Defining the Customer Contact Channels
To define which customer contact channels you need to use depends on many
different criteria. However, some of the questions you should be asking are as
follows:
What channels are currently in use by the contact center today? How efficient
are they? What do I need to modify to make them more efficient?
By evaluating the type of customers you are servicing, and by adding
additional contact channels (either voice, e-mail, fax,Web collaboration,
and so on), would it make the agent and customer’s interaction with
each other easier and more efficient?
By implementing an additional contact channel, would it increase customer
satisfaction, bearing in mind that happy customers are more likely
to recommend your service than unhappy ones?
Can the additional cost of the hardware/software/integration customer
contact channel be justified by a return-on-investment analysis?
Agents are normally one of the most expensive parts of a contact center,
especially monthly operating costs, so what can I do to better manage
their time, allowing them to more effectively deal with customer queries?
In this chapter, we hope to give you insight into some of the advantages of the
provided applications by utilizing a converged solution, as well as present you
with an understanding of some of the design considerations associated with each
of the different applications, including Interactive Voice Response (IVR),Web
Attendant, Administrative Reporting Tool (ART), and Voice Recording solutions.
This range of applications is one of the major factors that differentiate an
Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony solution from the traditional solutions of the
past. Once you bought a traditional solution from a specific vendor, you were
pretty much tied up in terms of who, what, and where you could buy any of
your future applications.These decisions also tied down the number of supported
applications for the specific platforms you would normally work with. Now there
is a converged solution that is able to support many of the standards in place
today, as well as providing you the capability to support future standards once ratified.
Currently these solutions are more software-based than hardware-centric,
allowing many different applications to be integrated by using standards-based
interfaces. No longer are you tied to a single vendor to provide a solution; you
now have the ability to choose which vendor provides you with the most suitable
answer to your specific requirements, and who is able to offer you the best future
scalability.
Within the framework of AVVID, and more specifically, the Cisco
CallManager, is the ability to provide application integration using either the
Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI) and the Java Telephony
Programming Interface (JTAPI), as well as several other supported standards-based
solutions.There are several Cisco applications that can use these APIs, such as the
Cisco IP SoftPhone (which uses TAPI) and the Cisco IP-IVR (which uses
JTAPI).With these standards in place, many other vendors’ applications are able
to integrate via these APIs. Some of these vendors may even use Cisco’s own
Skinny Protocol for support and management of Cisco applications and products.
One of the most notable of these applications was a company called Active Voice,
which provided a Voice Mail/Unified Messaging Solution called Unity that utilized
TAPI (as well as Skinny) to provide integration into Cisco CallManager.
Unity was such a well-constructed and integrated application that Cisco has since
acquired the solution and it is now marketed under the name Cisco Unity (we
will be discussing Unity later in this chapter). Using such an open solution allows
you to feel like you are more in control of your fate since it allows you to make
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decisions as to where you would like your converged solution to be in the future,
rather than being dictated to by closed proprietary solutions.
NOTE
It is also possible to use Cisco’s Skinny Protocol to provide integration
into the CallManager solution.
Open standards is obviously something Cisco would like to utilize. Based on
this, we will later in this chapter look into some applications that have been integrated
into Cisco’s IP telephony solutions and how open standards were used to
help them incorporate and streamline these products within many companies’
network infrastructure and planned growth.We will also be providing links to
some of the vendors that provide solutions which either complement the converged
solution, or, in some cases, even compete with products Cisco already
offers. As mentioned previously, the fact that vendors can integrate via standardsbased
APIs provides you with the ability to choose the applications relevant to
you, and that suit your business needs.