Nabnasset paves the way

Separation is bad. Integration is good. No one knows how many telcos have this mantra posted above the doorways to their engineering departments.

However, as we near the close of the decade that ushered in competition, it stands as one of the key philosophic lessons of the new age.

One of the first and most significant arenas in which that integration is occurring is the telco call center. Call centers traditionally have been a bastion of independent databases that have been difficult to access and manage seamlessly, and they have helped to create an impersonal customer service structure at many telcos.

However, some telcos are starting to recognize that improving their competitiveness depends on their ability to carry out massive business re-engineering projects that will make them more market friendly. For many, these projects start at the call centers, the closest point of personal interface between carriers and their customers.

As always, such overhauls create a huge opportunity for the vendor community, and while all the usual suspects--inlcuding Lucent Technologies and Northern Telecom--offer enhanced call center solutions, many smaller software developers also are lining up to assist carriers.

Nabnasset Corp., based in Acton, Mass., falls into the latter group. The company, which has been in the process of developing computer/telephony integration solutions for the last seven years, promotes the idea of "virtual call centers," in which distributed call centers operate on a wide area network basis, using client-server architectures for fast access to dense and informative customer profiles as customers are linked with customer service representatives.

Customers also can be seamlessly routed between different call centers so that carriers can make the most of information and resources that might be dispersed among call centers.

At the core of the virtual call center philosophy is Nabnasset's Voice Enhanced Services Platform (VESP). "VESP acts as a communications traffic cop in the middle of the call center environment," said Stan Vestal, vice president of engineering at Nabnasset.

VESP manages call center workflow by integrating a customer call and the accompanying customer profile into a VESP software module, which handles query and routing commands to various call center databases, such as automatic call distributors, voice response units and other elements (see figure).

The VESP module passes the customer call through each database, documenting any interaction with these databases. This lessens the chance that a customer call will be accidentally cut off or that customers will hang up while waiting for connections to be completed, said Vestal. Without VESP, customer calls would be transferred back and forth between databases without central call control.

"Some call centers might deal with 100,000 calls per day. Reliability is important. Call center software must support cradle-to-grave call tracking and collect information throughout the call to contribute to the customer profile," said Vestal.

Nabnasset recently released version 3.0 of VESP, but a few telcos have been aware of the solution for some time. Pacific Bell Information Systems was Nabnasset's first major telco customer and Frontier Telecommunications deployed VESP following it's historic reorganization a couple of years ago. Also, a European telco soon will deploy the solution. New carriers can deploy the software to have well integrated call centers from the start. Pacific Bell Mobile Services is one such VESP believer.

VESP can be purchased directly from Nabnasset and used on its own, but the solution also works as a significant piece of some larger call center offerings, such as Lucent's Definity call center and a similar IBM solution. In addition, the system can interface with existing predictive dialers and other call center equipment, said Vestal.

Significantly, VESP also is integrated with the Common Object Request Broker Architecture toolkit to support creation of new applications and databases, meaning that call center database structures can be changed easily.

"Bashing the phone companies about their help desks is too easy at this point," said Vestal. "With the right middleware, carriers can position themselves with an integrated call center that better helps their customers."

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