CIS:
What is your company’s specialty and mission statement?
Burr:
Castel, Inc. develops, markets and supports call management solutions
designed to increase the productivity of outbound and inbound customer
contact centers, while improving the customer experience and complying with
all outbound calling regulations. We design our modular solutions to
integrate with existing contact center environments that support
applications such as customer service, teleservicing and collections.For
nearly two decades, Castel has been pioneering software solutions that
enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of customer contact operations. We
were the first to capitalize on the power of ISDN for communicating directly
with the telephone network. We have also implemented a series of
call-handling capabilities, such as:
• Host-based predictive dialing and call distribution,
• Skills-based routing,
• Value-added routing,
• Inbound/outbound call blending, and
• Dynamic caller I.D.
Today, our mission is to deliver exceptional CTI-based solutions for
business-critical customer contact applications. Driven by a commitment to
excellence, we are dedicated to providing superior products and services
that enable our customers to meet and exceed their business goals.
CIS:
What makes your services unique and how can users benefit by using them?
Burr:
Castel offers an outbound call management solution, which is fundamentally
different from traditional predictive dialing systems. Our solution allows
businesses to make, and take, more customer calls without the hindrance of
dead air, abandoned calls or “unknown” caller I.D. What distinguishes the
Castel offering from traditional dialer systems is a patent-pending
technology that communicates directly with the public switched telephone
network at the command and control layer. This peer-to-peer communications
approach to dialing provides answer detection that is 100 percent accurate,
100 percent of the time. In other words, agents are connected to every call
in time to hear the called party’s first “hello.”
What does the traditional predictive dialer call sound like? Your phone
rings, you answer it and listen to silence. This “dead air” delivered by the
dialer forms a barrier between your customers and your representatives, and
saps the performance and productivity out of each call. So we feel that
hearing the first “hello” is more than a system capability. We see it as a
business advantage.
Castel solutions are modular and can include call management software,
CTI interface, a softswitching platform and a full suite of
productivity-enhancing options. Our solution delivers the capabilities and
the capacity needed now and the flexibility to grow as customer-contact
requirements change.
CIS:
What, in your opinion, is the most pressing issue facing our industry today?
Burr:
Today’s contact centers are trying to balance agent productivity with
compliance to government regulations. Global economic pressures are driving
centers to produce more with less, while state and federal regulations
governing outbound calling are seen as restricting productivity.
What is interesting is that the real impact of these regulations does not
come from the do-not-call registry, but from the other “predictive dialer”
regulations. The DNC registry affects a relatively small percentage of the
nation’s daily outbound call volume, while the other regulations governing
agent response time, three percent abandoned call rate and meaningful caller
I.D. apply to every outbound call made to an American consumer…no matter
where the call originates.
There is no doubt that the impact these regulations will have on our
industry is going to be significant. While many people say the new rules
will decimate the industry, the truth is the rules will help. Those
companies that go out of business as a result of the new regulations will do
so out of choice, not government decree.
When predictive dialers first became widely available, a 200 to 300
percent jump in productivity was the norm. Today, contact center managers
are searching for ways to ratchet up productivity a few percentage points
with every add-on and upgrade. What consumers want is personalized service.
They want someone to answer their greeting. Outbound calling businesses have
focused on agent performance instead of customer satisfaction. The
technology exists to make businesses compliant with the regulations, while
improving the customer experience and increasing agent productivity. It’s
not the end of the world…but it is the day of reckoning.
CIS:
What are your recommendations to alleviate such problems?
Burr:
The most practical method for striking the delicate balance between
productivity and compliance is to implement a call management technology
that, among other things, provides instantaneous answer detection.
Communicating with the telephone network as a true network peer, Castel’s
outbound solution receives the “off-hook” message that indicates a
connection and routes the call, and its associated data screen, to an agent
in time to hear the called party’s first hello. Other answer detection
schemes, such as those based on DTMF tones, DSP noise analysis or digital T1
A/B bit signaling, cannot provide 100 percent answer certainty 100 percent
of the time. Peer-to-peer signaling can.
Hearing the first “hello” effectively eliminates the dead air consumers
have come to associate with nuisance calls. In addition to eliminating dead
air, the Castel call management solution can eliminate abandoned calls. The
combination of instantaneous answer detection and our unique heuristic call
placement algorithm automatically adjusts calling rates to help ensure that
there is an agent available for every answered call. The solution monitors
the answer rate of each campaign and the time agents spend on calls, then
adjusts call placement as needed in real-time. This translates into the kind
of person-to-person communication that operations should be giving people,
rather than the machine-induced annoyance that has come to exemplify the
call center industry.
Eradicating dead air and eliminating abandoned calls are a few of the
unique capabilities available with a Castel solution. Other important
features include: dynamic caller I.D. on a call-by basis, outbound/ inbound
call blending, seamless integration with existing customer-contact
applications and a wide array of calling activity monitors and reports.
Castel can help cost-effectively add as many agent positions (outbound or
inbound) as wanted. There is virtually no limit to the number of agents that
can be supported. It also liberates customer contact applications from the
confines of the call center facility. Using in-place voice and data
networks, Castel can support any agent at any desk, anywhere in the world.
Castel’s server-based architecture is capable of centrally managing a series
of distributed calling operations. Together these functions free the user
from the sizing and facility restrictions inherent in many conventional call
center systems.
Finally, while our solution increases productivity, it also decreases
outbound calling costs. With a Castel solution, call center operating
expenses for personnel, telephone line usage, add-on systems, wiring,
facilities and specialized programming can be reduced. Castel customers have
seen their systems pay for themselves in less than a year through cost
savings alone.
With a growing number of businesses thinking about eliminating outbound
calling from their customer-contact repertoire, those organizations that
eliminate nuisance calls with the right technology will rapidly join the
ranks of the top companies in their market segment. There is tremendous
potential in this industry for those willing to make the necessary
technological changes.
CIS:
What is your vision of the future of the CRM/contact center/teleservices
industry?
Burr:
The simple fact is that the telephone is still the best medium available for
contacting your customers. Unfortunately, this valuable tool has been abused
to the point that consumers banded together to demand their government set
restrictions and strengthen regulations.
Society has spoken, and if you listen to what they are really saying,
you’ll see that it is good for our industry. They are fed up with the
impersonal attributes of machine-driven calling. The silences. The wrong
messages. The abandonment. They don’t mind personal calls or information
that is important.
What the industry has to achieve is the sense of personalized
communications with its customer base that is intelligently managed by
technology. If you can contact the right customer with the right offer and
give him or her the impression that the number was dialed personally, then
you have established a lasting relationship.
Here’s what I see for the future of this industry: person-to-person contact
…at about 20,000 calls an hour.
For information and subscriptions, visit
www.TMCnet.com or
call 203-852-6800.
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2003 Table Of Contents ] |