Having gone the opposite way (from Symposium to Genesys), I can honestly say that Symposium is the superior product, at least for use with a Nortel switch. Symposium aquires the TN, rather than the two AST keys that Genesys does. That means you get much better integration and more functionality. For example, since Genesys can only monitor the two AST keys, and one of them is the incalls, it can't tell the difference between ACD calls delivered to the extension and any other type of call. Symposium can out of the box distinguish between call types. This means that you can have an agent's phone hunt to voicemail and Symposium will not allow ACD calls to go to the agent's voicemail if they don't answer. Instead, Symposium sends the call back to the queue and puts the agent's phone in a not
eady state to prevent further calls from being presented. You can do this with Genesys, by configuring the agent's phone to hunt to the queue, but then ANY call that was presented to that phone, ACD or not, would get thrown into the queue if the agent didn't answer. That's no good...what if the agent's supervisor tried to call and the agent didn't answer? That internal call is now in the queue! And when the supervisor realizes it and hangs up...abandoned call! Symposium can tell the difference, and will send unanswered ACD calls to the queue and everything else to voicemail (if that's how the phone is configured). Symposium's reports are much better, as well. Genesys reports for a Nortel switch tend to be...difficult to interpret sometimes (that's a nice way to say it). The outofox Symposium reports are useful, userfriendly and, most importantly, ACCURATE! Besides all that, the integration with the switch is much better. Where Genesys routes calls by instructing the switch to execute a series of transfers, once Symposium has the call it does all the work...the switch has much less to do when Symposium is routing vs. Genesys. You can also set up access ports for Symposium in Meridian Mail. With these you can run all of your busy treatments, menus, etc. from Meridian Mail, and you build this IVR ype functionality right into your routing scripts. You don't need another server to handle that stuff (like VTO).
