|
May
1999
The Uncentered Call
Center: Building Distributed Or Virtual Call Centers
With CTI And Internet
Telephony
BY TERRI GHIO, COSMOCOM
When you fantasize about the call center of your
dreams, what does it look like? Is it a physical
location or more of a concept? Do you imagine sufficient
parking -- or no need for parking at all? Do you see
rows and rows of headsets, all in simultaneous use -- or
a large map studded with headset-shaped push pins?
If your imagination runs more toward the latter
concept, your ideas are not as fantastic as you may
think. The call center of your dreams is a virtual call
center. If your dreams include the former concept, but
include several locations working in synchronicity, you
are envisioning a distributed call center. While there
are many similarities between the two, they are not the
same thing. Although, as neither is a single central
operation, they are both "uncentered"; that is, call
centers without "centers."
- A distributed call center uses network-based
routing to connect disparate locations. These multiple
call center sites are then managed as a single entity
with universal call transferability. This concept may
consist of many small centers or a few large centers,
according to a company's needs.
- A virtual call center uses location-independent
agents who telecommute from individual locations such
as their homes. In a virtual call center, agents can
work anywhere there is a Web-enabled PC and a headset,
and supervisors can monitor these agents' productivity
and efficiency just as well as agents in any other
call center.
Just as the physical set-up of both types of call
centers differs, so do the advantages. The issues that
might motivate you to consider a distributed call center
include:
- Load sharing. You can
redistribute calls from a busy call center to less
harried agents at a center that is having a slower day
-- and reverse the flow on the next day.
- Redundancy and back-up. If there
is a flood or a power failure, or a server goes down,
the calls intended for the affected center can be
transferred to another center without the need for
callers to be aware of the situation.
- Skills allocation. You can shift
calls from one location to another on the basis of
"skills required versus skills available." If a call
requiring a certain type of expert comes into a call
center where all those experts are busy (or there are
none), the call can be seamlessly transferred to an
available expert anywhere in the organization.
The advantages of a virtual call center can go steps
further than those listed above:
- Facility cost savings. People who
work from home do not require parking lots, restrooms
or lunchrooms; in fact, they do not need buildings at
all. As a result, a virtual call center eliminates the
need for maintenance staff for snow removal, cleaning,
landscaping, etc.
- Expansion of labor pool. There
are many people who would make great call center
agents; however, they only want to work part-time,
cannot travel to the office or want a more flexible
schedule. When companies can offer the work-at-home
option, they have a much deeper labor pool from which
to draw hires.
- Piecework compensation. People
who work from home need not be compensated in the same
way employees who travel to a central facility for X
number of hours per day. The law allows employers to
compensate these workers for piecework -- a certain
amount of money for each call they handle. In
addition, the benefits savings are enormous for
workers who are not full-time employees.
- Specialization. With a virtual
call center, companies can provide callers access to
experts of all types. By allowing everyone to be an
"agent," companies can assure their customers that
they will always have the information they need, when
they need it. Even if a particular "agent" is only
called into action once a week or once a month.
- Increased morale and motivation.
This is especially true for "technology" people who
might be specialized agents or flex-time workers and
who often require special attention within an
organization. With this approach, companies can meet
their needs without upsetting the equilibrium of the
entire call center.
In both cases, companies can eliminate the need for
overtime by moving the calls with the time zones. If all
inbound calls after 5:00 p.m. EST are handled by a
Midwest call center (or Midwest location-independent
agents), East Coast operators can go home on time. The
switch occurs again for the West Coast and, if a company
operates internationally, it can keep moving west until
it gets back to the eastern U.S. without ever having to
pay extra for a night shift.
Following is a more in-depth explanation:
Let's begin with the call center (the group of agents
together). The first difference is not immediately
apparent. There are computers and headphones. What you
may not notice right away is there are no phones. The
agent has only one appliance -- a networked PC. The
headphone is connected to the PC and all the information
the CSR requires is provided via "screen pops" or text
and graphic information blocks that pop up every time a
call comes in. These screen pops tell the agent who is
calling, what the call is about, what type of call it is
(PSTN, voice-over IP, chat or a message) and display
whatever historical information the center's database
has on the customer. This subtle change affords myriad
advantages to all types of call centers.
