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When a customer service representative takes a call or a
telemarketer makes one, just how do they know so much about
the customer on the other end of the phone before anyone speaks?
The secret is CTI, or computer telephony integration, and
it is the technology behind Versatility Inc.'s success in
the call center industry. With CTI, the Fairfax, Virginia-based
company helps call centers automate a host of functions for
their call-center representatives, thereby increasing their
effectiveness, improving customer service, and boosting call-center
revenues.
For instance, CTI can:
- Identify a customer through caller ID then automatically
display the details of the customer's prior transactions.
- Help managers analyze variables in call-center activity
patterns to ensure proper staffing, crisp customer service,
and an efficient sales effort.
- Remind customer-service representatives to phone prospects
again if they weren't home the first time.
- Automate "call blending," which presents a call-center
representative with an outbound call when the stream of
incoming calls slows down.
CTI is a complicated business, and it only pays dividends
if it's easy to use, secure, and seamless. Those concerns
are paramount for Versatility, a leading vendor of mission-critical
call center systems and applications.
Versatility delivers advanced customer interaction software
solutions to the most demanding call-center customers. Examples
of customers that depend on Versatility call center applications
include AT&T, British Telecom, Citibank, Humana Healthcare,
Mellon Bank, Sanwa Bank, and Time-Life Libraries.
The company's success relies partly on its integration of
Entegrity Solutions' PC-DCE software with the Versatility
Series, a family of state-of-the-art telesales, telemarketing,
account management, order-taking, and customer-servicing applications.
Entegrity's PC-DCE software guides communication, ensures
security, and synchronizes desktop clocks across Versatility
systems, which can serve hundreds of agents at a single site
and thousands of agents across an enterprise-wide network
of call centers.
PC-DCE helps Windows desktop clients find such applications
as call dialing, blending and assignment on Windows NT servers-without
a lot of work by the users or systems developers. PC-DCE also
safeguards the goldmine of customer information in call center
databases.
And it ensures that the time kept on each system is accurate
and consistent, which is critical for statistical analysis
of call-center performance. For instance, if two desktops
are five minutes apart, a phone operator could start a three-minute
call at 4:17 p.m., transfer it to another operator and have
the call conclude by "4:16 p.m." Consequently, managers
could never track what really happened because of the unsynchronized
clocks nor accurately measure how many calls were handled
at a given time.
PC-DCE also acts as a universal translator, allowing Versatility
to set up systems where desktop machines communicate with
minicomputers and mainframes, which have different architectures
and data formats.
Why did Versatility choose Entegrity? "We needed a complete
DCE implementation that ran on Windows and Windows NT,"
said Keith Roberts, Versatility's director of product development.
"Entegrity, which brought DCE down to the desktop, was
the natural choice for that."
"Call-center application developers in a DCE environment
benefit by having a service setup that's transparent to the
customer's desktop," Roberts said. "You don't have
to do nearly as much configuration, hardwiring and mapping
of drives that you have to do with other network setups. Instead,
a desktop application can simply say it needs a service, and
PC-DCE will find that service somewhere on the network and
tell the desktop how to connect to it."
"With PC-DCE, you're getting a system that's easier
to administer than other network configurations," Roberts
said. "It's dependable, robust and secure. By combining
Versatility and Entegrity's PC-DCE technology, we enhance
both call-center representative productivity and revenues
generated in customers' call centers."
Entegrity's PC-DCE Product Family
Entegrity Solutions is the leading supplier of The Open
Group Distributed Computing Environment (TOG DCE) technology
for the desktop.
Entegrity provides DCE runtime services for a wide
variety of platforms including Windows 2003, Windows
XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Terminal Server, Windows
NT 4.0 Workstation & Server (SP6a and above), Windows
NT Terminal Server, Windows 98, and Windows XP.
Entegrity also offers the DCE Distributed File System
(DFS), a system software service that enables computers
to share files within and across enterprises, on selected
platforms including Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows
2000, Windows 2000 Terminal Server
Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (ask about versions
for other Linux distributions), and Tru64 UNIX v4.0
and later.
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