Key Features To Look For | Computer Telephony

And so here are five key features that you might want to add to your call center through computer telephony. There are many others, and the list grows all the time. (That’s part of the wonder of this industry.) Again, these are the ones I see most frequently, that provide demonstrable benefit to the companies that implement them. You can add them by adding software that contains them, or as part of a general CTI overhaul. The benefits of each of them are always the same — faster and better customer service.

1. Simultaneous Screen Transfer. An agent is speaking to a client. The agent has the client’s database up on his screen. The agent needs to send the call to someone else for special treatment. Push a button on his screen, “Who would you like to send this call to?” He types the name, hits Enter. The call and the updated screen go to the specialist.

2. ANI/Caller ID Database Lookup. A call comes in. It carries the calling number. Your ACD grabs the calling number, passes it to your database over your LAN. As the phone rings on an agent’s desk, the agent’s screen pops with a screenful of information on the caller. What he bought last time. What his problems were. How they were resolved. What he tried to buy last time.

   Automatic phone lookup can shave 15 minutes off a typical call — the time the agent takes to ask the hapless caller such questions as “What’s your name, address, phone number, etc.?”

3. Predictive Dialing. When your agents are not answering incoming calls, they could be making outgoing calls. “Last month and the month before, Mr. Smith, you bought four dozen boxes of paperclips. May we send you another four dozen?”

4. Other Database Lookups. Many agents are linked to only one database. But customers always want more information than one database can provide. A price list. A list of your dealers. Other machines you’re compatible with. How to get the machine fixed. Layouts of the hotel rooms you’re renting.

5. Fax server. Your agent is answering a call for help. Explaining the solution is too difficult and time consuming. It’s easier to say, “May I fax you several pages of explanation?” Let your fax server send the pages while you make another phone call. Let your customer follow the jumping ball on the fax he just received.

How to Make it Work | Computer Telephony

There’s no way for me to tell you everything that can go wrong (or right) with a CTI install. There are so many things that can’t be anticipated by outsiders, which is another key reason why you want to have an internally directed plan, rather than handing everything over to a consultant or a systems integrator.

Many companies need help defining the scope of what CTI should do in a business context (not just from a technical point of view). That help can come in the form of a consultant or systems integrator, who typically work with a company to coordinate the entire plan of an installation, help select the products from the various layers, and if necessary create any custom linkages or applications to suit the situation.

Or, that help can come from one of the vendors themselves. This is more common than it used to be, as vendors have worked hard to orient themselves in a way that makes more sense to the end-user: end-to-end coverage of the entire CTI process, from the component layer through the applications and service. They often set up

So use this short list as a tickler, to spark some thoughts about the kinds of things that applies to your particular business circumstances. These aren’t the only things to watch for and pay attention to; they are just the ones I hear about most frequently.

• Single out the high-volume areas of your call center operations. For a telemarketer selling stereo equipment, the customer service and new orders division may field many calls, while the help desk may get a relatively low load. For a PC vendor, however, the help desk may be just as inundated, or more so, in the face of decreased sales.

  Before implementing any computer telephony technology, you should define the internal environment. The areas with high volume are going to have the highest payback when you implement open applications. Possibly, only one or two of your applications would really benefit from computer-assisted telephony.

  The telecom manager should also assess the nature of each department, to see if the switch-to-host application would enhance or besmirch the corporate image. (Yes, failure to do this could prove extremely embarrassing.)

  When calling the complaints division, for instance, the caller usually expects to air her grievances to a live agent. Her resentment and frustration may only build if greeted by a VRU unit.

• LANs, minis or mainframes — size up your host solution. For smaller call centers, a local area network can serve as the entire host side of the solution. Clearly, the last few years of application development have shown that a LAN-based or client/server-based application gives you more flexibility when it comes to importing telephone functions to the workstation than you’d get with a mainframe.

  Of course, if you have a mainframe or mini already in place, you’ll probably work with this existing hardware. You can often use these hosts as central servers, connected to workstations via local area networks, combining the flexibility of a LAN with the processing power of a mainframe.

• Pin down the vendor on probable savings and goals. Before you even think of contacting a vendor, you should evaluate the time it takes to handle a given call. Only then will you know what your projected savings might be.

  Bear in mind that most applications salespeople are just that — salespeople. Get past the vague promises and pin them down on how much will be saved. Demand detailed projections and scenarios. Ask to speak to a few happy customers — even among happy customers you may find some potential drawbacks of a particular system.