Staying inside the call center (regardless of what it
looks like), let's look at the servers. There is a
virtual ACD, housed in a PC, for automatic distribution
of calls. The ACD (automatic call distributor) is the
brains of the virtual call center. (In the interest of
brevity, I will be using this term to cover all IP-based
call centers for the remainder of this explanation.) The
ACD collects all incoming communications and, using its
inherent intelligence, places them into orderly queues
and routes them to the appropriate agent based on the
priorities, skills and other factors the call center
requires.
There are also Internet, message and telephone
connection servers. In a small virtual call center,
these can be housed in one PC. The architecture scales
well and in a larger configuration, there can be
separate servers, as shown in Figure 1. The number of
incoming communications determines the hardware
configuration. These servers collect the Internet
(voice-over IP and chat) calls, the telephony (PSTN)
calls and the messages (voice and e-mail) and route them
to the ACD for queuing and distribution.
In a traditional packet-switched telephony-based call
center, calls come in and are connected in a direct
connection between caller and agent. This is a
point-to-point connection and one agent can only have
one call at a time -- other callers hear busy signals or
are placed in a holding pattern. It is very difficult to
get any information from one of these calls to the
agent. To make the PSTN call "talk" to the call center's
computer system, a complex system of CTI
(computer-telephony integration) must be jerryrigged to
enable two inherently incompatible systems to
communicate.
Unlike some CTI systems which convert all incoming
calls to telephony calls (thus eliminating all the
advantages of the multimedia-rich Internet environment,
the opportunity for computer-to-computer collaboration
and the change for agent-led browsing), a true virtual
IP multimedia ACD converts all incoming PSTN calls to
Internet calls. This allows the agent to access the
screen pops, knowledge base, skills-based routing
options and location independence offered to
Internet-protocol (IP) calls, even when the incoming
communication is a telephony-based (PSTN) call.
Now let's consider the VPN (virtual private network).
If the ACD is the brains of the operation, the VPN is
the heart. It is there (even though in reality, no
"there" exists) that all the calls are circulated. When
a call comes into a virtual call center, whether it is
from a telephone caller, Internet caller with multimedia
capabilities (voice-over IP) or Internet caller using
the chat in real-time option, it passes through the
appropriate server (or gateway). The call enters the VPN
and passes through the ACD to be queued, routed and
distributed through the VPN to the appropriate agent,
who may be located in the next room, the next state or
the next time zone.
Now that we have covered the virtual call center's
operations from the inside, let's consider the operation
from a human perspective. If you were an agent in this
call center, your experience might look something like
this:
1) You log onto your computer, put on your headset
and immediately receive your first call. A screen pop
informs you that this is a PSTN call and gives you the
caller's name and the nature of the call. It has gleaned
this information from the customer's responses to IVR
prompts, combined with what the CRM (customer
relationship management) software has mined from the
call center's database.
2) You speak into your headset, addressing this
valuable repeat customer by name and offering assistance
with her specific concern.
3) While you are speaking with Caller A, a new screen
pop informs you that an Internet-based call is coming
in. You click on the call service button and type a
greeting.
4) The Internet-based caller (Caller B) receives your
personalized greeting, complete with your name and
photo, and expresses surprise that you know not only his
name but what is in his shopping cart and the item he
was looking at on the Web site when he called.
5) You complete your conversation with Caller A by
transferring her to a specialist in another city. You
are confident that the information you added to her
record during your conversation will arrive with the
transferred call and this valued customer will be given
the personalized treatment she requires, without her
having to repeat information to another agent.
6) You ask Caller B if he wants to escalate from chat
to voice-over IP. He does, and you click on the escalate
button on your screen. Now you are speaking to him on
your headset while viewing his information on your
screen.
7) You suggest that there is a better quality item
available for only a small price differential. He is
skeptical, but you click on the "push URL" button on
your screen and provide him with an explanation about
the picture and description he now sees on his screen.
8) Before closing the sale, you check your database
for this caller and find out that he is entitled, as a
first-time customer, to a special shipping rate on
orders that total only slightly more than the order he
has just placed. You mention this to him, while sending
him a picture of an accessory for the product he just
purchased. The total will now put him over the spending
mark for the discount.
9) He asks you to put this item in his shopping cart
and you push him a copy of his final invoice and
complete the transaction.
All the circuit switching, the queuing, the call
routing for skills and availability and the transfer to
the needed expert are transparent to the caller. It does
not matter if the caller is placing a PSTN call or an
Internet-based call; the amount of information about the
contact and the level of customer service remain equally
high.
