January 1999

A Quartet Of Productivity Enhancing Products

Connect-Care Version 6 is designed to allow companies to provide quality support and analysis throughout the entire customer life cycle, from pre-sales events and individual marketing activities such as direct mail campaigns. The software also tracks campaign responses, leads generated and campaign effectiveness.

Connect-Care also has the ability to monitor the progression of a sales opportunity from a qualified lead to a completed sale. Post-sale support and customer relationship management is achieved through Connect-Care's tracking, support and reporting functions.

The core Connect-Care module gives organizations the flexibility to organize key customer information at as many levels as necessary. In addition, there are five optional modules that can be used to further extend Connect-Care's capabilities and tailor the system to an organization's particular requirements:

Sales-Connect helps sales professionals identify, forecast and manage each component of a sales opportunity including competition, confidence factor and revenue potential. To measure marketing campaign effectiveness, information can be analyzed against win/loss data and correlated back to the campaign that generated the lead.

Support-Connect gives customer service agents the ability to proactively support customers before, during and after the call through features that track products, problems and contracts. Additionally, the full-featured knowledge base enables support agents to access enterprise information and find answers to customer questions quickly.

Quality-Connect allows organizations to manage the quality process by recording product quality issues, tracking progress toward resolution, communicating workarounds and publishing estimated completion dates.

Survey-Connect lets companies measure customer satisfaction levels. Utilizing a simple four-step process, organizations can generate and implement surveys, analyze responses, and improve business processes to meet customer expectations.

Web-Connect promotes communication by allowing sales, support, engineering, marketing and other designated groups to access the Connect-Care knowledge base via the Internet. Customers can also log on to find answers to questions without the aid of a support agent.

The product supports Window NT, Windows 95 and Windows 98 clients and many leading relational database servers and engines.

No. 400, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

Virtual Hold works by monitoring the incoming call queue, predicting the amount of hold time for each caller and guaranteeing a callback within a set amount of time. The system maintains the caller's position in line without requiring them to physically hold on the line. Virtual Hold guarantees first-in-first-out service to callers; callbacks are made in the same order as they were placed on hold.

The Virtual Hold system automatically intercepts calls during peak periods and delivers a message to each caller. Callers can choose to wait on hold or receive an automated callback in a designated amount of time. If the designated callback is inconvenient, additional scheduling options are offered. Utilizing full IVR capabilities during both incoming and outgoing calls, Virtual Hold software can play user-recordable prompts to the caller, capture the caller's telephone number (touch-tone or ANI) and record the caller's name.

When callers opt for the Virtual Hold callback, they hang up and thereby eliminate the charges the call center would have incurred if they had stayed on hold on the toll-free line. Furthermore, call abandonment due to lengthy hold time is reduced and call blocks are eliminated due to increased facility efficiency.

With Virtual Hold, callbacks are fully automated and transparent to the agent. Agents do not waste any time initiating callbacks and staff training is not required. Answered callbacks are transferred only when the correct party is already on the line and are presented to the agent as if they were an original inbound call. This optimizes the use of the call center agents.

The Virtual Hold system dials all calls from its own ports. Callbacks are routed through PBX extensions automatically, eliminating the need for IVR prompting for extensions. Outbound ports enable calls to be automatically re-queued if the callback attempt results in a busy signal, no answer or answering machine pickup.

By providing callers with flexible options other than waiting in queue, Virtual Hold increases customer satisfaction. During both the initial inbound call and also when Virtual Hold makes the return call, callers hear several convenient options. Virtual Hold features a stand-alone design and offers seamless integration with all automatic call distribution systems. All major switch (ACD) vendors, including Siemens, Lucent, Nortel and Aspect, are compatible with the Virtual Hold software. It also offers full interface with IBM's CallPath software and other computer-telephony integration (CTI) applications.

No. 401, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

Etrog facilitates the development and integration of call center products such as call routing, skills-based routing, intelligent call/data blending, agent desktop management and call center statistics. Etrog is also suited to CT-enable IVR applications for call control integration with media and unified messaging products. Etrog provides a standard platform for development and integration, freeing developers from having to support multiple CT interfaces for different products and PBXs.