  If you’re fortunate enough to be running a regional monopoly — a utility or water works — you can call colleagues from other areas to discuss any open applications they may have implemented. If you run a mail order house, you may have less luck getting your competitors to divulge their secrets.

• Starting over or improving upon the existing order. Many applications can be integrated into an open CTI environment rather painlessly.

  For instance, you may have an application that calls up customer profile information by having the agent key in the customer’s social security number. Using ANI, the open application automatically summons the file to the agent’s screen simply by replacing the social security number with the caller’s home phone number.

  Many open applications, like predictive dialing engines, are more efficient or economical if purchased as turnkey applications. Sometimes, it pays to scrap the old order rather than undergo an ill-fitting adaptation.

• Test the waters. There are two ways to test computer telephony apps prior to full implementation. Dummy applications are available, simulating call traffic, your workforce, the equipment you plan to employ, your network services and your application code. You can also have a test region on the host, where you can run pilot tests while you’re making changes, perform load analysis.

  Many telecom managers prefer to phase in the new regime gradually through such separate testing areas. One way is to phase in with 10% or 20% of your customer base, then gradually broaden the application to include the entire base through the call center.

• Avoid glitz for its own sake. CTI apps perform some feats so stunning that even the most sober telecom center manager can get carried away with the fancy.

  Few would argue that the act of automatically shunting a caller’s vital data and his phone call to an agent’s terminal before that agent even picks up can save a lot of valuable seconds in WATS time and agent labor. All of these precious seconds are lost, however, when the agent picks up the phone and exclaims — “Hello Mr. Brooks, how may I help you?”

  If you call people by name before you give them a chance to introduce themselves, you’re going to waste 20 seconds of your time with ‘how did you know I was calling?’” The result is a transaction three times as long, and three times as expensive, than the manual solution.

• Don’t ignore agent considerations. Weeks before you implement the application, you should set up a training program — coordinated by the applications developer — to master the system.

  As with any introduction of automation, you may need fewer employees on the job — in this case, agents at their terminals. Perhaps your budget will permit you to divert customer service reps to a larger support group or complaint division. You may also be compelled to reduce the workforce, either through attrition or layoffs.

  Also consider the implementation of new evaluation criteria for those who remain at the call center. If your application incorporates a voice response unit, for example, the unit will handle most of the simple inquiries without any live agent intervention. Which means that your agents handle only trickier, more difficult calls. So you should expect that the duration of an average call fielded by an agent will increase.

• Reality checks. Three months after your application is in place, then three months after that, you should take a look at how much you are saving.

  Note that while it is relatively easy to calculate lower toll free usage or fewer agents needed to staff the phones, other benefits are more difficult to gauge — such as how many new policies have been taken out by insurance customers simply because the agent was able to transfer both their datafile and screen immediately from the life insurance division to the accident group.

  Often, you’ll find you must alter your long-distance contract, your agent scheduling, even the capacity of your computer plant to accommodate the changed call processing environment.

  From a bottom line standpoint, though, these changes are probably for the better. Many end users report a nine to 16 month payback on their investment.

What it’s Used For | Computer Telephony

Voice response systems are front-ends to the phone system that deliver recorded information when someone calls. Interactive voice response is two-way; it responds with information when a caller enters digits on the touch tone phone. And when that information comes from a host database, that’s CTI in action.

Customers can call at any hour of the day or night looking for account balances or order status information. The IVR engine queries a database in the background and reads the information to the caller. In this way it can be made dynamic — instead of just reading off a set of canned, pre-recorded announcements (“we’re closed right now, please call again tomorrow” or “to leave a message for our sales department, press one”) it pulls real time data out of corporate databases.

When this is translated to the Web, the kind of information you can make available to customers is expanded dramatically. Anything visual, from catalogs to product schematics, can be dropped onto a customer (or agent) desktop. Customers can help themselves when problems arise. They can learn about your products before they buy. And when it comes time to talk to an agent, they are better prepared; so the call is shorter, more effective, and more profitable. The “shopper” does his shopping without consuming your most valuable resources. But the buyer gets your full attention.

CTI is an information delivery tool. It won’t make a seller out of someone with no sales ability, but it will give someone who deals with customers the knowledge they need to address the needs of the customer.

