Teloquent Communications Corporation has announced Open@gent™ and Web Call Center™, the first two products in its Internet/Intranet strategy. Open@gent and Web Call Center are complementary solutions to the company's Distributed Call Center� product, a full-featured, switchless ACD that uses the company's patented technology to manage calls, agents and voice processing equipment distributed throughout the public telephone network.

Open@gent is a family of desktop software products that leverages corporate Intranets as the backbone of the call center. It gives call center agents the ability to make and receive calls through a personal computer. This capability allows call center managers to place agents anywhere, using plain old telephone (POTS) lines for the most economical solution. Open@agent is compatible with Microsoft's Telephony Application Programmers Interface (TAPI) and has a fully customizable graphical user interface. It enhances the computer-telephony integration (CTI) features in Teloquent's Distributed Call Center with support for Microsoft's ActiveX controls in addition to Dynamic Data Exchange.

The Web Call Center is designed to allow customers to access live agents while browsing for information on the World Wide Web. The Web Call Center will incorporate a CallThrough™ capability, in addition to the callback capability used by nonintegrated systems. With the callback capability, customers requesting human contact would be called back by the system when an agent is available to take the call. The call would be initiated by the call center over a separate connection, generally at the call center's expense. In this scenario, the call center pays for the call plus, because callbacks are difficult to synchronize, customers may become stuck waiting for a call and will be unable to surf while waiting. In addition to this, simultaneously handling callbacks and inbound traffic in call centers has proved to be a significant management challenge.

With the CallThrough feature, the customer contact originates from the customer using computer- controlled phones that can often use the same Internet connection. Using CallThrough, an applet on the customer's desktop launches a queuing request, then directly calls an appropriate agent when the agent becomes available. Because not all desktops are appropriately equipped, this approach may revert to callback where needed. The problem of proper call synchronization with the call-through is avoided because the desktop knows when the agent is available. The call center benefits in that the call requests closely resemble inbound traffic for management purposes, and toll charges may be paid by the customer if desired.

Teloquent's CallThrough implementation includes: ActiveX controls, TAPI and Internet Protocol phone technologies.

For more information, contact Bob McGrail at 508-663-7570.