Introducing Call Center solutions

"Choose your words carefully" is a good adage to live by At home, at work and everywhere in between, nothing affects us more than the words we use to communicate with others. Nuances in speech and verbiage can totally change how others perceive what we say.

The perception of certain words can even change through time. Younger generations use words that adults don't understand. Californians use unique language as do Southerners and New Englanders.

A great example of words whose meaning changes as time goes on is the expression "quantum leap." A quantum leap in physics is a term that is used to describe an infinitesimally small change in energy. Throughout time, for some unknown reason, this term became associated with huge paradigm shifts. Physicists have a blast with this term.

Another great example of a word that has changed through time is the word "telemarketing." In June 1982 we founded the first magazine in the industry named simply Telemarketing(R). The term telemarketing referred to the process of using the phone to take inbound calls and make outbound calls. However, sensationalistic journalists and broadcast media became fixated on producing negative story after negative story about outbound telemarketers and outbound telemarketing, and as time went on, the term became associated with outbound calls only, although since the 1960s, telemarketing centers handled inbound calls, outbound calls and customer service.

Despite their efforts to cast a dark shadow on the industry, the market served by Telemarketing(R) continued to boom and is still growing at an amazing rate. To keep up with the times and the broadened spectrum of the market, we appended our name to read Telemarketing(R) & Call Center Solutions(TM) some years ago. This name served its purpose and has served us well throughout the years. To be honest, though, this name is both redundant and a mouthful. In the interest of brevity, we will simplify our name, beginning with the July 1998 issue, to C@LL CENTER Solutions(TM), without changing our focus or our renowned editorial quality.

Rest assured that as a reader of this magazine, you will continue to find articles from cover to cover that will help you run your call center more efficiently. Whether your needs range from gaining information on service agencies for outsourcing or software to enable you to provide customer service, training, sales and support, or human resources, we will continue to be your most authoritative resource. As always, we will present articles on ACDs, PBXs, headsets, IVR, ergonomics, site selection, workforce management, data mining and every item you can imagine that will help you run your call center effectively and more productively.

We are very excited about all the changes we have been making lately. At the same time, as many of our faithful readers know, we still have our original Editorial Director Linda Driscoll, who has been editing this magazine since June of 1982! This is a pretty amazing feat - in a world where an editor's average tenure can be measured in mere months; we are working on decades. Moreover, our Publisher Nadji Tehrani was the original founder of this market and has helped shape the growth of it since its inception. We feel that the longevity of our founders is what separates us from other information sources in this market.

Our new name change, our new look, as well as our new logo all symbolize our enthusiasm for and dedication to this incredible industry - today and into the future. Our goal is to relaunch our publication to new heights the same way we launched our publication and this industry in 1982, which means we will continue to give you the best quality articles and news we can with the most attractive graphics and insightful columns. I would love to hear your comments - please send them to rtehrani@tmcnet.com.

GeoTel And AT&T Offer Call Centers Enhanced, NetworkBased Routing

The Intelligent Network (IN), sometimes referred to as the Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN), is something that is certainly not given enough press in industry publications. Just as PBXs now have open interfaces that can be controlled by computers such as Telephony Services Application Programming Interface (TAPI), the IN allows the telephone network to be controlled as if it were a local PBX.

The beauty of AIN technology is that you can take advantage of it either by owning equipment on your premise, leasing it on your premise or in the network. Many variations are available and those call centers looking for a low-cost way to get involved in the latest call center technology without a huge cash outlay should be very happy about this announcement.

There are at least five great reasons why CTI makes sense in the public network:

1) Sharing of equipment cost. If you can have your IVR and ACD functions take place in the public network cloud and just pay for the service, you wouldn't need to worry about installation and service of complicated equipment that quickly becomes obsolete. Although I am skeptical that a telephone company can price any new service other than long-distance in a competitive manner, AIN should provide call centers with less expensive solutions.

2) Intelligent call routing results in reduced telephone charges for your company. In a typical scenario without this service, you can allocate two similarly staffed but distributed call centers with an equal number of calls. If one of your centers becomes overloaded with calls, the additional callers will wait in queue until the next agent becomes available. Potentially, your second center could have idle agents while you pay per minute keeping the caller on hold in the other center. AIN allows your network call routing to be very dynamic and linked directly to realtime parameters you specify.

3) AIN solutions allow you to place your VRU in front of the ACD, which has a few benefits. When a call comes in, a customer number can be solicited in the network, and by the time the call reaches the agent, the database lookup has been done. This gives agents more time to absorb screen pops of customer information. Furthermore, placing the IVR system in the network positions it ahead of the ACD, freeing up valuable ports. Call centers that take hundreds or thousands of calls a day will certainly appreciate this. GeoTel has had instances of companies that installed network IVR finding that 60 percent of their callers terminate their calls in the IVR without ever having to go to the ACD. These calls are typically for account balance retrievals and the like. This translates into wonderful equipment and port savings. I am big fan of not losing the human element in a call center and AIN solutions allow you to keep your callers in touch with agents by allowing them to simply press a key to be transferred to the appropriate call queue and the next available agent.

4) Corporations with multiple call centers often have ACDs made by different companies, each of which uses various reporting methodologies. Since no two reports are the same, managers need to make assumptions about the reports they receive in order to normalize their results. Many times this can lead to inaccurate results. AIN allows the entire network of ACDs to have their reporting standardized in a single format and in a single report.

5) If you commonly use a service agency to outsource your call center needs you undoubtedly know that you can have a varying cost scale depending on the number of calls the service agency receives on your behalf. You may have a rate that increases after 10,000 calls have been received. AINbased solutions allow you to preprogram a cutoff in the call flow from one service agency to another as your parameters dictate.