For starters, a customer record is brought to the agent’s desktop at the same time as the customer’s voice arrives on the phone. The caller can be identified in many ways, including the information that travels with the toll free call, or through digits entered by the caller himself. When the agent has the customer information in front of him, the call doesn’t last as long. The customer doesn’t have to repeat himself every time the call is transferred. And the agent sees the entire history of the relationship with that customer. If the customer has a history of problems, the rep will know about it. And if the customer has a million-dollar lifetime value to the company, the rep will know that too.

Better still, if that caller is really a million dollar value, the CTI system will know it before the rep will, and can be set up to send the call directly to someone equipped with the experience to handle priority customers.

Another way CTI helps is with quality control. In call centers, calls are often monitored — recorded and archived so that the agent and his or her supervisor can listen to them later and assess performance.

That analysis process is made much more productive when it’s augmented by the data that passes through the agent’s screen during the call. A complete record of every transaction can be kept indefinitely, including every screen viewed by the agent. This “screen scrape” is an audit trail and a training tool.

All these things help a company cut operating costs by reducing (or stabilizing) support staff headcount. A company can be more productive with the same staff by handling more calls (or customers, or transactions, depending on which metric is most important to them).

And most important, it lets a smaller company look like a big one — without sacrificing the personal touch. Customers don’t care how big a company is, they care about what kind of response they get when they call or contact that company. If they get good service from Federal Express or L.L. Bean, they’re going to learn to expect it from every other business they deal with, no matter how large. CTI applications allow companies to appear more fully outfitted than they really are. This could mean putting systems in place to answer calls during off-hours when no agents are available, or having a website take orders at all hours. In any of these cases, the underlying technology that links the computer networks and the telecom systems enables the small company to decide for itself how to manage its customer relationships.

A call center that uses computer telephony knows who its customers are and why they are calling. It knows what they like, what they dislike, and how much they are worth to the company. On the other hand, without computer telephony every customer interaction is like a blind date — full of expectation, and possibly, frustration.

CTI lets a company respond faster to changing market conditions. But it must be implemented correctly: with clear and ongoing support from upper management and a clear-eyed view of the company’s goals for the technology.

For a company to put computer telephony into place requires that they determine, from end to end, exactly what they want a customer interaction to be like. Every contingency must be accounted for: phone calls; emails; fax requests; even Web hits. Far too many companies have had disappointing results because they didn’t put in the computer telephony they needed; they put in the technology they imagined. The right CTI is the mix of applications and core technologies that add value to the company’s existing operations, and allow it to do more: voice mail, unified messaging, advanced call routing, fax redirection, Internet telephony, call center apps, customer service software, sales force automation — whatever combination is most useful in their particular circumstances. The key is to figure out which pieces are right for which circumstances.

There are many ways to make it work. There are also many places to go for expert advice. Component vendors start the process, and often point the way to application partners whose product works with the core pieces. Telcos and other large service providers can also provide an umbrella under which integration between all the pieces are certified to work correctly. There are systems integrators, who specialize in matching the various pieces to the custom needs of a particular company, or vertical industry.

Whichever direction, the growing company needs upper management buy-in, direction on the goals of the project, and a clear-eyed view of the relationship between the company and its customers.

CT’s Changing Face | Computer Telephony

What began as a tentative effort by PBX vendors to open their switches has turned into a more solutions-based set of technologies.

Part of that is due to the widespread adoption of technical standards for interoperability between vendors and industries. At the basic level, there are standards for the operation of component hardware at the board level. There are also specs put out by individual vendors that enable applications to work correctly on particular board sets — SCSA and MVIP, for example, by companies like Dialogic and Natural Microsystems.

There are also standards, created largely by the computer software industry, for the creation of applications that work with operating systems. The key standards, TAPI and TSAPI, were offered up by Microsoft and Novell, respectively, as a way to push the switch vendors into compatibility so that developers could use those companies’ OS platforms as the basis for CTI applications.

Some of these apps focused on call control (the movement and tracking of calls around a phone network). Many others were apps 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, you need standards to assure that the integration goes smoothly (or works at all).

The Internet, of course, forced things to become even more standards-based. Building apps that combined call control and data manipulation became a lot easier with the adoption of Java, TCP/IP and ODBC as standards for data communication.

While most apps assume that there will be a dedicated piece of hardware for the pure telephony switching, it’s becoming clear that nearly all the add-on functions of value — the call center specific applications — can reside quite nicely in a “telephony server” hooked into the phone switch. More and more, that telephony server is a Windows NT box.