As you can see, whether your fancy runs to connecting
several disparate call centers into one distributed IP
call center operation or connecting scattered individual
agents into a virtual call center, the advantages are
numerous and the technology is currently available to
make your call center dreams reality.
Terri Ghio, CosmoCom's vice president of sales,
is responsible for sales strategy and management of the
company's sales team. She has over 20 years of sales
experience and a successful track record for building
winning sales teams and selling high-end IT products.
Her expertise includes both brick and mortar and
electronic retailing and the transition from one to the
other, as well as selling on the Internet, merchandise
planning for the Internet, Web-based customer service,
transitioning CSRs from telephone to Internet sales and
customer support, maximizing agent productivity and
developing customer loyalty.
|
| A Network-Leveraged Future For
Call Center Services
BY JAMES SWINGER, LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
Network leveraging is one of today's most exciting
developments in the application of IN (information
network) technology, enhancing the solutions that
network service providers (NSPs) can offer to solve some
of the toughest problems faced by enterprise call
centers.
Network leveraging extends the virtual call center
concept by making the capability available from NSPs as
a service, eliminating the need for premises-based
call-by-call routers and reducing the need for other
premises-based systems such as IVRs. Network resources
are used for multiple enterprises and as needed to
facilitate dynamic call-by-call routing to the most
appropriate available call center agent. This is the
wave of the future in NSP call center services and it is
a wave that is already breaking over the enterprise
telecommunications operations market. International Data
Corporation (IDC) projects that the market for
network-leveraged call center services, which IDC refers
to as NSP-managed call center services, will grow from
$591 million in 1998 to $6.03 billion by 2001 in the
U.S. and Canada alone.
The network-leveraging phenomenon is an international
trend, important not just in North America, but also in
numerous international call center markets such as those
in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and
the Netherlands. This market segment has become very
active in the past year, as some NSPs abroad have
increased their offerings of network-leveraged services
to customers. Other NSPs are showing a great deal of
interest, as well.
Problems And Solutions
Although
premises-based virtual call center solutions are readily
available today, the added investment in the
sophisticated technology needed for a premises-based
virtual call center exceeds the budgets of all but the
largest enterprise call centers. As a result, call
processing at many enterprise call centers is still done
on a post-call-delivery basis; that is, routing of calls
among multiple sites is done primarily on-premises by
transfer after the call has already been completed from
the network to the enterprise. Because the call is
delivered to the premises before the most appropriate
available agent has been determined, premises-based
resources are used in making that determination.
With access to virtual call center technology through
a NSP, enterprises can reduce the need for intersite
trunks among multiple call center sites because calls
can be routed more accurately on the first try. This is
important in an industry where multiple-site call
centers are a growing trend.
In the network-leveraged future of call processing
for call centers, the steps of collecting information,
accessing relevant enterprise data, routing the call to
the most appropriate available agent, etc., will be done
dynamically, call-by-call, within the network before the
call reaches the enterprise. Caller-related data from
enterprise databases that is needed to route the call to
the most appropriate agent can be stored by the NSP in
the network. NSP intelligent peripheral resources can be
used as needed for IVR to collect caller-entered digits,
offsetting the need for IVR units on the call center
premises.
In addition, with network-based call-by-call routing,
the enterprise expense for actual service and connect
time is reduced. The network does not route the call to
the premises until after digits have been collected from
the caller, caller-related data has been accessed and
the most appropriate available agent has been selected.
If an agent is not immediately available, the call can
be queued in the network until one becomes available.
A New Revenue And Service
Opportunity
It is a new revenue and service
opportunity for NSPs, a way of enhancing their
intelligent network-based, advanced 800/888 service to
make it even more attractive to enterprises that use
call centers -- especially those enterprises that are
more geographically dispersed. It also makes call center
technology more affordable and less risky for a wider
range of companies. It can lower the on-premises
equipment investment threshold for call centers and
provides them with NSP technical support. Smaller call
centers, or small- or medium-sized companies, often have
difficulty in affording on-premises equipment. The
cost/benefit equation can be no less daunting for large
call centers that want to expand to smaller or
medium-sized locations. With a network-leveraged
solution, however, companies can simply subscribe to the
service from the NSP.
We envision this capability allowing call centers to
be expanded by making greater use of home-based agents,
or those based in small offices of three or four people.
