Intelligent Call Routing

Intelligent Call Routing

Mr. Harrison decides to call his credit card company to inquire about a credit limit increase. He picks up the phone and dials the company's 800 number. He is then prompted by a friendly voice that says, "Welcome to Mycorp, please enter your 15 digit account number". After punching his15-digit account number into the handset, he is quickly prompted by a friendly agent who greets him with, "Hello Mr. Harrison, how are you today?" Surprised that the agent knew he was the one calling, he then mentions that he is interested in a credit limit increase.

After the agent helps him with his primary objective, the agent says, "I noticed you have been traveling a lot lately; would you be interested in upgrading to our new Travelers Green Card?" That's right. The agent knows a lot about him, but how? Remember the 15-digit account number he entered? To Mycorp it's much more then 15-digits: it's about every product he has purchased using his Mycorp credit card; his language preference; if he is past due on his bill; if he is considered a high value customer to the organization; the type of card he has, and much more.

The call center of today is evolving at an extraordinary rate. New technologies are popping up all over the globe bringing to the table new and exciting products that will help companies to service their customers in faster and smarter ways. One of the products with the most impact on the market today being used to accomplish this is Intelligent Call Management. Many large organizations such as American Express, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, and Discover Card are using Intelligent Call Management to provide better service to their customers. A recent survey discovered that 90% of today's call centers are using voice-processing applications, while another 54% have introduced Intelligent Call Management into their call center. Intelligent Call Management, or ICM, cannot be accomplished with one single piece of hardware. It involves multiple peripherals working together, each providing a different functionality that contributes to the efficiency of the call delivery. ("Are You," 2004)

Computers and the telephone have technologically collided and as a result CTI, or Computer Telephony Integration, was born. The CTI component is the most important piece in an ICM environment. With CTI, companies are improving their efficiency, lowering their operating costs, and building the infrastructure for new business opportunities. Surveys show that 64.2% of call centers use CTI in their daily operations. CTI provides call centers the ability to connect their telephony peripherals to a computer system so that data messages or "events" can be communicated back and forth over a data network. Events are the key to keeping track of all the calls coming in and out of the call center.

For example, every time a call rings an agent's phone, a "CALL_DELIVERED" event is generated and sent over the CTI connection. Every time an agent answers a call, a "CALL_ESTABLISHED" event is generated and sent over the CTI connection. Many different types of events exist and act as triggers for anything that might be listening to the communication. Located with in the event's message set is a unique call identification number that is used to keep track of the call throughout the data network. This CallID is also used to match up the voice call with the data so that the two elements do not get separated while traveling between multiple peripherals.

Located within the events message set are call variables. A call variable is a string of bytes set aside for the system to store information about the call or caller, and they travel with the call until an agent answers. The data elements stored in the call variables are used to make intelligent decisions about where to route the call. For example, if a caller has a "Y" in call variable1, byte position 1, it is identified as a High Value card member and should be treated differently than someone who has an "N" in the same byte position. Another example would be to identify the customer's language preference. If call variable2, bytes 3, 4, and 5 contain "ENG," then Mycorp knows to send this call to an agent who speaks English. Virtually any piece of known information can be stored into the call variables associated with the call. Based on these values, the routing destination can change dynamically.

The CTI connection also allows the call routing infrastructure to monitor the status of the telecom peripherals on the network. Since all the peripherals have CTI connections, the call router can verify if a destination peripheral is online and available before making a decision to send a call to it. An example would be an emergency situation. For example, assume there was a power outage in the Texas call center. The call router has the ability to determine if the site is available by sending heartbeats down the CTI connection. If a response is not returned with in a specific amount of time the call router will automatically re-route calls to a different call center.

After having discussed the glue that holds all the telecom components together, now is a good time to introduce the rest of the components. The most commonly known component in the ICM or Intelligent Call Manager environment is the VRU, or Voice Response Unit. The VRU is a computer that runs voice applications and hardware that allows it to communicate with the caller. Its primary function is to answer calls and provide voice menus to callers that allow them to service themselves without agent interaction. In a credit card servicing environment, it is the peripheral that customers interact with that prompts them to enter a card number over the telephone. In newer environments it is not uncommon for the VRU to be equipped with voice recognition hardware that allows the customer to navigate through the menus by speaking instead of pushing the buttons on a telephone.

Also available is text-to-speech technology, which speaks dynamically created content back to the customer such as account balances, telephone numbers, and addresses. The hardware associated with a VRU usually consists of an operating system, UNIX in most cases, incoming telephone lines usually spanning 24 line intervals, and a CTI link connecting the VRU to other peripherals on the network.

The ACD, or Automatic Call Distributor, is a telephone switch that sits at the front of a company's voice network. All calls arriving from the network carrier get delivered to the ACD using TDM, or Time Division Multiplexing. This is a process of taking multiple phone lines from the carrier and multiplexing the information into a single transmission where each frame is sent