Etrog Agent is an ActiveX that controls telephony at an Agent's desktop. With Etrog Agent, programs that provide "screen pops" with call information can be easily integrated with "best-in-class" software.

Etrog Server is an ActiveX that controls centralized information in a call center. With the information gathered by Etrog Server, applications can be written that: interface with interactive voice response systems; call center help desks; call center administration screens; and host-based routing scenarios. Etrog ActiveX modules simplify development for Dialogic's CT-Connect CTI server. The ActiveX also simplify programming of CT applications while providing an industry standard development platform allowing the most advanced type of integration with the most popular software packages such as Office97, Outlook and Notes. The platform of ActiveX allows for open integration with Windows NT based programming such as MAPI, ISAPI and ODBC. Integration is possible using any language or development environment that supports ActiveX including Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Java (J++), and C++. The Etrog ActiveX platform provides modules for development in 3 key areas of call center development: call routing, desktop CT and call center statistics.

Call routing enables application integration with the CT-Connect so that all incoming calls can be routed to a particular destination based on application criteria such as database information. The Etrog Call Routing ActiveX allows applications to configure various types of routing scenarios such as Route Points (an ACD queue without agents used to intercept all incoming calls), and IVR queues. Applications can also define agent groups that will be monitored by the Etrog Module. Applications can then query the Etrog Module as to the availability of an agent group and/or an individual agent within the group. Integration with route points is available so that a call can be assessed and assigned a destination by an application while the call is still ringing. Call Routing allows for integration with IVR/ACD systems that may need to identify the caller, determine a destination, and query the availability of the destination before transferring the call.
The Etrog Agent ActiveX allows for integration between desktop applications and PBX functionality so that developers can create "screen pops" and provide an agent with as much or as little control over the call as needed. The Etrog Agent provides a desktop application with the essential information needed to tie its data together with the CT link.

The Etrog ActiveX for call center statistics, Etrog Observer, provides both historical and real time information that can be used by a desktop application, an application connected to the Etrog Server routing ActiveX, or a standalone monitor application. Etrog Observer gathers information from active Etrog Agent sessions, and from monitors it creates itself to provide a define picture of the call center.

No. 402, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

The HelpDesk module is designed to provide fast access to vital information. The graphical Call Tree provides an up-to-the-minute picture of what has happened to a call. When a call comes in, caller line identification (CLI) through computer-telephony integration (CTI) automatically fills in such key information on the caller such as the caller's department, location and e-mail address. royalblue HelpDesk also provides ActionTracks that enable users to split a call into the different actions required to resolve the call. The royalblue HelpDesk also allows users to access information that may reside in disparate databases through the use of its 32-bit MTC (Multi-Tier Component) architecture. Calls can be automatically logged from external sources such as IVR systems and SNMP messages and data can be passed easily to and from legacy and third-party systems. The royalblue HelpDesk also provides a KnowledgeBase of know problems and solutions gathered from any number of different knowledge sources. The InfoMine data mining tool continuously and automatically learns as the HelpDesk is used, assuring that all support analysts have access to all of the help desk's most up-to-date knowledge.

The SupportCenter module is designed to provide both current and long-term statistics to help determine how the support operation is functioning. Real-time management information is continually and automatically updated and a suite of standard reports are provided that can be run as stand-alone reports, amended with the FrontOffice ReportWriter or used as the basis of new reports. SupportCenter also incorporates the tools to provide the proactive management of call handling, such as contracts, service levels, alerts, assignments and escalations. Each call logged can have a service level assigned to it. SupportCenter provides this automatically depending on who calls, their support contract, the product or service they are using and the type of inquiry. SupportCenter also provides automatic escalations and color-coded workload lists that are automatically updated as calls progress through the system to highlight calls that need action most urgently.

The ChangeManager is designed to provide a platform for ordered control by monitoring and recording changes to track the history of the changes and their impact. ChangeManager allows the creation of configuration item types such as PC, business process or design document and individual configuration items that are specific instances of these configuration types. Using the specified information, ChangeManager assesses which configuration items will be affected by a particular change. Configuration items can be given a severity level according to their impact upon the operation of the business. For every item that is affected, ChangeManager identifies the maximum severity level and lists the analysis results.

No. 403, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo