But with the growth of the World Wide Web, there is new movement to add support for Internet access within the traditional call center. Analysts at Patricia Seybold Group are among industry observers who believe call-center integration with the web is "one of the most important pending changes of the web itself."

Driving the move is the exploding use of e-mail. Forrester Research Inc., for example, estimates the number of people using e-mail will increase from 15 percent to 50 percent by 2001, while the number of e-mail messages will grow almost six times to 12 billion a year. The Electronic Messaging Association (EMA) thinks the figure will be even higher. By 2000, EMA believes, 108 million people will use e-mail to send more than 7 trillion messages a year. For many workers, that will work out to about 250 e-messages a day.

Integrated Centers

All that suggests the importance of integrated customer response centers that handle messages arriving in both voice-call and e-mail formats. Ability to support 24-hour-a-day operations without the requirement for full-time staffing is one advantage of integrated e-mail. Reduced call volume is another advantage.

But Internet protocol (IP) access to customer care centers also expands a call center's audience, allowing it to serve international customers and accounts. Customers who might not think of calling a center when paying an international phone charge often will not hesitate to contact an IP center. IP also changes the character of a website. Whereas the site once was an information and document source, it now becomes a transaction vehicle.

Web access also becomes a way to enhance customer service and interaction without increasing call volume. That's because a properly designed website can give customers the ability to "self-provision" service levels for their accounts, for example. For an Internet service provider (ISP), that may mean the ability to change billing plans, check account status, add e-mail aliases or create new accounts.

With a web-enabled contact capability, a customer wanting to add a new e-mail alias might have called the call center 800 number, for example, requiring rekeying of information, checking of credit card authorization or choice of a different e-mail address by call center personnel. With the web, those transactions can be automated.

At some point, even the term "call center" may require revision. Entirely new types of "Internet support centers" will arise to support huge new volumes of messages based on e-mail, rather than dial-up phone access.

"In addition to accessing centers using a phone, customers will have the ability to reach firms from the Internet," says Stephen Kowarsky, executive vice president with CosmoCom Inc. (www.cosmocom.com), a software applications company. And that raises issues not traditionally found in today's call centers.

Indeed, the integration of Internet support for call centers has huge impact beyond the front-end move to personal computer (PC) and web-based access. "On the back end, you have the movement from centralized to decentralized call centers," Kowarsky argues. "With IP, you have the ability to create unified, yet distributed call centers where hundreds of people are working at home."

The other big change is the move from "ACD (automatic call distribution) to automatic communications object distributor (ACOD) architectures," Kowarsky says. What he means is that, in an IP environment, all messages are objects. That means they can be stored, forwarded and answered in a totally distributed fashion, "whether you're dealing with a call, an e-mail or an alarm," Kowarsky says. "You can even treat callbacks as an object."

In some cases, the practical result is that call center agents may not even require access to a conventional ACD, or telephone, to handle inbound voice calls, e-mails or other types of messages.

IP/CTI

Indeed, all of the traditional reasons companies adopt computer-telephony integration (CTI) for their call centers also are drivers for web-based interfaces. And improved customer support continues to rank at the very top of reasons for using technology in call centers, followed by operational cost savings, according to research by International Data Corp.

One advantage of Internet-enabled contact centers is the simple fact that customers enter their own information before, or during, a transaction, argue analysts at Sterling Information Group. That increases the likelihood that the information upon which the transaction is based is accurate.

Cost savings are a definite attraction. "On average, it costs $6 to $7 to handle a call center transaction," argues Ernst & Young LLP Manager Terry Boyle. "An IVR transaction costs $1 to $1.50, while on the web, the transaction costs less than 5 cents."

Enterprises have three major options for adding IP interaction to existing call centers: Internet Relay Chat (IRC, or "chat"), "voice around the net" and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

IRC is the technology widely used to support chat rooms, but it also can be used in a "click to chat with agent" application. The downside is lack of live voice communications, but an agent can always type in a "call me at this 800 number" reply if live voice support is required. The upside is that IRC is cheap to implement.

Likewise, "call me back" buttons allow a customer to request a call back on a separate phone line. The downside, of course, are the outbound long distance charges incurred by the call center.

VoIP ultimately offers the highest form of customer ease of use, since voice circuits are activated from within the browser context.

Observers frequently point out that VoIP is bandwidth-efficient. This is especially true in a call center context.

A standard dial-up line, for example, consumes 64 kilobits per second (kbps) worth of bandwidth, while a T1 circuit supports 24 phone circuits. But using the H.323 protocol, widely used for VoIP client software, a voice stream is reduced to 10kbps. That means a single 56kbps frame relay circuit can handle up to four simultaneous calls, while a single 1.5 megabits per second (mbps) digital subscriber line (DSL) connection could support as many as 150 calls.

Informal Centers

Going forward, there also may be an extension of technology traditionally used in a formal call center context in the "subject-matter expert," "professional knowledge worker" and "small office/home office" (SOHO) arenas. These personnel, not considered to be call center agents, nevertheless spend quite a bit of time on the phone answering questions. In fact, argue analysts at the Pelorus Group, though only 10 percent of companies might say they run call centers, about 60 percent might say they do telesales and provide customer support and service over the phone.

Such "casual call centers" typically do not have access to ACDs, predictive dialing, monitoring and reporting tools that normally are part of the CTI effort. Instead, casual call center functions typically are provided using standard key system or private branch exchange (PBX) systems or Centrex.

Price has been a major reason such informal centers have not adopted CTI faster, Pelorus analysts say. Compounding the problem is the lack of understanding many businesses appear to have about informal call center functions they already provide. As well, the payback is hard to quantify. Many of the benefits, including "happier customers," are hard to state in "hard-dollar" terms.

And CTI requires system integration work that smaller firms cannot stomach. Still, the Pelorus Group estimates that up to 38.5 percent of CTI revenues will come from the informal call center segment, while 9.5 percent comes from the SOHO market segment by 2001.

IP technology may speed introduction by obviating the need for complex integration. "The pure IP call center is the architecture of the future," Kowarsky says. What he means is that, as more traffic begins to originate and move through the network in IP format, it should be easy to operate informal or formal call centers "with no circuit switch and no phones," he says.

"At the same time, IP allows us to move beyond computer-telephony integration to a pure computer-based communications system that doesn't require any of the CTI implementation, and the difficulties that presents," Kowarsky says.

Whether CTI is superseded or simplified, widespread use of IP technology in traditional call centers is a big trend.