In addition to raw interoperability standards, there are more different kinds of links to consider. In any data/voice application, there are a lot of possible combinations. When I say “voice,” for example, I could be talking about a lot of different kinds of “calls” — traditional phone calls, for one, but also recorded calls in the form of messages, fax traffic, even the digits that callers enter when they pass through a voice response system.

As for data, this starts with the host information that resides in the back office databases. But it also includes the subset of host data that moves to the desktop (and back). And MIS data that passes through the corporate LAN, through intranets, over the Internet (including company Web traffic), and emails.

It used to be easy to isolate the two streams — to break it apart and clearly identify what was voice and what was data. Today, though, a corporate CTI system might also be dealing with strange combinations that include elements of both sides: things like voice-over-the-Internet, fax-over-the-Internet, browser-based transaction processing, “call me” buttons that appear on Web pages. Even speech recognition — all these combos are the result of standards that make it easier to push data and voice across each other’s pathways, and that make it increasingly irrelevant in what form a piece of information comes in. What’s more important is how that information is acted upon, and who has access to it.

CTI is now so broad that it is best defined as any technology that combines some form of real-time, person-to-company communication with a background of data that adds-value to that communication.

When I first wrote about this, in the first edition of this handbook, computer telephony was a developer’s technology. It was still being thought out, and built into the core telecom. It needed to be embedded in the switch, or the switch needed to be open to one or more of the “glue” products that sit in between the switch and the applications you wanted to run (“middleware”). Now, that integration is showing up more behind the scenes, as products (particularly applications) for call centers assume a greater degree of CTI readiness on the part of the switch and the center infrastructure as a whole.

The phenomenon of switch-to-host integration represents a total transformation of what you can do with a center. Thanks to this category of product, the most sophisticated call center features are no longer only available to the biggest, highest-volume centers. Small companies can now avail themselves of once prohibitively expensive technology, taking advantage of ANI, DNIS and other network-provided services to do a lot more with each call. This places them on a more level playing field with their most mammoth competitors.

Some of the most obvious benefits that computer telephony offers the call center:

• Have shorter calls. Cut hold time dramatically. Speed information to the agent’s desktop, then to the caller. Reduce your telecom usage costs (the second biggest expense in a call center).

• Have happier customers. Simply put, your reps solve more of their problems the first time out. And faster.

• Make more sales. You have more information about the caller. And, more important, you can bring the information that’s hiding in the corporate database to bear on that particular call exactly when it’s needed. You know what they like to buy, and what problems they’ve had in the past. You can appeal to them on their terms. They don’t get passed from agent to agent. And you can cross-sell or up-sell them while building their loyalty.

• Make better use of staff. Gain efficiencies through blending, and other ways of creating dynamic, responsive group configurations. Slow period for calls coming in? Move some of those reps to the outbound side. A dialer seamlessly starts sending them calls, a script pops on the screen, a whisper prompt in their ear tells them the name of the person they’re talking to. Presto — no more down time. Now, it’s not quite as simple as that, but you get the point; computer telephony puts more information — meaningful information, not just raw data — into the hands of the people who can use it most.

• Improve customer service. Put more information into the hands of the customers, with or without agent intervention. Customers can often serve themselves. This costs less and frees up company resources for more complex tasks.

• Connect with the Internet, or with company intranets, with all sorts of multimedia sales and service tools. All of the traditionally expensive tasks, like order processing, literature fulfillment, interactive faxing, are made easier through computer telephony.

Where Did CTI Come From? | Computer Telephony

Consider, for just a moment, the historical anomaly of telecom. Despite the conventional wisdom about the rise of the microprocessor and the computer revolution, the fact is that the national telephone network built incrementally by AT&T over the course of decades was a feat of computational and networking engineering unmatched in the 20th century.

And yet, when microprocessors begat PCs and PCs begat client/server networks, the companies that made the phone switches for average businesses remained curiously unmoved. Notwithstanding the fact that the business phone system is one complex piece of computational hardware, there was a great deal of resistance to making the phone act more like a computer.

The computer, though, was easy enough to make act like a phone. The computer industry was better at implementing the things that make disparate technologies talk to each other — important things like vendor-independent standards.

