Call centres find a new voice: Network-based call centres will change radically the way SMEs and corporates conduct their business — but are they an opportunity or threat for telcos? - Industry & Market Update

Telecommunications International, March, 2002 by Graham Wilde

Imagine you are the call centre manager for a large organisation. You have a number of call centres - huge rooms with vast quantities of agents, all housed in little cubicles with their computer screens and their telephone lines.

You manage an enormous cost centre for your organisation. Every call centre investment is a major capital outlay, which, in today's economic climate, is hard to get approved. On top of that, there is the difficulty of getting the financial controllers to understand the TIA (three letter acronym) jargon of CPE, PBX, ACD, IVR (see sidebar) plus the need for call recording equipment and systems integration.

Call volumes are increasing, call types are changing, and you need to record more calls because quality guidelines have been tightened up; you also need to improve disaster recovery because last autumn's floods prevented 50 per cent of your agents getting to their cubicles. Yet obtaining approval for increased capital spend will be virtually impossible.

Now imagine if someone walked into your office one day and said: "You do realise you can do all you want without any capital outlay, don't you?"

No, you would not be dreaming - this offer is real.

Network-based call centres

A new set of companies have emerged who are offering a radical solution to the call centre problem - network-based call centres.

This is not centrex, which just housed all the traditional call centre technology within the network and offered no real cost saving to the user. This is an IN (intelligent network) solution. Instead of using traditional PBX, ACD and IVR technology, the new network-based call centre solutions run on computers which offer all of the standard call centre functionality - and more and which are securely housed in the network, instead of on the customer's premises.

The concepts of IN and the programming languages of the internet, notably XML (extensible mark-up language) and voice XML, are the tools which hove enabled these developments - and which will be behind a real revolution in the voice telephony market.

Who are the players? The leading developers of network-based call centre solutions in the UK are New Voice Media, Opal Telecom, Callagenix and Consorte, The technology developed by New Voice Media allows customers to route calls according to their requirements and also modify call routing in real time, through New Voice Media's secure web site. In addition to all the savings and advantages offered by standard ACD, IVR and CTI, New Voice Media's technology can record every single call made or received.

CLI (caller line identification) information can also be used to create 'screen pops' which automatically inform the called party about the caller. "It's a numbers game," explains Richard Pickering, New Voice Media's managing director. "In a call centre where average call duration is three minutes, a screen pop saves 30 seconds. This could make it possible for the call centre operator to reduce from 100 agents to 80 - it results in savings".

The other benefit of networked call centres a la New Voice Media is the possibility of using home workers. Previously impractical because of the inability to record calls and to transmit CTI information to agents, this possibility brings a whole new opportunity to major call centre operators.

SMEs and corporates

One of the major problems in managing traditional call centres is scalability. Do you plan for the average busy time across the year, or for your most busy time (say, the week before Christmas)? How do you cope with the effect of one-off campaigns and sudden peaks in requirement? Even within a day, there are peak times.

Because of travel time to call centres, most agents are on minimum six-hour shifts, which offers management little flexibility to cope even with predictable peaks and troughs in traffic. However, with the option of teleworking, agents could do shifts as short as one hour, or elect to work from home for a certain proportion of time. The information they receive on screen, and the ability to record calls and monitor performance is exactly the same, regardless of location.

It also opens the door for smaller companies to take advantage of the facilities of call centres - or even just the features of a PBX. The internet has opened new opportunities for entrepreneurs, removing the barriers to setting up businesses and creating a new breed of company which has used the internet as the basis of its business communication.

Businesses no longer need a shop if they can operate via mail order and have a web site which is always open and accessible from anywhere in the world. Goods can be sent out directly from a warehouse, from the manufacturer, or from home. Professional services businesses no longer need offices, since staff can work from home and communicate by e-mail or telephone. This means that staff can be located anywhere and still operate effectively as a team.

However, voice communications is still vital in customer relationships. If every single person in the company has a different phone number, it can be hard to maintain the unified and professional corporate image presented by the web site. Traditional telephony offers no way for small businesses to have one national number and divert calls to the appropriate member of staff.