive - RMA is easy when it appears a card or module might be at issue, AudioCodes support is speedy to replace which grows customer confidence.
The ability to order, assemble, configure and ship multiple units to replace aged or failing gateways allowed us to impress the customer and gain more business.
The reliability of the devices with very lengthy up-time and little to no reboots has impressed customers greatly.
We're improving our CX by optimizing our call centers, using additional attributes and keys to identify the best rep for the job.
We are also streamlining the journey of each individual customer by using PureConnect as the central interface for omnichannel interactions, allowing us to pick up the conversation where we left off.
Using additional attributes that start with the contact center interaction, we're able to track a student journey and proactively step in - increasing our individualized support to focus on the student outcome.
