Aspect vs Meridian or Sympoisum....?

[EJW]

Hi,

Anyone out there used both the Aspect ACD V8+ and Sympoisum? Have an oppurtunity to move away from Aspect and onto Symposium.

Any pitfalls people are aware of or anything that they know the Aspect does and the Sympoisum doesn't??

Need general thoughts around this.

Thanks to all who respond!

EJW- watson1@keme.co.uk

 

[JYJYJY]

I have used both Aspect and Symposium.

My personal favorite is Aspect, and will not move to Symposium if I am already using Aspect.

Nortel is known to be difficult to administrate.
Just take the call routing programing as an example. In Aspect you use GUI CCT to create your routing rule. Simple, easy to see, and easy to learn. A new person can be trained and can handle most common routing within a month. Symposium routing, still CLI base. You need to familar with most of those command wordings in order to has a good feel of how to set the routing rules.

Aspect, you can administer everything from the Management software. Setting up trunk group, call routing, restriction, agent, ..... However, in Symposium, you can only set agent, skillset, routing script. Other related programming is from M1 administration like trunk, phoneset, etc. M1 administration is even harder to learn.

You can take 2-3 courses from Aspect, and can be very comfortable to do the administration work. Using M1+Symposium, you need a lot more. An example is you need to take 3-4 M1 course from Global Knowledge/Nortel in order to just know how to program the phone set.

But the most important part I don't like Symposium is the reporting capability. Symposium database is structured in an interval base. You can have interval (every 15 mins), day (one day), week, and month "view". You cannot seperate each individual call's information. Think about the shortest interval view, all the calls are summarize within 15 minutes interval. This means you cannot get the CLID or ANI of each call. The only place you can find CLID in Symposium is the eCallbycall stat, that is like the callevent today table in Aspect. In order to get the same flexibility of report creation as Aspect do, you actually need to build by yourself another replication database server for Symposium to dump the eCallbyCallstat and create your own tables and collapse that monster data into different useful summarize table. A huge job.

 

[EJW]

Agree about the MIS but from what I have seen you can drill down on individual calls...Symposium? (not express)

Any other thoughts? We could be saving the business a lot of cash due to the way both systems are licenced.

 

[JYJYJY]

I have used SCSS 4.2, the full version, using Crystal Report 8.5 to create special report.

In symposium, from the Agent perspective (AgentPerformanceStat view), you are correct that you can get individual agent information.

But from a Call detail perspective, you cannot obtain information on a per call basis. Everything is summarized in a 15 minutes interval. E.g, within this 15 minutes, the number of call offered, the number of call answered, the number of call abandoned, etc.

I have once built a test report to try to see what details I can obtain from the interval application stats view. I find that within the 15 minutes interval, Symposium give you the summarized data for each skillset created within your SCSS. Therefore if you have 5 application created, you will get 5 rows of data in each 15 minutes interval.

You cannot find any information for each call. Everything is summarized within a 15 minutes interval.