InformationWeek

Uniglobe.com Inc., an online travel agency, turned to Lucent for its CenterVu Internet Solutions package to help drive down response times to customer queries. For some online purchases, a 24-hour response time just isn't good enough, says Michael Dauberman, senior VP and CIO of Uniglobe.com. "We're dealing with an emotional sale with cruises and travel services," Dauberman says. "If we don't close the deal when we have the person in contact with us, we may lose the deal. We had to have technology that could help us respond ASAP."

Unfortunately, many of the offerings Uniglobe.com found on the market for Internet customer-service centers didn't integrate well with one another or with the company's digital PBX call-routing system. But CenterVu, Dauberman says, provides an "out-of-the-box package" for supporting voice over IP, chat, E-mail, telephone, and phone-back functions, although the company did have to modify its Web site's interface a bit to work with the new system. "Lucent does 90% of the integration work for you," Dauberman says. "They install it. They set it up. They give you a system-administration tool."

The new system runs on Windows NT and supports the integration of computer and telephony apps over TCP/IP. The call-center environment to support the product requires Lucent's Internet Telephony Gateway, for voice over IP and text chat, and its Definity Enterprise Communications Server.

Uniglobe.com says it's happy with how the change to its infrastructure has enhanced its business processes. "We do skill-based routing of queries to agents," Dauberman says. "We have agents who sell high-end cruises and agents who sell hotel and car reservations. We've hooked our E-mail and callback and chat features to the call-routing system. Queries are sent to the person who has the skills needed to serve that individual client." In addition, he says, agents can't pick up new calls until they're done typing the E-mail or chatting, or calling the last person.

The company says the changes it has made have also benefited its customer-service reps, who work on commission. "If they don't sell, they don't make any money," Dauberman says. "But with the IT system in place, we've reduced the number of interactions it takes to make a sale from 15 to three."

Improving call-center infrastructure is as critical for business-to-business activities as it is for business-to-consumer operations. Hewlett-Packard operates the HP IT Resource Center for contract customers who have purchased HP-UX, as well as other data-center products, from HP or its resellers. The site had some 80 million hits last year.

Customer-service operations for the Web site are powered by five G3 asynchronous transfer mode switches from Lucent-four in the United States and one in Canada. "It's a virtual setup," says Rex Mayne, the technology program manager for the HP project. The centers handle both E-mail and voice calls over an IP network. "The call can start in any of the hubs and wind up in any of our five call centers," he says.

Like the others, HP enables customer-contact inquiries to be prioritized and routed to agents with the expertise to handle the query on the basis of their availability. If a particular call center is swamped, queries can be routed to another center.

The biggest challenge for Mayne was integrating InterVoice-Brite Inc.'s product for interactive voice response and HP's software for managing records of customer calls with the G3 switches. Computer telephony integration "has a pretty poor track record," Mayne says. "It's a challenge integrating the data and the voice sides of the house. But, you know, HP has a rather significant infrastructure already, like the G3 switches. So I was very fortunate to have that here."

Still, it took a lot of testing "to make these technologies work together correctly," Mayne says. "Vendors need to do more integration of these kinds of services. You shouldn't have to have two NT boxes and three boxes running Windows 2000. It should come on one box."