Call Center Environment

The communications environment

Most call center applications require a dedicated piece of hardware for pure telephony switching; however, all the add-on functions of value—the call center specific applications—can reside on a "telephone server" connected to the phone switch. One product that is commonly used in this application is a Windows NT box.

In addition to interoperability standards, there are other links in any data/voice application. "Voice," for example, could refer to different kinds of calls—traditional phone calls are one example, recorded calls in the form of messages, fax traffic, and even the digits callers enter when they pass through a voice response system are other examples of voice traffic. Data traffic originates with the host information in databases and includes the subset of host data that moves to the desktop and back, as well as MIS data that passes through the corporate LAN, through intranets, over the Internet (including company Web traffic), and e-mails.

Prior to the advances in network technology, it was relatively easy to isolate voice-form data streams; however, now a corporation's system might also be dealing with varying combinations of new technologies that include elements of both voice and data: voice over the Internet (VoIP), fax over the Internet, speech recognition, browser-based transaction processing, and "call me" buttons that appear on Web pages.

Standards for CTI

The switch technology resulting from the partnering of computers and telephony has resulted in the design and production of switches that contain CTI hooks built in and a suite of applications from vendors and their partners built to meet joint industry standards that take advantage of the interconnections between the computer and the telephone. When PBX vendors decided to make their switch technology freely available, a more solutions-based set of technologies resulted, largely due to the widespread adoption of technical standards for interoperability between vendors and applications industries. These standards included specifications for the operation of component hardware at the board level, as well as specifications from individual vendors that enabled applications to function correctly on particular board sets.

The computer software industry also created standards for the applications that work with operating systems. The key standards, TAPI and TSAPI, were set up by Microsoft and Novell, respectively, as a way to push the switch vendors into compatibility so that developers could use these operating system platforms as the basis for CTI applications.

Call control

Some of the new applications focused on call control—the movement and tracking of calls in a phone network. Many others were applications that took advantage of the growing LAN/phone system connections to bring data to the desktop at the same time as the phone call arrived. Wherever voice and data networks come together, standards are required to ensure that the integration goes smoothly.

The Internet has required the implementation of additional standards. Building applications combining call control and data manipulation became a lot easier with the adoption of Java and TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol), as standards for data communication. The development of standards to manage these combinations of "information traffic" makes it easier to move data and voice together. It has become irrelevant what form the information takes. What is more important is how that information is used and who has access to it.

CTI has become more precisely defined as "any technology that combines some form of real-time, person-to-person company communication with a background of data that adds value to that communication." CTI was first implemented in the mid-1980s in large corporate call centers. Since then, advances in public telephone network technology and computing have made CTI a powerful tool for businesses of any size. Along with technological advances have come reductions in the cost of implementation, making CTI available and affordable to a much broader range of organizations.

Computer telephony can trace part of its origins to the fact that adding to a typical office PBX required purchasing the add-on to the equipment from the original vendor through a third-party company that wrote to the PBX vendor proprietary specification. For most of the 1990s, this was the method use to install CTI systems—customization, with detailed on-site upgrading and continual fixing of both major and minor glitches to keep the system working. Current CTI systems have benefited from these early experiences and are now much easier to implement. They can now meet the requirements of both large and small companies, in relatively standard versions that require little, if any, customization.

The adaptation of CTI was further hindered in the early days of the technology by the fact that software companies were reluctant to develop add-ons because the cost of developing them for multiple switch vendors was prohibitively high. However, the more perceptive members of both the PBX and computer industries realized that their technologies were more alike than different. Switches were really high-performance communications servers, and if the specifications could be opened up and standards developed, both sides would benefit from the many application requirements that would be met by the combined technologies.

Switch-to-host integration

As noted previously in this chapter, advances in technology have brought sophisticated capabilities within the price range of even the smallest call centers, and switch-to-host integration has contributed most significantly to this change. Switch-to-host integration represents a total transformation of the capabilities of a call center. Small companies can now avail themselves of technology that takes advantage of a range of network-provided services to provide more options with each customer communication.

Voice response

Voice response systems deliver recorded information to incoming calls and are an important element in any call center operation. Interactive voice response, IVR, is two-way: It responds with information when a caller enters digits on the touch-tone phone. The response information is generated from a database, and this application is one of the key functions of CTI. In the typical voice response application, this feature is available on a 24/7 basis, and customers can make a variety of inquiries regarding their accounts or order status. The IVR engine queries a database in the background and reads the information to the caller. This is a dynamic function and represents a much better form of customer communication than a canned, prerecorded response. When converted to an Internet-based operation, the utility to customers is expanded dramatically. Any visual or text image, from catalogs to product schematics, can be displayed on a customer (or CSR) desktop. Customers can help themselves when problems arise. From both the company and customer viewpoints, this feature has several benefits:

§  Customers learn about products before they buy.

§  They are better prepared to talk to CSRs.

§  Calls are shorter, more effective, more profitable.

§  Shoppers do their shopping without consuming valuable resources.

§  The buyer gets full attention.

CTI applications

Some of the specific applications for CTI in inbound call centers include

§  Synchronized voice and data delivery

§  Simultaneous voice and data transfer

§  Voice and data conferencing

§  Automatic retrieval from callers

§  Segmentation and prioritizing callers

§  Caller-specific messaging and routing

§  Enhanced performance reporting

§  On-line training tools

§  Enhanced marketing research

§  Automated switching between inbound and outbound (call blending)

§  Desktop-based productivity tools

Computer telephony surpasses the traditional limitations of both component technologies (phones and computers) and combines their best features to bring more information to the person on the phone and to make data more accessible and more useful to CSRs. Computer telephony adds computer intelligence to a phone call. Everything from simple screen presentations to predictive dialing is a CTI application. The capability of integrating the computer and telecom system brings customer phone calls along with data files right to the CSR's desktop as the call comes in. This translates to massive savings in 800 line charges and agent labor. In practice, implementing CTI has been a tricky proposition. In its early configurations, it was usually custom-made for a particular application. Companies used a systems integrator to pull together the necessary links, proprietary interfaces, and special connections to applications.