9/2/03
XO Communications and Echopass to Provide Customers with Hosted Contact Interaction Solutions
Reston, VA (September 2, 2003) XO Communications, Inc., a national broadband communications services provider, today announced a joint sales agreement with Echopass, the leader in hosted contact interaction solutions. The two companies will provide XO customers with a complete suite of telephone and web-based contact interaction/call center solutions delivered over the XO network and offered on a monthly cost-per-seat basis.
The Echopass suite of services provides a robust set of call handling and e-media features, including universal queuing, skills-based routing, synchronized screen delivery, CRM integrations, email response, web-chat and web callbacks. Management features include real-time views of contact center traffic, consolidated historical reporting, centralized administration, predefined service-level objectives and contact escalation features.
Hosted services offer a number of advantages over premise-based solutions
Echopass has simplified the challenges of deploying multi-channel contact center services by integrating best-of-breed telephony and data technologies and hosting the applications from its world-class network facility. Echopass hosted services offer a number of advantages over premise-based systems. Capital expenditures are low: customer-side requirements are simply a PC, a browser and a network. Deployment is exceptionally fast because the infrastructure already exists, which also relieves customers of on-going maintenance costs. Echopass manages the contact center infrastructure and gives its customers the tools they need to manage the operations side. Echopass hosted services are inherently flexible, allowing companies to scale up and down simply by adjusting their subscription. Additionally, virtual centers and remote agents can be quickly and easily deployed using XO's broadband communications options.
"We are excited about this strategic partnership," said Linda Mills, Vice President, Product Management at XO. "This allows XO to offer call center customers a faster, more complete, intelligent and integrated handling of their customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers and partners via the telephone and the web. The Echopass solution is also easily and seamlessly integrated with XO voice services, such as our own Hosted Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions."
Echopass CEO Vincent Deschamps concurs. "We're delighted to partner with a broadband provider of this caliber. XO's award-winning Internet backbone and our web-delivery application model are highly synergistic. Furthermore, XO's presence in over 60 U.S. major metropolitan markets coupled with the breadth of XO's sales force, significantly broadens the reach of our service offerings."
About XO Communications
XO Communications is a broadband telecommunications services provider offering local and long distance voice services, Internet access, Virtual Private Networking (VPN), Ethernet, Wavelength, Web Hosting and Integrated voice and data services to business customers nationwide. XO owns facilities-based broadband networks and has tier one Internet peering relationships in more than 60 markets throughout the continental United States.
About Echopass
Echopass Corporation is the leading provider of hosted contact interaction solutions for mid-tier enterprises, departments and branches of large enterprises and outsourcers worldwide. With a wide range of flexible inbound and outbound customer contact solutions, Echopass delivers rich functionality that is easy to deploy and use.
Echopass takes the pain and complexity out of implementing telephone and web-based customer contact solutions by integrating best of breed technologies and offering a full suite of service packages on demand. With Echopass, customers enjoy the benefits of high impact, cross channel customer sales and service applications in less time and at a lower cost than traditional, premise-based multi-vendor systems
Founded in 2000, Echopass is privately held, backed by top tier venture capital firms and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, visit Echopass at www.echopass.com or call 1-801-258-7000.
For more information contact:
Dawnyielle Downes/ XO Communications
Media and Industry Analysts
703-547-2682 or 703-675-3450
XO Communications Investor Relations Department
Financial Analysts
877-444-2068
