Must a company harbor a massive phone bank fortified by a heavily
tiered hierarchy of enthusiastic customer service supervisors, team
leaders and lead CSRs to be considered a call center? Today, many call
center solutions -- whether they're targeting the back office,
front-line services, e-commerce assistance or, more commonly, a little of
everything, seem to be geared for the larger call center environment.
Perhaps rightly so. While most small to medium-sized businesses require
large-call-center-type ideals to provide today's customer with superb
customer service, the employment of a dedicated customer service staff of
that magnitude is not financially practical or necessary. Nevertheless, no
matter what its size, to function as a profitable company, a business must
retain a healthy customer base -- and, therefore, consistent, high-quality
customer relationships.
The 'Right' Degree Of Connectivity
In today's ocean of conglomerates, personal attention can often be found
sinking to the sea bottom, drowning in a wake of price slashing,
undercutting and wholesale buyouts. To compete, many smaller businesses
must both rely and pride themselves on 'personalized relationships'
with their customers. Instant access to company representatives helps
create and sustain a healthy customer base that provides customers with
the degree of personal care they demand. ObjectWorld has developed a
unified communication solution that may provide the degree of connectivity
a small to medium-sized business is searching for to maintain personal
relationships with clients. Titled CallAttendant Office (CAO), this
unified communications solution combines flagship features such as a
personal auto-attendant with a drag-and-drop interface to control call
flow, remote message notification and one-time messaging which targets
messages for specific callers. CAO integrates with both Microsoft Outlook
and a Nortel Norstar PBX. CAO also touts more traditional unified
messaging features such as distributing calls to your desk or a remote
location and conveying voice mail to your phone or inbox.
In order for TMC Labs to examine some CAO fundamentals, an ObjectWorld
representative visited our office and brought an entire demo system:
Nortel Norstar PBX, Dialogic D/82-JCT-U board (one free PCI bus slot is
necessary for each card installed), punch-down block, Teltone simulator,
NT 4.0 server with SP6a (minimum of 266 MHz processing speed if 4 Dialogic
cards are installed), and Exchange Server 5.5 with SP3. Our equipment
arrived with all server and CAO software installed and configured for the
PBX, much the same way it would if a customer purchased CAO from a
reseller. ObjectWorld employs trained and tested VARs to sell and
implement their unified messaging solution. Administration can then be
left up to the customer.
Implementation
Although the CAO server software and Exchange software don't need to
reside on the same machine, both must be added to the same domain. At the
time of product review, CAO was compatible only with Nortel's Norstar
PBX. ObjectWorld said it was working in conjunction with resellers who are
also vending those particular phone systems. While the Norstar is a very
capable phone system, provisioning for only this system is somewhat
limiting. Although we realize CAO was built to function as a unit with the
NorStar, this may inhibit otherwise interested parties with a phone system
already in place. (By the time this review goes to press, CAO should also
be compatible with Avaya's Merlin Magix.)
Essentially, during configuration, an Outlook account is created (or an
existing administrative account can be used) for CAO, granting it the
necessary permissions to access Exchange server mailboxes using them for
the storing and retrieval of messages. This additionally integrates CAO
with the Outlook Contact list. Finally, the Contact names are mapped to
PBX extensions via the Administration GUI linking the two systems
together. ObjectWorld says that a company can be up and running with its
new CallAttendant system within one day.
Administration
Users are grouped into two different categories by the administration:
personal auto-attendant users and personal voice mail users. Services are
all easily applicable to trunks and extensions. Additionally, creating and
managing users is done using existing Exchange accounts, without
programming the PBX. Company greetings and auto-attendant are also
programmable from this GUI. Although the system can be accessed from any
PC with the CAO software installed, it would have been nice if all an
administrator needed to do was launch a browser and type in a user name
and password. Additionally, the administrator has access to trunk line and
user logs, port status, the fax manager and the announcement manager,
which allows company-wide access (a library of sorts) to phrases and
greetings.
Personal Auto-Attendant (PAA)
The personal auto-attendant's drag-and-drop app-gen functionality
impressed us. The service elements, as they're titled (building blocks),
allow end users with the right permissions to very simply create their own
call flow by building an audio menu with services and notifications
specifically engineered to best suit their clients, callers, etc.
The GUI is equally impressive, so using the service elements in the
toolbar, we created our own auto-attendant in a scant 20 minutes. The best
way to describe the simplicity of this app-gen is to say that a user could
make daily changes to his or her personal auto-attendant if need be. We
quickly assembled an auto-attendant as intended for a fictitious
salesperson in a small company. The menu we created allowed callers to
reach this salesperson at any time by pressing '1' to dial his or her
wireless phone number. Messages can be recorded through a user's
extension (or with a PC's mic) for each service element to preface a
menu item with, for example, 'I'm currently out of the office on a
sales tour. To reach me on my wireless phone, press '1' now. If you'd
like to place an order, Tom Green is taking new orders in my absence.
Press '2' to reach Tom now,' and so on. Other service elements
allowed us to verify a password to reach certain areas of the
auto-attendant, use the TTS engine to 'say' menu items, forward a call
that meets certain criteria or send a fax. Although this may be slightly
outside of ObjectWorld's focus right now, perhaps a future release will
contain a service element permitting ODBC connectivity. For example, some
companies may want to give clients the option to check their records for items such as total orders for the month, pricing and
inventory.
Personal Voice Mail (PVM)
If users aren't granted PAA permissions by the administrator, they'll
have access to a portion of the PAA's functionality through the PVM
interface, which includes the ability to record greetings for different
callers, the notification and reception of phone messages to remote
locations and access to one-time messaging.
We also found one-time messaging particularly useful to bolster client
relations and additionally, capable of relaying information in cases when
leaving sensitive information, or repeated messages on a home answering
machine, for example, can be damaging to a relationship. Further, it
relieves the necessity of contact by a company representative, or a
callback. Based on ANI and CAO's integration with Outlook's Contact
list, a user can record a message for a specific caller. For example, 'Mr.
Smith, unfortunately your credit has been denied. Please call Jim at
extension 222 if you are interested in making an alternate arrangement.'
After the one-time message is played for the intended party, CAO deletes
it.
Active Messaging is another distinguishing feature of CAO. This feature
enabled us to listen to messages from a remote location as they arrived.
The feature also provides the option to choose only specific callers from
whom to receive messages and a type of follow-me functionality which
enables CAO to contact you at alternate locations should you not answer on
the first attempt. It's also possible to set this feature for specific
days and times; for example, a user can disable the system from ringing
his or her home phone on a Saturday with a work-related message.
Some other features of the GUI include voice message playback via phone or
desktop; the ability to reply to internal voice messages by e-mail; the
ability to record and modify external and internal greetings; and
functionality to copy, reply to and forward faxes to other fax devices.
The telephone interface also permits access to many of the features
available through the GUI as well. For example, a user can forward fax
messages to another fax number, listen to e-mail using an available Lucent
(3.2) TTS engine, change mailbox options, forward voice messages to
another extension and record and modify greetings.
Conclusion
CallAttendant Office seems to focus not only on simplifying communication
through the amalgamation of disparate media, it additionally appears to
focus on providing end users with a unique tool set, allowing for
personally managed communication and messaging. Further, CAO provisions
for the extension beyond the desktop with many remote-notification-type
features. All totaled, this may be a very compelling paradigm for small to
medium-sized businesses that must sell first-rate, personalized customer
service as a part of their product.
[ Return
To The February 2002 Table Of Contents ]
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