Computer telephony has its origins in the fact that if you wanted to add on to a typical office PBX, you had to buy the add-on from the original vendor, or from a third-party company that wrote to the proprietary spec promulgated by that PBX vendor.

Good applications were hard to find because for a software company writing these add-ons, the cost of developing for multiple switch vendors was prohibitively high. If you wanted a reporting system to complement your switch, you had only a few options: buy from the vendor or the vendor’s approved partner, or build it yourself. None of the options were particularly attractive.

Computer telephony was an attempt by the more perceptive members of both the PBX and computer industries to come to grips with the notion that they were more alike than different. Switches were really high-performance communications servers, after all. If the specs could be opened up, if standards could be developed, both sides would benefit from the flood of applications that would be developed.

Today’s switches come with CTI hooks built in, and a suite of applications from the vendor and its partners that take advantage of the connections.

Computer Telephony

Any company’s main focus should be its customers: fielding their calls, delivering service, getting orders out the door, making sales. The easier it is for a customer to get in touch with you, the better the relationship will be. Companies that do the best job of opening the door to customers, those that make it as easy as possible for customers to find out what they need to know, are the ones that have the best track records in the long term. Small and medium-sized companies that have adopted customer-focused attitudes have, over time, become giants of their industries.

Over the past few years there has been much discussion of the pros and cons of a new set of technologies called CTI, or computer/telephone integration (or just computer telephony — they all mean the same thing). Computer telephony was designed specifically to enable better contact between companies and their customers.

It is a loose but complicated amalgamation of interlocking technologies. It isn’t any one thing, not any one piece of hardware or software. It’s a way of combining the two streams of information — voice and data — through open, standards-based systems. It has uses in all areas of modern business, but its most dramatic possibility is in the call center. If implemented well, it can improve the way a company interacts with its customers, which of course, is the whole point behind the call center.

Computer telephony is a way of reaching beyond the traditional limitations of either of the component technologies (phones and computers) and bringing them together in a way that improves them both, by bringing more information to the person on the phone, and making the data behind the scenes much more flexible.

Think about it. The ability to integrate your computer and telecom system could bring the customer’s phone call along with his datafile right to the agent’s desktop, as the call comes in. This translates to massive savings in 800 line charges and agent labor.

In practice, implementing computer telephony has been a dicey proposition. Until very recently, it was largely custom, with each venturesome company taking the plunge using a systems integrator to cobble together all the necessary links, proprietary interfaces and special connections to applications. The benefits are easy to see, but sometimes difficult to achieve. Most call center CTI experiences begin with good intentions. Somehow, they don’t all end up that way. Imagine this scenario:

Your company is facing stiff competition and is growing rapidly, resulting in a certain amount of customer tension — people have a hard time getting you on the phone when things go wrong. It takes too long for sales reps to respond to good leads. Emails come in from customers and go...you’re not exactly sure where. Same thing for fax traffic. You don’t even have time to think about the traffic coming in from your website (and whether your site is connected to your call center).

You hear that there are technologies out there that promise relief. They promise to tear down the walls between you and your customers by bringing voice and data together. You swallow the bait. You hire a consultant and they present you with a plan. Screen pop, says the consultant. When a call comes in, shouldn’t the agent have all the information? Sounds good, you say. Single point of contact, he says. So when a customer calls, whoever handles it has all the relevant info. Makes sense, you say. Links between the switch and the host. Connections everywhere.

Of course it makes sense. And before you know it, you are in the middle of an implementation. The months drag on. The consultant puts a dollar figure on the technology, but once he’s gone from the scene you realize that his number didn’t include things like training, or coordinating what happens in the center with what goes on in other departments. Of course, the technology works, but do the people know how to work the technology?

A year later, you are staring at the prospect of starting all over, with a different set of technological priorities, a different consultant, but the same basic feeling in your gut that yes, you do need to get closer to your customer. You just need a better way to get from Point A to Point B — one that has clearly defined cost and benefit signposts along the way.

For most of the 1990s, installing CTI systems was an incredibly custom job that involved detailed on-site “fixing” to make sure that everything worked together. Luckily, things have changed a lot.

Computer telephony is simply defined as “adding computer intelligence to the phone call.” When you think of it that way, everything from simple screen pop to predictive dialing becomes, at one level or another, a computer telephony application. Depending on your call center’s level of sophistication, and the capabilities of the underlying telecom infrastructure, you may already be using core computer telephony technologies.