Desktop call control--a new tool for professional office workers

Telemarketing & Call Center Solutions, Mar 1997 by Bob Olsen

As necessity drives invention, the earliest adopters of computer-telephony (CT) applications were the organizations who needed them most, call centers. By deploying automated call distributors (ACDs) and "screen pop" applications, call centers have reaped significant benefits in the areas of increased customer responsiveness, increased sales, and enhanced worker efficiency.

Today, however, the deployment of CT applications is poised to extend well beyond the isolated environment of the call center agent. CT is about to have a new species of user - the professional office worker.

In fact, every professional office worker is now a prime target for computer-telephony technology. That's because every office environment, big or small, relies heavily upon two business tools, the telephone and the personal computer. But of greater importance to branch offices and small businesses, a new generation of computer-telephony PBXs is now available as cost-effective PC servers that simply attach to their existing LAN.

According to International Data Corporation, there are now approximately 6.3 million small businesses in the U.S. About one in seven currently has a network of PCs interconnected by a LAN. It is estimated that about half are in service-oriented industries such as brokerages, finance, insurance, real estate, health care, legal, travel, etc., that employ office professionals engaged in sales, service, and administrative activities that require them to spend a considerable amount of time at their desks on the phone.

The productivity of office professionals is determined by their ability to manage their dynamic work environment where frequent interruptions and multitasking are the norm. Unfortunately, a major source of diminished personal productivity comes from not being able to properly manage one's own desktop telephone.

Leveling The Playing Field

In many organizations, executives are able to safeguard their personal productivity by arming themselves with trained secretaries and executive assistants who screen calls to ensure that only the most crucial get through. But what about the rest of the professional office staff? Most are deprived such lavish resources to manage their telephones.

Fortunately, needed assistance is coming from new a category of CT application called "Desktop Call Control."

Standards Enabled

Desktop call control is enabled by new computer-telephony APIs such as TSAPI and TAPI V2.0 that work in a client/server relationship across LANs. These new APIs interconnect desktop clients to computer-telephony PBX servers, enabling organizations to significantly improve their corporate image and their call-handling functionality.

Functionality Roundup

While the specific offerings of desktop call control applications vary vendor to vendor, a common set of features and capabilities has recently emerged in the marketplace. A sampling of these features and benefits includes: GUI-based Telephone Controls: A graphically-rich, Windows interface to the desktop phone provides users with intuitive telephone control and status information that eliminates the need for users to learn and use complex telephone function key and keypad codes. Simple point-and-click operations combined with optional "Are you sure?" error messages ensure that even the novice user can successfully, for example, transfer an incoming call or construct a multiparty conference call.

Caller-ID Display: Using CallerID, users are made aware of the identity of an incoming caller before picking up the phone. This enables users, during busy periods, to avoid low-priority distractions by determining which calls need to be answered and which ones can be forwarded to voice mail.

Screen Popping of Personal Information Managers: By leveraging the power of caller-ID, users are given a "screen pop" of a database record while the phone is still ringing. This gives employees instantaneous access to all desktop records containing caller identity, information and history upon receiving the call. These "screen pops" work to ensure that employees are adequately prepared to answer the call. This produces business benefits in terms of shorter call times, better service and the projection of both a better corporate and personal image to the caller.

Call Logging: Provides a detailed, online history of all calls made and received. Among others, an important benefit is the ability to capture the caller-ID of a caller that hangs up when they are forwarded to voice mail instead of to a "live" attendant. This logging capability greatly assists an organization's sales and customer service efforts by capturing the identity of callers and preventing them from becoming a lost customer.

Online Phone Books: Because the number of each call is logged immediately, leading CT applications provide the ability to dynamically build an online phone book. This eliminates awkward and time-consuming fumbling for phone numbers and allows users to simply "doubleclick" on icons or listings to initiate an outbound call. In addition to the online search benefit, users can dramatically improve outbound dialing speed and accuracy as well. Statistics tell us that more than half of the calls made from a telephone's touchtone keypad have to be redialed due to `fat fingering' or improper inclusion or omission of area code numbers. Online phone books eliminate that.