It's a Whole New Call Game

CTI transforms the customer and the call center.

Just a few months ago, computer-telephony integration (CTI) seemed like Jetson-esque technology that only a company like Spacely Sprockets could master. But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. The Internet has integrated society's mainstream successfully into the wireless-data stream. As the public becomes digitally comfy, CTI has become the trademark for a "customer transforming industry."

"I see CTI as just a powerhouse," said Bob Marino, Convergys president of the information-management group. "It's the most efficient way to exchange information 1-on-1 with the customer and creating real opportunities on multiple fronts."

Untangling the Web of Applications
CTI offers a wide range of applications through a single public network using a variety of open telephony technology. Service providers and ISPs can combine services to offer voice mail, call-center help, private networking, automated attendants, fax-on-demand, conferencing, real-time billing updates, messaging and other services from a single CT server platform.

The same infrastructure allows customer interaction through new wireless-Web applications.

On the operational side, a customer-contact center uses CTI to give CSRs instant access to customer databases while simultaneously integrating incoming and outgoing Internet connections, e-mail, faxes and telephone calls.

Many industry leaders say CTI has gone from wishful thinking to a core business in a short time.

"Our business is CT," said Keith Paglusch, Sprint PCS senior vice president of operations. "Just look at the handsets we're using, and they're very much fully integrated.

"Customers are just now discovering the power of the new technology," Paglusch said.

He believes as CTI allows consumers to have remote laptop connections, on-demand stock quotes, sports scores, weather, airline schedules and banking from a single handset, call centers must be prepared to deal with questions on many more topics.

CSRs also must be able to deal with inquiries coming from multiple sources — voice or data — with a quick response time.

"We really began working on this in 1995," said Carl Strathmeyer, director of strategic marketing for the CT Consulting Services Division of Dialogic, an Intel company. "It really has stayed a niche rocket-science kind of thing until now, because there weren't a lot of products to support it.

"Now, we have 2,500 sites that have our CT systems installed," he said. "We approached it from a building-block point of view."

Others came in from the application level and worked their way back to link up with the technology.

Strathmeyer said the equipment platforms used for call centers have gotten much more manageable thanks to CTI.

"It's getting easier," he said. "We turned our attention from CT research and development to focus on IP telephony and public networking. We've been broadening it to where it doesn't matter to the system what type of call comes in. It only asks 'Who's this message from, and how should I sequence them?'"

Strathmeyer said the acceptance of CTI has hinged on making it appealing to a different audience.

"The trick was we learned to make CTI look comfortable to the programming community," he said. "We finally made the telephony stuff look like other areas of data processing. So now we're getting mainstream data-processing companies as customers."

The Personal Touch
"Mobile phones are much more personal than desktops and have become a natural extension of mobile commerce," said Peter van Es, Logica executive vice president. "The generations of call centers and in-bound calls have changed the standard of customer satisfaction," he said. "At the same time, carriers need to lower expenses because of increased competition. By referring callers to a Web site, it saves money and increases customer satisfaction.

"Artificial-intelligence and voice-recognition programs can be used to reduce the number of call-center employees, but also help those on staff to more effectively answer the phones, answer customer queries and improve service," he said.

Van Es said that CTI also improves profitability by providing CSRs with caller ID linked to account details. This translates into a potential marketing bonanza, allowing calls from qualified customers to be routed to a sales personwho instantly knows what they might be interested in purchasing.

Mobile commerce will continue to increase at a rapid pace thanks in part to growing industry acceptance of WAP. WAP includes a specification for authentication and encryption — just like secure servers on the Web — which allow for transactions in the mobile environment.

But it will take a while for consumers to build confidence in the security and reliability of their handsets, just as with the Web. Those service providers who grasp the full capabilities of CTI in their customer-contact centers the quickest, stand to profit the most.

Billing questions to CSRs could include not just calls made, but purchases made. Although current CTI applications are task-oriented, future uses could be entertainment-oriented.

As bandwidth increases, users will be able to download music, books or video to a handset device. This brings a whole new set of customer-service challenges to be met by even the most versatile CSRs.

Since all of this already has happened in the IP environment, CTI is laying the groundwork for the transformation of the wireless world.

"We've quickly gone from talking about it to actually doing it," Marino said. "In the past, we had computers, and we had telephones. Now there's a real effort to upgrade existing systems to make them real-time capable.

"CTI billing helps companies be more discriminating in how they handle information and retain client revenue."

Paglusch said the consumer rush to the wireless Web will continue.

"We keep adding more content providers," he said. "Right now, we're the only carrier that has it nationwide. But my competition is trialing it, too."

Strathmeyer said there's an easy way to tell that CTI is coming of age.

"You can tell by the consolidation that's going on," he said. "In the last year, a lot of computer companies have come together with telecoms, so now you know it's poised to hit the big time.

"We've come a long ways in five years."

Thomas (thomcomm@mediaone.net) is a freelance writer.