CTI: High-tech curiosity or everyday business tool?

Telemarketing & Call Center Solutions, Dec 1995 by Tehrani, Richard

With all the talk about standards in the CTI industry, you might start to wonder what all the noise is about. Why, indeed, should CTI standards attract so much interest? To answer this question, let's start by looking at a simple example of what standards can do for an industry. Imagine, if you will, that you are about to relocate. Now, moving is difficult in the best of circumstances, but -- for the purposes of our example -- let's say we have an extra problem. Let's say that every electric utility in the country observes it own standards for delivering power.

You could find, upon moving into a new house, that all of your appliances are now useless. Your television, your videotape recorder, your microwave -- everything requiring electricity -- would have to be replaced. Ridiculous? You bet. But such problems are not uncommon in call centers. For example, if you ever changed your PBX manufacturer or even upgraded an existing model, you may have found that your telephones were incompatible with the new system. Of course, in some automatic call distribution or predictive dialer environments, there are no phones to upgrade. However, in many cases, there are advanced phones on each agent's desk. Replacing such phones, at a cost of several hundred dollars per phone, quickly becomes an expensive proposition in a large call center, which can easily have 1,000 or more agents.

Clearly, the lack of standards can be a daunting prospect if your business relies on technology. On the other hand, effective standards can help free you of the complications and limitations characteristic of proprietary technologies. Moreover, effective standards can help you to take technology for granted; that in is, when standards are in effect, you can enjoy the benefits of a technology while being insulated from the technology's inherent complexities.

The CTI industry, by introducing standards, is emulating other industries that are characterized by effective standards. For a dramatic example of how an industry benefited from an effective standard, we can look at how the world of computing changed with the introduction of the IBM PC.

When the IBM PC was first brought to the market, many other major computer manufacturers were offering their own PCs. It may be hard to remember now, but these other PCs were often incompatible with the IBM model. What happened to these other computers? Well, the market forces prevailing at the time dictated that the IBM PC would be the standard, and the other manufacturers quickly realized that they would have to "clone" the IBM architecture if they wanted to be successful. This was the start of the IBM clone industry.

Before the IBM PC became the standard, a floppy disk from your PC might not have worked in someone else's PC. Such compatibility problems disappeared, however, when PCs began to adhere to a common standard. In fact, the fantastic growth of the computer industry in the last 15 years is largely attributable to widespread acceptance of a common standard.

This scenario -- which shows proprietary schemes being superseded by standards, leading to explosive growth -- is already familiar in the computer industry. Now, however, it is being played out in the CTI industry. Two key standards are the telephony services application programming interface (or TSAPI, introduced by Novell and AT&T) and the telephony application programming interface (or TAPI, introduced by Microsoft and Intel). TSAPI and TAPI enable a computer program to work with not just any particular telephone system, but with many telephone systems -- without the need for custom programming.

We are already familiar with this kind of interoperability from our experience with computers. For example, we take it for granted that we can keep using our word processing program even if we buy a new printer. That is, our word processing program needn't care about what printer we are using. Similarly, our call center application needn't care about what telephone system we are using -- provided we can take advantage of a specification such as TSAPI or TAPI.

Standards-based CTI allows customers greater flexibility in choosing a PBX vendor. If vendor B does not meet your expectations, you can easily remove the product provided by vendor and replace it with one provided by vendor C. Virtually no changes are needed in your software. No retraining. The main thing is that you are no longer locked in to any one vendor's products]

In addition, TSAPI and TAPI specifications allow you to have every telephone feature the most advanced hand set had, and more. Special features are actually easier to use in a CTI system because the interface is more intuitive. With telephones, features must be accessed via the telephone keypad or whatever extra buttons are provided. With CTI, features can be accessed via the PC's graphical user interface, which means communication with the PBX can be accomplished by clicking on icons -- an easier and more natural way of working.

Picture this scenario: A travel agent is taking a reservation in a large call center. As the agent takes the reservation, the client asks if the agent has ever been to a specific hotel in Hawaii. The agent says, "Well, I haven't, but we have another agent who has just come back from that same island in Hawaii, and she may know about that specific hotel." At this point, the agent would like to arrange a conference call. However, with most PBXs, making a conference call happen isn't always easy.