Northwinds Contact Solutions was selected by a new online magazine for managed services as their first Technology Test Drive.  Independent contact center consultants received a trial account of Northwind's Virtual Call Center platform and tested the platform for a two week period and wrote their unbiased reviews.  The reviews are now available for your perusal below. 

Dean LaGrow
414.489.1056
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Dean with over 17 years experience as a leader in customer care, inside sales and telephony as a Director, and Vice President most recently with a Fortune 500 technology company is currently available for contact center consulting opportunities.
In their server based telephony environment, Northwinds has created a wonderful managed telephony tool I recently spent some time analyzing Northwinds offer and I was impressed with the ease of use and vast functionality.
The current tool works with PC-based softphones and has the ability to connect calls to any PSTN-attached telephone. Future developments will include multiple contact methods such as e-mail, chat, social media, etc.
Northwinds’ tool is a telephony dream; first, it is a managed service so you do not need a huge piece of equipment that comes with service contracts and additional staff. The base of the system is powerful ACD, as well, it does outbound campaigns through the dialer functionality, IVR, call recording (QM) and call disposition capabilities in the systems database or you can hook into an existing CRM system. All this functionality in a managed environment through one system so integration is not an issue.  Additionally, their soft phone receives call-associated data so CTI integration.  Currently, workforce management is not part of the solution. Because of the way they built it, integration is an easy hook.
The interfaces are simple and easy to make changes no programming skills are required to run inbound or outbound campaigns. If you need to make changes on the fly, it is quick and simple. They have attacked the legal side if protecting their clients by having the ability to load Do Not Call lists. Agents can even add numbers to this list with the click of a button. The system does all the filtering.
The agent interface is easy to use so adaption will be at a quick rate. After the agent logs into the system, they starts receiving calls to their phones inbound, outbound or even a blended environment for maximum staff utilization. Call disposition feature limited in the information that it can capture, but it is easy to use. If you are not tracking today, this information will give you better knowledge of the voice of the customer. 
Northwinds it is not the solution for the 500-person mega call center, but if you have fewer than 200 seats, you need to help your employer and look at this solution.  

Customer Experience Advocate
Brad Totten, Consulting
805.405.5159
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 Brad is a 20-year veteran of the Contact Center space.  He is a certified Project Management Professional and currently offers consulting services in contact center infrastructure design and implementation.
I have always managed to be ahead of the curve when it comes to contact center technology, sometimes a little too far ahead for my own good.  Lately old age and wisdom have settled in and I am not so quick to jump on the latest trend.  I have learned the important lesson of “supporting infrastructure”.  This was the lesson I learned back in 2001, after spending my own money and investing a lot of time and energy in launching an alternative transport service using Session Initiation Protocol.  While SIP went on to became the default standard for Voice over Internet Protocol, (VoIP), we were about 4 years ahead of the infrastructure curve and our visions of IP based call centers were dashed when we ran out of money and couldn’t get funding.
Fast-forward five years to 2006, the Yankee Group publishes a paper entitled “VoIP and Lower TCO Will Drive Adoption of Hosted On-Demand Contact Centers”.  The keys to this emerging trend that they identify were:
“The transition from circuit-switched voice to packet”
“The increased demand for integrated suites versus best-of-breed components”
“The TCO-driven shift to technology on-demand instead of owned”
Besides a corporate migration to IP based telephony, we have seen the rapid expansion of infrastructure to homes of high-speed network services.  With fiber optics and cable now reaching the majority of households, we can enjoy the network connectivity speeds that were once reserved for corporate environments.  This was our missing link.
In the three years since the Yankee Group published their findings we have seen the emergence of several players offering their hosted solutions.  When looking at the various offerings one of the key questions I ask is, “Where are your servers located and what is your connectivity to the Public Switched Telephone Network, PSTN?”
To me the contact center is mission critical and having a service provider that has built their infrastructure to meet 99.999% availability is number one in my book.
I recently had the pleasure to meet Steven Cramer, SVP of Operations at Northwinds Contact Solutions.   Northwinds provides hosted and managed contact center services from the prospective of someone that has managed large contact centers for over twenty years.  I embrace the philosophical approach they have taken to providing a top-notch virtual contact center environment.
To meet my first criteria of having Local Exchange Carrier, LEC, level connectivity to the PSTN, Northwinds Contact Solutions has redundant servers collocated in telecommunications switching facilities of Cox Communications.  The fact that Cox uses Northwinds Contact Solutions for their customer service contact center and that Cox was the recipient of the JD Power and Associates 2009 Residential Telephone Customer Satisfaction Study^SM Award was not lost on me.
The next area where Northwinds excels is in their ability to address their clients’ unique needs with customization.  Backend legacy systems are not an issue as Northwinds includes integration services for each clients’ specific needs.
Integrated services such as Outbound IVR and call recording are all part of a seamless offering.  Northwinds provides 24/7 customer support with live agents, a further example of their commitment to customer satisfaction.
I had the opportunity to use the system to add an agent, create a campaign, make calls and listen to the recordings.  In all cases, even without a Quality of Service, (QoS), cable modem, the voice was perfect.  I used a Logitech USB Clear Connect headset and microphone to make and receive calls.  The soft-phone provided was easy to use and I did not need much in the way of coaching to be up and running.
If you are not looking at migrating off your existing switched based contact center technology, you should.  Managed and hosted services are much more cost effective and they are providing the integration of essential features that best-of-breed has failed to achieve.
Make sure when looking at MSP’s that you understand their infrastructure, its advantages and limitations, the company’s willingness to provide custom integration services as well as their commitment to your support and satisfaction.  These are important elements in selecting the correct partner.

