Computer telephony integration (CTI)

The significance of the integration of the computer and the telephone (CTI), is reflected in the growth of the communications market, around which CTI has been developed. Telephone call volumes are growing exponentially: In 1980, Americans made about 200 million international phone calls, and by 1998, that number had risen to 4.5 billion. The global fiberoptic networking market is expected to reach $52 billion in 2003, $25 billion higher than in 1999. The rapid growth of networked systems, and the increasing demand for more bandwidth have enhanced the importance of CTI as well, as illustrated by the sophistication of enterprise systems such as call centers. The impact of open systems, new technologies such as the Internet, VoIP, and wireless computing are altering fundamental business models. (see Figure 1)

Figure 2.1: CTI—An open architecture.

The evolution of CTI

One of the overall design objectives of CTI was to enable better contact between companies and their customers through the seamless and intelligent integration of both technologies. It has been defined as a "loose but complicated amalgamation of interlocking technologies," a way of combining the two streams of information—voice and data—through open, standards-based systems. It has uses in many areas of today's technology-based business, but certainly one of its most significant applications is in the call center. In this facility, it provides opportunities to improve the way a company interacts with its customers, the key focus of any call center operation.

A brief review of the evolution of both the computing and telephony environments is provided in this chapter to give some background on the technological advances that define CTI and to the current prevalent "model" of computing—client/server architecture. An overview of telephony, the second of the two technologies that make up CTI, is also provided, describing the basic functioning of public networks and business telephone systems. Finally, the two technologies are brought together with the integration of computerization into the communication environment, illustrating how they maximize the benefits of both in the call center environment.

The computer environment

The distributed computing architectures that have become commonplace in today's business world began with the mainframe, a massive structure of processing and data storage elements. The mainframe environment provided centralized "host" facilities to run applications—users outside of the computing department used "dumb" terminals and cumbersome commands to access applications and request actions.

Mainframe computing

Mainframe computing platforms are still an integral element of many IS environments and are often referred to as legacy systems in reference to the legacies of information they still retain, the considerable investment they represent, and the role they play in today's computing architecture. That role is usually focused on the handling of record-intensive functions such as employee or customer financial databases (health care records, automobile licensing, inventory, etc.). (see Figure 2)

Figure 2.2: Mainframe architecture.

Rapid advances in processing technology and the demanding desktop/ workgroup requirements of the marketplace stimulated the evolution of the minicomputer in the late 1970s and personal computing—the ubiquitous PC—in the early 1980s. This widespread availability of relatively inexpensive computing power allowed new architectures to evolve. (see Figure 3) The architecture of choice in today's computing environment is client/server computing. In this model, an intelligent terminal (PC) is connected to various applications and services by a local area network (LAN), and in large enterprises users are usually connected to remote locations via a wide area network (WAN). These networks of computing power are commonplace in the business world of the 21st century.

Figure 2.3: PC architecture.

Client/Server computing

Today's typical office environment includes a variety of input and output devices—PCs, scanners, printers, and so on—all connected by a LAN. The client/server model extends "sharing" to files, databases, and more importantly additional applications by putting the shared elements into a shared PC (the server). By doing so, each desktop PC (the client) accesses the server to extract or input information. When users update a record, the server database is updated, so that everyone in the workgroup is sharing up-to-date information. Client/server applications allow users to configure their screens to meet specific needs and preferences, yet have the benefits of shared information. (see Figure 4)

Figure 2.4: Client/server architecture.

The capability of mixing and matching machines from different vendors in an open system environment is another feature of client/server computing. The user can select the server best suited to the task but choose PCs from a different vendor, based on a preferred graphical user interface (GUI) or other application parameters.