Barcelona City Hall reportedly has selected Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company, and Telefonica Spain to develop and implement a SIP-enabled, multi-channel contact centre to improve response to citizens' needs.

In a release, Genesys officials said that under the terms of the contract, Spain's second largest metropolitan local authority will deploy Alcatel-Lucent's (News - Alert) Genesys platform to integrate services across multiple communication channels including web, email, SMS and voice.

Company officials said Genesys' (News - Alert) SIP server integrates and consolidates the operations of the Catalan local authority's internal and external contact centres to provide a complete view of customer interactions.

The platform completes the service catalogue offered by the City Hall to its citizens throughout the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona and enables them to contact the local authority by telephone, email, website, and even SMS, to make inquiries about housing, social services, local tax and benefit services.

Barcelona City Hall estimates the new contact centre to manage 3 million citizen contacts in 2010, a 10 percent increase over the number of contacts managed in 2009.

The Genesys SIP server is expected to enable the Barcelona local authority to deliver services to its citizens by creating a single virtual pool of resources in the contact centre back offices, and remote locations to simplify administration and the addition of staff during peak times.

The platform, company officials said, also extends customer support across the full spectrum of government services, providing citizens with access to qualified and available resources, and enables the use of customer service applications including presence, IM and video to provide higher levels of citizen-centric services.

The SIP server was implemented in cooperation with Telefonica, Genesys' partner in Spain.

In September Genesys Telecommunications had announced the extension of Genesys Workforce Management (WFM) with two new modules that identify gaps in agent competency and then automatically build training plans designed to improve agent skills and close those gaps.

Together these modules -- called ‘Genesys Skills Assessor’ and ‘Genesys Training Manager’ -- identify exact agent training needs and build training schedules that consider service level impact.  Previously, no workforce management suite incorporated such automated capabilities.

As a result, the Genesys WFM suite improves employee performance and enables businesses to increase customer satisfaction, agent engagement and overall business results.