Steve Earle
909.241.8660
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Synergy Vision Partners is a technology focused company dedicated to providing leading edge solutions to worldwide businesses in strategic management, collaboration, call and data center deployments and virtual infrastructure implementations.
Combining focused expertise, customer-driven innovation, and platform independence, SVP provides a comprehensive portfolio of software and hardware solutions including consulting, call center management, sales and support.www.SynergyVisionPartners.com
Over many years I have worked with a broad range of telephone systems from all of the major providers with a wide variety of technologies. Lately most of the technology advances have been in the VoIP based platforms typically delivered by Avaya and Nortel for the Call & Support Centers I have been involved with and built internationally. These platforms tend to be very expensive to implement and maintain and any changes or additions require extensive long range planning and execution to have any chance of getting them right and on time. Invariably in building or expanding a call center they were the “long pole in the tent” i.e. the longest lead time requirement along with circuit acquisition. Another critical element of these systems is the ability to provide meaningful information of call activities to clients via reports or connections to a database for WFM & other ancillary services. It is from this thought, this set of experiences, that I reviewed Northwinds Contact Solutions platform. Would I implement it in call center or distributed enterprise solutions model or stick with the “big steel” approach of other vendors? Well, after reviewing the product and the management console I came away with a resounding YES to all of my questions, this product is the real deal. Many of the solutions I have been asked to provide of late would be cost prohibitive on older architecture platforms which are pretty inflexible when it comes to both standard and non standard environments. Add in the potentially dynamic nature and growth of these environments and the separation between the 2 grows.
The Northwinds Contact Solutions platform offers many built in features that might require additional applications to be accomplished on other platforms such as IVR and Integrated call reporting, campaign management and many others. In addition it can be expanded quickly without all of the costly components associated with the other competitors from the old school models as well as those in the CaaS arena. Integration with a variety of WFM environments would seem to be available and relatively easy to accommodate
The user console is very intuitive and setting up different functions is easy and the impact is immediate not delayed. All the functions are well documented and follow standard practices so training for administrators is not needed as line managers will be quite capable of performing most tasks. An HTML interface is provided to allow for communication withy legacy applications such as a CRM, ERP or other application to provide real time data flow expediting corporate decision making processes. I can see where the interface specifically between the CRM and this environment would provide critical call disposition information providing a complete view of call metrics not easily available in other applications without significant cost and integration time.
I look forward to exploring this environment in greater detail but at this time Synergy Vision Partners have selected Northwinds Contact Solutions and their product as our go forward partner in solutions we provide to our clients.

Cindi Cunningham
Customer Solutions and Contact Center Leader
303.909.6424
“Cindi is an experienced call center manager, director and consultant whose experience includes managing the global contact center for Holiday Inn Hotels.  Cindi is currently available for contact center consulting opportunities”.
As a call center leader, I’ve had the privilege of leading medium to large, Inbound and Outbound, customer contact centers worldwide.
Previously, my team and I built one of the largest virtual operations for individual hotel customers.  Most recently, I ran a call center operation where over 50% of the employee base worked from home. Times are changing and employees desire the flexibility that working from home provides them.  No traffic-snarled travel/commute time, expense of gasoline, time away from family etc. We found that we often attracted a higher skilled employee as many had fulltime careers and opted to work for us on a part time basis.  Allowing them to work from home gave them the flexibility to do so and we derived the benefit!
Regardless of the company requiring customer contact activity, we each seek the most economical ways to run and support our businesses.  It becomes quite expensive to purchase hardware and software and maintain staff on hand for 24×7 technical support.  New versions are constantly being released for additional cost and capital expenditures fill our budgets!
I found it simple and easy to use as well as affordable! The flexibility lends itself beautifully to supporting the variety of call center environments that exists today especially if companies experience seasonality in their business model and have a need to expand and contract from time to time.
It was easy to establish parameters of desired phone activity and I like the fact that a company can easily change/modify those parameters on a case by case basis as their campaigns or clients change.
I personally like to “inspect what I expect” and found metrics identification readily at my fingertips via the Northwinds platform solution.
Key areas that I require, and are already provided:
   Securing productive calling activity on a campaign or agent basis
   Service level metrics
   Agent availability
   Totals as well as Averages
I would most definitely recommend the Northwinds Platform to any company seeking a Virtual Call Center platform!