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Have you ever dialed directory assistance in North America or Europe? If so, then you likely have touched much of the infrastructure and platforms that VoltDelta builds and deploys at carrier-grade levels for our telephone company customers. VoltDelta has been providing cutting-edge solutions and system integration services for the $5+ billion/year directory assistance industry for well over 30 years. We are now offering these solutions into the contact center market through our suite of hosted solutions.

For over 100 telephone carrier customers across the globe, VoltDelta provides many call center services, including system integration, switching and intelligent call routing, network development, workstations and database management for premise- and hosted-based solutions. We have processed well over nine billion calls via directory assistance services and currently support over 36,000 agents globally across our customer base.

High Volume, High Demands
So how do you handle call volumes that are in excess of even the largest inbound call center? Through constant efforts to introduce technological innovation to control costs and maintain efficiency within the call center environment. VoltDelta introduced speech automation into its solutions and our customers rapidly adopted it because of its very tangible benefits of reducing average work time per call at the operator level. The challenge has always been creating a solution that effectively maintains customer satisfaction levels, meeting the business drivers of the customer (i.e., reduce costs), while maintaining high service levels and tight integration with live operators. VoltDelta’s solutions are built to support the “five 9’s” of reliability and service availability. Customers expect that when they make the call to directory assistance it is always available. Given the revenues involved, the carriers expect the same.

Expanding To All Contact Centers
VoltDelta has taken these years of expertise in supporting the demands of the directory assistance call center environment and is now offering its services through a hosted environment to all enterprise call centers. The hosted model is optimal for customers who want to deploy new technologies or extensions to existing services in a variable cost model without the capital expense burden of purchasing and managing the technology directly. Additionally, VoltDelta has been supporting clients who want to leverage their existing call center deployments but want to extend their functionality by integrating hosted solutions and switching solutions for new services involved in the call, such as mobile alerts or sending calls to “work at home” agents.

About VoltDelta Hosted Solutions
VoltDelta specializes in providing carrier-grade on-premise and hosted platform and database services to the worldwide telecommunications and enterprise contact center markets. VoltDelta develops and integrates solutions that support all aspects of customer service call centers, including speech automation, VOIP and TDM network switching and advanced call routing, agent workstation software, database services and in-call advertising. To learn more, please contact us at [email protected] or visit www.voltdelta.com/voltdelta-hosted-solutions.

Not Your Grandmother’s
Directory Assistance

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
Do you remember using directory assistance in “the olden days?” A live operator would answer every time, look up your query and manually connect you. It was hard not to maintain a visual image of a grandmotherly-looking woman with a tall, white hairdo sitting in front of a switchboard wearing an old-fashioned corded headset. Dialing for directory assistance was something you seldom needed to do: invariably, you were telephoning from your home or office, and both places had telephone books.

But times have changed and the demand for directory assistance has risen. With the advent of cell phones and the rapidly changing nature of businesses, directory assistance has had to become a completely different animal. Honestly…when’s the last time you touched a phone book? On the flip side, you probably use directory assistance much more often now, particularly when you are in your car, in an airport or otherwise on the road.

Service providers know this, and they know that offering directory assistance is an effective value-added service. But let’s face it: unless you’re willing to start building directory assistance from scratch (if you start now, you may have conquered the speech recognition component of it in a few decades, then it’s time to start building the databases), you’re going to need to get help from outside.

Directory assistance is an ideal service for hosted delivery. You can pay for only what you need and deploy state-of-the-art technologies, and the technical challenges need not be in your hands. DA is also an ideal value-added service that today has marketing potential far beyond offering customers a convenience.
Of course, you can’t use hosted directory assistance as a door-stop or a makeshift booster chair for a child like you can with a phone book, but then — no solution is perfect, is it?


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