- Business and Living
- The Call Center: Its Evolution from "Call Handling" and "Computer Telephony"
- Technology Behind These Services
- What a Call Center Must Have
- Interactive Voice Response IVRS and Digital Voice Messaging
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The Call Center: Its Evolution from "Call Handling" and "Computer Telephony"
Computer telephony integration (CTI) naturally evolved into the technology for most call centers. What is computer telephony integration, anyway? Let us first discuss some basic ideas before jumping at CTI. Right?
Think! Customers are in a hurry. How is your office responding to this demand? (See Figure 1.)
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Figure 1 An operator at a call center.
Because the telephone is the most common resource to interact with your customers directly, the way you handle the incoming calls speaks a lot about the way you do business. And where you place your client makes a direct impact on the growth of your company.
You probably have always wished for a technology that could handle calls efficiently, manage all communication networks within and among the various branches operating in your company, specifically address the problems arising at peak traffic times of customer servicing, and prepare a detailed statistical summary of incoming client calls.
Time and again, man has endeavored to improve his tools and the ways he goes about his business of living. Figure 2 shows the schema that operated in most offices in the past. Although it's cost-ineffective, it's still operating in some offices today.
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Figure 2 An office of yesterday.
In the past, there was a mushrooming growth of telephone networks, and their applications existed in almost every segment of business and society. These telephone networks were essentially circuit-switched. Today, however, telephone networks are hybrid networks: packet-switched and circuit-switched.
The difference? Circuit-switching establishes a dedicated communication channel between the two parties. In packet-switching, however, the same communication medium is shared by multiple data/voice packets that originate/terminate from/to various different locations. Thus, there is an appropriate usage of the bandwidth of the communication channel.
In fact, a humble copper wire is capable of carrying the human voice (in a bandwidth of 30Hz to 30KHz), leading to the convergence of data/voice/multimedia over these telephone lines.
This is how the c o n v e r g e n c e might have happened!
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YOU ARE INVITED to the Marriage of Computers and Telephones With the help of a Modem (Modulator/Demodulator) Leading to the first step in convergence ____________________________________________________________ |