This seems to be what call center managers are looking
for nowadays as a better way to manage the cost of the
overall service operation.
Technology And Market
The rise of
network leveraging is a story of both technology and
market. The virtual call center solutions prevalent
today are based overwhelmingly on on-premises equipment
that interacts with network-based services using a
NSP-specific, basic query-response protocol. At Lucent,
we are working with industry partners who are now
offering systems that work in the carrier network as
adjuncts to service control points (SCPs) through a
mediated access arrangement. The systems are designed to
support multiple enterprise customers from the same
platform, to use network rather than premises resources
in selecting and determining the availability of the
agent most suitable for each call and to designate to
the SCP the network routing number that will connect the
call to the agent.
NSPs and both network- and premises-systems suppliers
must partner in providing network-leveraged call center
services beyond what may have been traditional in the
past. This network-oriented solution requires a merger
of different technologies. Enterprise call centers will
be best served by a cooperative relationship among NSPs
and systems suppliers.
Changes set in motion by the Telecommunications Act
of 1996 are leading to greater competition in NSP
markets. This is already becoming the case in the local
exchange services market and might be the case soon in
the long-distance services market, especially for
in-region, inter-LATA long-distance calling, where
regional Bell operating companies are expected to have
regulatory permission to operate in the future.
Network leveraging is an exciting new solution for
the enterprise call center market, and more NSPs are
either offering or planning to offer this service. In
February 1999, for example, Sprint announced an
agreement that allows it to become the first U.S. NSP to
deploy the GeoTel Network Intelligent CallRouter as an
adjunct to the proprietary Sprint intelligent network to
offer a fully managed, network-based solution. At about
the same time, Genesys announced that Primeco had
selected the company to provide network-based, advanced
call center products for the Primeco network, including
the Interaction Router with network interface option. In
Europe, BT and France Telecom have also announced the
availability of network-based, call center solutions
linked with their own INs.
In this environment, NSPs are increasingly
recognizing a need to compete by offering value-added
services that enhance their ability to attract and
retain enterprise call center customers. Lucent's
response has been to offer a commercially available,
IN-based solution for NSPs that want to compete without
having to invest in their own proprietary development.
Provisioning
Provisioning is an
important factor. One reason call center managers build
their call-processing systems on-premises is that they
want to have direct control over them. A natural concern
among these managers is that in moving to the network,
they might lose control over important functions.
To address this concern, look for a vendor whose IN
platform and service packages provide the network with a
secure, PC-based graphic user interface that allows the
enterprise to specify those same functions to the
network elements providing the service. Call center
managers can specify the routing decision trees to be
created to their specifications from a pallet of
decision nodes and store those in the network for their
use. They can similarly specify their premises routing
scripts and skills-based, call-handling strategies. The
PC-based graphic interface allows for the provision of
plans to handle emergencies and other exceptional
conditions; if a call center loses power due to weather,
for example, that call center could be eliminated from
the routing plan and calls routed to other available
call centers.
These advantages are achieved through IN
capabilities. Rather than being limited by a fixed set
of options, as call center managers might fear, they
will have the same level of control -- if not more -- in
using the network elements.
Market Drivers
Many forces are
driving the rise of network-leveraged call center
services. Call centers are growing in strategic
importance to all enterprises, and network-leveraged
services especially match the competitive needs of
small- and medium-sized companies. They will appeal also
to enterprises affected by changes such as corporate
restructuring, mergers or acquisitions. If companies are
merging, for example, network leveraging will provide an
opportunity to blend together diverse call centers into
a single virtual call center with a smooth transition
and a reduction in overall costs.
Network leveraging meshes well with the current trend
toward reengineering enterprise telecommunications
operations based on integration of voice and data
communications, and with the need to accommodate the
complexity of managing voice and data integration amidst
the uncertainties of technological evolution. Network
leveraging is evolving as well, with such future
developments as support for Internet protocol (IP)
telephony, voice-over-IP and IP client sessions, as well
as fax and e-mail. With all these media, call centers
still have the same problem of routing to the most
appropriate agent. They need a comprehensive set of
strategies to handle all of the media efficiently and
effectively.
Perhaps most important, now and in the future,
network-leveraged call center services can enhance the
ability of enterprises to focus resources on core
business rather than on infrastructure, and to build
improved customer relationships.
James Swinger is product marketing manager for
Intelligent Network (IN) products at Lucent
Technologies' Communications Software
Group. |
