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October 4, 1999

The Modern Call Center

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Illustration by Bob Scott "You have to think a lot more to answer an E-mail. And you potentially have to have it checked off by supervisors or a legal department," says Lucent general manager Zachary Taylor. "To provide a thoughtful response to an E-mail could take 45 minutes to an hour, particularly if it's a complex problem."

With the advent of Internet communications, however, customer interaction will not necessarily be restricted to one form of communication. Internet telephony, which is in the initial stages of being integrated into call-center systems and services, is blurring the line between standard telephone calls and the Web sites that companies use to provide customers with information. Convergys, Innofone, Nortel, and other vendors have developed software that lets customers initiate an Internet telephony call simply by clicking a button on a Web site.

Combining the Web and voice calls can make sense for companies that need both visuals and the human touch to sell-and the combination can boost sales. Outrigger Hotels & Resorts, for example, has a Web site that lets customers review 400 pages of photos and travel information. Visitors can connect to a customer-service agent with a simple click on a "Call Me" icon. Then AT&T, which sells this service as interActive Answers, dials up an Outrigger agent and the customer via regular phone lines, and connects the two. The service costs $40 per month for 15 transactions and has a $195 setup fee.

Once connected, agents can talk with the customer and push Web pages-such as ones showing a particular resort or type of hotel room-out to them. This eliminates the need for customers to search the Web site themselves. Outrigger receives 200 to 300 more calls a day as a result of the Web-telephone connection, says Bill Peters, Outrigger's VP of reservation services in Denver, adding that about half of the Web customers actually book a room after talking to an agent.

Another example is Sterling Commerce Inc., a call-center outsourcer that provides help-desk services for Microsoft Windows and Windows NT software. Sterling uses customer-relationship portal software from Aspect Telecommunications Corp., which costs $995 per user, to provide visitors to its Web site with an icon that can initiate a regular phone call, a voice-over-IP connection, or a Web chat session with a customer-service agent. When a call is initiated, the Aspect software shows the call-center agent which Web page the customer is viewing. It also populates the agent's screen with a variety of information about the customer. This has the potential to save a lot of time.

"Today, the customer-service representative has to scramble to try to bring up the same Web page the customer is looking at," says Neil Baker, Sterling's global customer services VP in Dublin, Ohio. It also can prevent customer frustration at a time when 60% of Web transactions are abandoned because a customer runs into a problem, according to Aspect's estimates.

Voice-over-IP can also be used to reduce the total cost of call-center ownership. Companies can use the data network that already links distributed call centers to carry voice traffic that is transferred from one center to another and reduce long-distance and WAN line costs by 10% to 40%, Lucent's Taylor says.

Organizational Challenges
While technology exists to integrate E-mail and other forms of Internet communication into call-center systems, companies can face an organizational challenge when trying to integrate new media. One key question is whether the customer-service representatives who answer phone inquiries should also handle E-mail messages, chat sessions, and other new forms of communication.

"Good talkers are not necessarily good letter writers," says Purdue's Anton. "People who are very articulate on the phone are not going to want to take a break to answer E-mail."

Blackstone at MediaOne agrees. "Many people who can carry on a good conversation on the phone could not put a cogent thought down in writing if they tried," he says.

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