September 1998

BY EVAN KOBLENTZ

Call it what you want — Web call through, Web ACD, Internet ACD, PC-based ACD, or something else — it’s still the act of selecting a Web site’s "click me to connect" button, transparently going through a software-based ACD, and ending up at an appropriate (and possibly remote) agent. Internet ACDs could be a killer app, but not until after the year 2000, industry insiders agree. Like its other Internet cousins, they say, the end user features are cool, but its selling point will be reliability and good quality of service.

Understanding Internet ACDs means considering where a call starts, how it travels, and the route it takes. Real benefits derive from systems where live agents actually answer Web users’ "calls" routed through a PC-based ACD and delivered to the appropriate queue. Other PC-based ACDs are call-back systems, where agents reply to Web-based and routed requests with traditional phone calls, e-mail, or faxes. Still other systems accept inbound audio-only H.323-based IP telephony calls. These systems can all be considered Internet ACDs. 

TODAY’S MARKET
At least five companies manufacture Web call through software, and more are developing and deploying it everyday. Included in the first generation are PakNetX’s PNX ACD, NetSpeak’s Virtual IP-Based ACD, Lucent Technologies’ Internet Call Center, CosmoCom, Inc.’s CosmoCall, and Computer Talk Technology’s ICEScape.

End user advantages include live audio, video, and data sharing; text chat (the lowest common denominator for non-multimedia users); free calls; URL pushing and joint browsing; death of the "logging out so I can use the phone" dilemma; and multimedia replacements — perhaps even TV-like commercials — instead of traditional audio on-hold features. To the call center agent, systems like PakNetX’s will treat IP calls, Web calls, and even PSTN calls as one, so the agent will never have to worry about whether to use the keyboard, telephone receiver, or any special software to do their job correctly. Administrators will like the speed, agent assignment accuracy, call reporting, and reliability.

DEPLOYMENT
Very few companies are using Internet ACD technology so far. Of those that do, most are companies in the IT industry, and they’re taking an honest approach with users. "We still kind of expect the person using it to be a PC aficionado. We have to make it more and more transparent to the user," said NetSpeak executive vice president Harvey Kaufman. "It has to be a ‘nothing’ experience."

The agent/end user interface is usually Microsoft’s NetMeeting, which is free, feature-rich, and included with many versions of Windows. But some companies use proprietary collaboration programs. NetSpeak, for example, uses its own WebPhone IP telephony software. Unless someone develops a smaller, simpler, and free challenger, observed PakNetX’s vice president, marketing Chris Botting, NetMeeting will win despite its clunkier, unfriendly GUI. (NetSpeak’s site already uses such a solution — a "light" version of their WebPhone product.) Botting also anticipates a phase shift toward packet-transmitted, packet-switched ACD systems. The transmission technology is here, he says, but too many switches today are still circuit-based.

UPGRADE OR BUY NEW?
As with the traditional PBX versus PC-based PBX market, another issue is whether to dispose of a large investment, a legacy ACD, and start anew with an Internet ACD, or attempt an adaptation from the legacy system.

Leveraging Legacy Systems
Generally, larger companies with established call centers are against disposing of the old hardware for an untested new medium, said Laura DiSciullo, Lucent’s managing director of Anywhere Call Center Solutions. But even within Lucent, not everyone agrees.

Dump the old system or upgrade it? "The answer to the question is both — it’s very circumstantial," said Marty Welt, who confesses to the issue’s complexity. Lucent’s director of conferencing and collaboration and board member of the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium, Welt takes the middle ground. "It’s playing to the managers of these call centers and making sure that they [the products chosen] can be managed intelligently," he said. He estimates that the Internet ACD’s 50 percent crossover point into the mainstream will happen in the year 2005. Until then, he emphasizes that most companies will want an incremental solution.

NetSpeak engineer Peter Reintjes is equally cautious about rushing into a Web ACD. "All this whiz-bang stuff you get with it is great, but with the vagaries of the Internet there’s about 30 things that can go wrong," he noted. Currently, he said, "We have a lot more potential than we have people ready."

Starting Fresh
Mandle Cheung, president and co-founder of Computer Talk Technology, represents the other extreme. Refining a new technology from its functional ancestors often results in "horror stories," he said.

"Building from the ground up is the only way to go architecturally," Cheung said. "Otherwise, you end up like an octopus. ‘Do-it-from-scratch’ is very important." Keys to making a good Internet ACD, he said, include exploiting the chance to attain user data while they wait in queues, protecting agents’ data behind firewalls, distinguishing hype from reality, and understanding that the market won’t suddenly be here anytime soon.

Toward that end, Computer Talk Technology’s ICEScape solution is available as part of a larger call center product and as a stand-alone product. Both solutions were designed from the onset to be PC-based ACDs with room to grow, not giant hardware boxes with limited ability to scale. However, he said, "The success will come in somewhere between three to ten years. If one looks at what happened in the voice mail and IVR markets, it took some 15 to 20 years for those markets to take on steep growth. But the Internet seems to accelerate everything. We think in a few years it will be a very popular thing," he said.

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES
None of the players want to give the impression of pessimism. Examples of companies actually using this technology included Micron Computers and Interactive Intelligence, both tapping Lucent’s technology. Micron.com is testing the Web connection waters cautiously, burying their connection button several pages deep — it only appears when users are ready to purchase a PC. Interactive Intelligence’s button for a Web connection has a greater presence — it blinks at visitors from the site’s home page.

Another example is ACI Telecommunications Corp., whose PakNetX solution works with NetMeeting. Most of the other implementations lie on the developers’ own sites, such as CosmoCom. Even flashier than the Interactive Intelligence button, the CosmoCom animated GIF flashes "CosmoCall – Talk To Us – Click Here – Try It Now" and, like the other sites, asks users for basic data before it will process the request.

Golf4Less.com, one of the nation’s largest commercial golf equipment Web sites, recently implemented the CosmoCom solution in its call center. "We’ve been looking for a solution like this for a long time," said Tim Reha, the company’s director of e-commerce. Reha noted that golfers share many of the same demographic statistics as people who are early adopters of technology — typically, white, educated males who hold management positions. He also noted that golf equipment is expensive, so buyers are "willing to go to certain lengths" to save money, perhaps even upgrading their PCs. Since the company often can’t advertise product prices on the Web site, he said, the Internet ACD link "solves a lot of problems for us."

While the experts ponder new ways to refine bandwidth, latency, packet loss, and other quality of service issues, it’s easy to think of more solutions for a technology that essentially amounts to free data and fax-enabled videophones, perhaps someday crammed into PDA technology to make the ultimate wireless communicator. Until then, applications include help desks; electronic commerce, banking, and stock trading; dining, entertainment, sports, and travel reservations; real estate; distance learning; telecommuting and conferencing; multimedia kiosks for shopping malls and tourist attractions; and of course, general customer service applications.

Evan Koblentz is a technology editor for TMC Labs. He can be reached at ekoblentz@tmcnet.com.