Web-Enabled Call Centers
The Customer Always Clicks Twice
Conventional call centers need to extend personal service to the website. "Dot com" companies need to build and staff call centers, to manage communications stimulated by e-commerce. In response, a new category of call center products is emerging: systems that mix telephony, VoIP, text chat, and other Web technologies; enabling buyers to provide fluent service across multiple media.Quite recently, CosmoCom (Hauppauge, NY – 631-851-0100, www.cosmocom.com) announced the latest incarnation of its product, CosmoCall Universe. CosmoCall is software that works like an ACD for a purely packet-based environment. Agents can be located anywhere because to the server, an agent is just an IP address, not a physical line or phone extension. The newest version features a multi-server architecture that scales for up to 8,000 agents, 50,000 simultaneous calls or messages, and can handle 200 incoming calls per second.
Calls originating from the Internet on the customer side (using click-to-chate or click-to-talk buttons) are routed through the CosmoCall ACD server (which applies skills-based routing) and delivered to an agent’s PC, which “rings” like a phone would. CosmoCall also provides an IVR interface for POTS callers, and includes a Dialogic-based gateway.
CosmoCall Universe is priced identically to earlier versions: $40,000 for licensing the software for ten concurrent agents, in an entry-level configuration.
This is an excerpt from the article 'Web-Enabled Call Centers' that appears in the November 1999 issue of Computer Telephony Magazine.