State of Art Call Center ?
9 July 2007As Pat Kelly, COO with OnState Communications, tells it, it all started with the airlines some 30-odd years ago.
The airlines approached Rockwell International, a provider of airline equipment and electronics, saying they needed help handling their numerous customer calls. So Rockwell built an ACD, or automatic call distributor, to help handle the load. Of course, ACDs are still used to forward calls to the correct customer reps at call centers today.
ACDs aren’t the only things that haven’t changed much in the past few decades in the call center realm, says Kelly. For the most part, he says, call center technologies overall remain very complex and expensive, meaning it can be a monumental task for smaller businesses to get into the game.
That’s what prompted OnState to offer small and medium enterprises hosted call center solutions that are more flexible and more affordable.
“We’re charging $29 a month versus hundreds or thousands of dollars per agent, as a solution from Cisco would,” says Kelly, who along with the other two OnState founders was among the team that built and integrated the call center solution at GeoTel Communications, which is now owned by Cisco. Even other hosted solutions can charge between $100 and $200 per month, he says.
OnState’s call center solutions also require no upfront or fixed costs and no commitments. “We’re offering pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-need call center management, which effectively redefines how call centers are administered, how services are priced, and how profit margins are calculated,” continues Kelly.
OnState is able to offer this favorable rate by leveraging peer-to-peer technology.
When companies like Google and Skype came out with their peer-to-peer VoIP services they rewrote the rules on how to get voice from point A to point B. “We’re taking advantage of that by building call centers on peer to peer,” Kelly says, which has a lot of cost advantages beyond just savings from VoIP.
In case you need a refresher on the term, peer-to-peer communication is what happens when endpoints can converse without having to go through a central server to facilitate the connection.
Skype, certainly the most well-known player in the peer to peer VoIP realm, is a strategic partner of OnState. “There are few if any enterprise plays by Skype folks other than us, yet 30 percent of Skype’s 170 million subs are businesses,” says Kelly. “We’re truly building an enterprise series of features and backing it up.”
OnState offers a Web-based, Skype-certified OnState ACD for Skype 3.0. A Skype Business Extra, OnState ACD for Skype will be generally available later this month and provides a complete rules-based, intelligent call center and customer contact management solution that offers such capabilities as skills-based routing, chat, click-to-call Web integration, interactive voice response and reporting. OnState ACD for Skype is part of a suite of OnState Intelligent CallCenter solutions for Skype solutions to be rolled out in the coming months.
As part of the OnState Intelligent CallCenter (ICC), OnState ACD for Skype 3.0 incorporates Skype’s portfolio of Internet calling, instant messaging, video conferencing and file transfers. These capabilities enable anyone within an organization to provide customer service – anywhere at anytime.
The OnState ICC controls the communication state of customers making inquiries and routes inquiries to those people in the company who can best address their request. For example, a customer may contact a company via landline, Web site or from their Skype contact list. The ICC accepts the request and using a rules-based engine determines who in the organization has the best knowledge to field the call. On the company side, the ICC gives call center agents the ability to control their work state, view and connect with customers in real-time.
The company began betas with Skype last year, and there are now 500 registered users of OnState’s application, which becomes generally available next month.
Because this OnState solution employs XML technology, it can work with a variety of applications. “We’re built as a Web application, so we’re inherently mashable – meaning we have the ability to quickly integrate with other Web-based technologies,” Kelly says.
For example, OnState is working with Skype owner eBay to integrate its technology into eBay auction site. This will allow potential eBay buyers to talk to whomever is selling the goods.
“We’re actually embedded in the Web page so I know what page you’re on and what other pages you’ve been on and when you say you want to talk to someone I can ask you questions via a popup or drop down menu,” Kelly says. “That way we can select best person to talk to you. And all that information can be used by an automated system [like a CRM system] or by a person. So in the end the communication can be text, chat or voice call.”
And if a person on a Web page initiating a call runs into a wait time and doesn’t want to wait for a rep to become available, the caller can opt to have the rep call them back without losing their place in line, adds Kelly.
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