Award Recognizes Portuguese Government Social Security Contact Center Innovative Use of Altitude solutions to Improve Access to Public Services

Altitude Software, the leading independent global contact center solutions vendor, presented its first Innovation Award to “VIA Segurança Social”, the new Portuguese Government Social Security National Contact Center. Mr. Manuel Pires, Social Security Information Technology Institute President, and Mr. José Silva e Sá, Board Member Public Social Security Management Institute, received the award at the 6th Contact Center Portugal International Conference gala dinner that recently took place in Lisbon, Portugal.

Altitude Software’s Innovation Award aims to encourage and reward companies and organizations that deliver great service and outstanding business performances through business model improvement and technology-based innovation on top of Altitude Software solutions.

The VIA contact center provides multichannel public services to a potential target of 10 million users and more than 0.5 million business entities, beneficiaries or contributors to the Portuguese national social security system. VIA provides information covering all different services which currently add up to more than a 100. It also helps citizens to securely assess the status of their own process, or of any request previously filed.

“The Social Security National Contact Center has been recognized with an Altitude Innovation Award for its excellence in using the latest technologies to quickly set up a completely new, flexible, powerful operation in a remote, impoverished region of Portugal. The new contact center clearly succeeded in improving public service performance and access with a multi-channel strategy, better management practices and using relevant performance metrics,” said Mr. Gastão Taveira, Altitude Software CEO, “VIA has proven they are committed to quality and excellence in solutions that benefit the citizen. I am pleased to honor their hard work and accomplishments and look forward to more innovative solutions from them in the future.”

The multi-channel contact centre employs almost 200 agents and can easily be reached by telephone, by e-mail, or by fax. In its first year more than 2 million contacts have been answered successfully. Early estimates indicate that the time saved by citizens and business entities using this new channel, over the initial six months, amounted to savings equivalent to over 3,5 million euros. By reducing demand on Social Security face to face services, the creation of VIA also contributed to decrease the waiting time in these services. The Portuguese Government Social Security Contact Center was also recently distinguished as one of the most innovative projects on the “European eGovernment Awards 2009”, entering the final list at the “Category 2a - eGovernment empowering citizens”. 249 projects from 31 countries were considered.

Altitude Software is making an impact on the market with flexible solutions to help dynamic contact centres.

Altitude Software is making an impact on the market with flexible solutions to help dynamic contact centres. Altitude’s platform is optimized for rolling out new campaigns and services, while enforcing safety and providing reliability. In 2010, Altitude Software is planning to launch innovative product versions, including the Altitude vBox 4.0 (Altitude SIP-based soft switch) and the a new version of its main contact center suite, the Altitude uCI, geared to deliver contact center business processes across any organization.

The Altitude uCI contact center suite fully integrates with the Altitude vBox and with a variety of IP-PBXs through ISDN and CTI. This enables advanced contact center applications to increase business results and operational performance in areas such as blended multimedia services, outbound voice campaigns, self-service voice applications and advanced agent desktop applications. The Altitude Software suite allows organizations to use a powerful, highly scalable, customizable IP multimedia contact center solution at a very competitive cost.

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About Altitude Software
Altitude Software (www.altitude.com) is the leader of unified customer interaction solutions, managing dynamic contact centers independently of platforms since 1993. With about 900 customers in 60 countries, Altitude strives for customer satisfaction and is ISO 9001 certified for its worldwide support. Altitude Software has won 40+ industry awards and it has been included by Gartner in the industry Magic Quadrants since 2000. “Altitude uCI” (unified customer interaction) is a software suite that manages in real time enterprise functions like Customer Service, Help Desk, Collections, Telesales, Surveys, etc. It is unique in accelerating the creation of services and campaigns, thanks to the unified design studio, routing, dialer, voice portal, desktop front-end, monitoring and analytics. Altitude Software can be reached at +1 877 4744499 or emailed to info@altitude.com

For More Information:
Carlos Taveira
GetGlobal - Marketing Communications
Tel.: +351 213502561
Email: carlos.taveira@getglobal.pt