AT&T realizes the opportunity to present call centers with superior AIN solutions and has teamed up with GeoTel in a three-year distribution agreement. AT&T Solutions' call center practice, Multimedia Call Center Solutions, recently introduced a new product called AT&T Resource Manager, which is built upon Intelligent CallRouter(R) (ICR) software from GeoTel.

With this agreement, AT&T will now deliver a robust, network-level solution that will address a company's business needs for customer segmentation, resource balancing and computer-telephony integration capabilities while taking full advantage of the ICR's enterprise-level call-event and customer-profile functionality. AT&T Resource Manager will replace AT&T's existing offering familiar to many of you as Call Center Transaction Manager (CCTM), more frequently known as TOPMS.

AT&T's new offering is comprised of the following elements:

AT&T Resource Manager Scalable from single- to multisite call center operations, Resource Manager is built upon the ICR, which provides network-level, enterprisewide CTI capabilities, call and data distribution, and consolidated management reporting. The ICR, which is based on Windows NT and SQL Server, collects information from its enterprise of attached peripherals, including multivendor networks, databases, ACDs, IVR systems and desktop applications.

AT&T Intelligent Call Process Service - This AT&T enhanced network service offering collects and routes information entered by individual callers.

The combination of AT&T Resource Manager and the Intelligent Call Processing service will enable companies to:

Segment calls based on real-time knowledge of agent skill and availability;

Handle more calls at their call centers without additional personnel;

Improve customer satisfaction, because calls are processed and routed more rapidly; and

Free resources to support more complex sales transactions.

In an age of outsourcing, it makes a lot of sense to let your carrier deal with the intricacies of complex CTI implementations. This agreement will allow you to do just that. For more information, please contact GeoTel at www.geotel.com or 978-275-5149 or visit AT&T at www.att.com/solutions.

CenterCore's Extremely Efficient Call Center Solutions

If Octapod sounds like a James Bond movie or something lurking in the depths of the ocean, you need to visit CenterCore's Web site at www.centercore.com. An Octapod is actually CenterCore's circular furniture unit that seats eight call center agents. CenterCore features circular furniture across their entire product line, from the Pod that seats six people to the Four-plus-1 that has four smaller seating areas and a large one that can be used for a supervisor.

By using a circular furniture style, you can decrease your call center space needs by up to 32 percent while increasing your agent's work area by up to 40 percent. As TMC is located in Fairfield County, Connecticut, we are painfully aware of how expensive real estate can be. It makes a lot of sense to use furniture that maximizes your space usage as well as each agent's work area.

CenterCore analyzed our office and their furniture did allow us to increase the number of people by at least 30 percent. CenterCore's Web site is pretty complete, consisting of their various pod configurations, a virtual call center and some animated graphics that demonstrate how efficient their circular furniture configurations are. For more information please visit www.centercore.com or call 800-220-5235.

Iwatsu's Reliable And Leading Edge Products

TMC's first phone system was an Omega system made by Iwatsu. Our Omega phone system served us well for years until we recently outgrew it. It performed flawlessly for about a decade and a half. Iwatsu prides themselves on legendary reliability, and if our experience is typical, they should be on your short list of PBXs or ACDs.

As is typical of all phone system vendors today, it is essential that CTI products differentiate themselves from their competitors. To that end, Iwatsu has assembled a leading-edge group of both applications and hardware.

Their ADIX ACD, which is compatible with their ADIX phone system, is a very flexible product that is also very customizable. ACD groups can consist of up to 150 agents and up to 3 supervisors. Up to 60 different groups can be specified. As is common, agents can be specified by priority, allowing the agent with the highest priority to receive calls first.

A hardware and software package called LINK is available to provide reporting functions as well. The LINK package you require depends on the number of agents you are interested in receiving reports on. Expect your cost to increase as your number of agents increases.

What PBX would be complete without a line of CTI products to properly integrate with your data network? Certainly not Iwatsu's, and to that end, they offer a broad range of CTI products. Iwatsu's IX-LANLINK is their CTI interface. A circuit board fits in the ADIX providing a link to the Novell server coupled with a Netware Loadable Module (NLM) that is controlled by a higher level scripting language. The system allows screen pops in a PIM, a contact manager or any program that adheres to industry standard open systems. Currently, Iwatsu has tested their product with Sixth Sense by AnswerSoft. For more information, please contact Iwatsu at 800-866-6342 or www.iwatsu.com.

IVR From Periphonics WwS In Style

Sometimes it's easy to get hyped up in the latest whiz-bang products that connect us to the Web or allow our agents to video conference. We do this without realizing that a somewhat simple solution can help pay itself back even more quickly in our call centers and even start saving money soon thereafter. Of course I am talking about IVR and one of the companies that has a string of long success stories in this field is Periphonics.

One of their more recent installations went into The Equitable Life Assurance Society, a New York City-based organization that provides life and annuity insurance to more than 1.8 million clients around the country. Using the Periphonics IVR allowed The Equitable to replace services that were once outsourced.

Through the new automated service, agents and policyholders can access general policy information, inquire about dividend and account values, request loans, transfer investment fund values and change investment allocation using their telephone. Special system features include fax-back for account statements and Caller Message Recording (CMR) for policyholder address changes.

The automated service is supported by two 48-line VPS systems. An additional 4-port VPS is used for application development and testing. The system handles about 15,000 calls a month with volumes to rise to over 75,000 as the system is introduced to the company's entire client base over the next year

The Equitable hopes to have the IVR handle up to 60 percent of all calls, freeing up agents to make more efficient use of their time by focusing on those callers with special needs. For more information on Periphonics' IVR products, please visit www.periphonics.com or call 516-468-9000.

Sincerely yours,

Rich Tehrani Group Publisher rtehrani @ tmcnet.com

Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation Jun 1998
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