How does business telephone systems tie into voicemail systems and in-house softwares??

[PeeluckyDuckee]

Ok, so I work at a call centre and there's this telephone system that's controlled by their in-house software program. Call picks up once voice is recognized by the system. The call will automatically bring up the customer's info in the in-house proggie, database being oracle.

How complicated, how much planning, and how expensive is it to set up something like that? Is it the work of solely the IT department or does the phone company play a role in the initial setup as well?

Calls goes to the seat that's not taking calls, and is randomized who gets the call.

I'm just curious as to how it is put together, how it works, and why it works. It's amazing to know how things work sometimes, and this is one of those times

 

[Garion]

Yea, it's very high-tech and cool stuff.

There's a lot of different solutions, but in it's simplest form, a call comes to 800 number into some kind of call management system. The management system determines which agent is free and routes the call to them. At the same time, it sends the caller ID info off to another application along with which agent is getting the call. This app looks up the customer's information, based on the caller ID and displays it on the screen of the agent getting the call. Not terribly complicated, but integrating it all together is EXTREMELY challenging.

- G

 

[Vegito]

I seen all those crap..

it's all caller id stuff

one company escapes my mind.. stock went from 14 bucks to like 98 cent.. cool things..
there was a way to use caller id that routes the phone call to different voice mail , ie for different clients. also some days u are not taking calls, u can route important phone calls through..

artisoft or something makes a system like that.. that was the name.. and there are many more !

 

[Woodie]

The phone company (can) provide inbound routing (we use AT&T) to a particular call center (we have multiple ones, spread across the country). This handles routing around call centers that are closed.

Once it gets into a call center, there's a phone switch of some kind (often leased) which has both phone connections (T1 and the like) and IP connections. It talks to/routes to all the agent phones, and talks to the application server for the phone info. Outbound dialers (telemarketers) work in a very similar fashion. Depending on your software/switch combo, it usually will offer some Voice Response Unit (VRU) technology (talks to the application server) to help route the call to the CSR (Customer Service Rep) with the right skills/rights/etc.

Really cool technology wise, especially because it requires very strong performance, in real-time.

 

[ScottMac]

We've used Aspect and Remedy (currently using Remedy - bleah - our programmers did what the management wanted them to do, not what they should have done). The system starts with a menu asking the caller to punch in their contract number, and whether it's an existing case or new. Existing cases punch in their case number so they can be routed to the correct engineer.

Usually there's an interface in the PBX (Interface / Bridge) that ties to the data software system to pass information (both ways).

Cisco also has a decent Call Center package.

I don't care whose it is, I hate ACDs, I hate voice menus, I'm tired of taking two minutes to do what a human operator could do in 15 seconds. It sucks, sucks, sucks ....(*rant restrictor activated*)...

LIfe is good

Scott

 

[Saltin]

I am the Admin at a software house that does just this sort of work (Unified Messaging, Voice Mail Servers, etc). Initially I was utterly confused by telephone/IP network integration, but in my time here I have come to understand a decent amount of it.

Our office just recently moved to enitrely IP phones, which is really cool. We use a 3com NBX box to handle all the calls as they come in, and our software does voice recognition, call supervision, voice mailboxes etc, etc. When someone leaves you a voicemail, it appears as an attachement in your Outlook, email is read back to you over the phone by the system. You basically get all your messages in one place.

We do all sorts of other things too, but the most interesting part of it for me is learning about how the phone system and network tie into each other. They are quickly becoming the same thing, no mistake!

 

[PeeluckyDuckee]

yeah, I find it pretty darn neat how telephone systems tie in to the overall network and how it can be configured, tapped into, and the such. Sounds like a very complicated system, and the cost of it going down, or any software that ties to it going down, is massive and its uptime very critical.

Customers usually dial one of two numbers, a local number or a 1-800 number, from then on it gets routed by an internal PBX system? The callerID of the caller goes into the search engine of the database, and then the database displays the query back onto the call agent's monitor?

How much does it cost to setup and maintain such a system? How do you learn about such things? Is there a course or program in a technical school/college that teach you about these things? I had the opportunity to learn about the exact same thing on my internship, but I skipped out on it and took on something else instead. DOH!

Can someone do a diagram of how all this hardware fits in together? Curious as to how the physical and logical infrastructure looks like.


Thx.
Plucky

 

[ScottMac]

Here, check out this link for Cisco stuff.

Cisco.com - ICM & Call Center

I believe thses kind of systems range in the many hundreds of thousands of (US) dollars up well into the millions. In addition to the necessary PBX hardware and feature sets (big bucks t start with), kick that with a major database server (typically a mid-to high end Sun, HP, or IBM box) - another buncha hundreds of thousands, then the actual Call Center software (Aspect, Remedy, and Cisco, & others...) more hundreds of thousands.

Then toss in some customization of the database and front end @ a hundred dollars + per person * a couple people * about six months up front with additional tweaking later on (and then a contract for maintainence for all of it).


Big bucks. There are smaller systems, I'm sure, but I'll bet you can't get into a decent medium-sized system for under a million (or *real* close to it).

FWIW

Scott

 

[cbqwinner]

Originally posted by: Saltin
I am the Admin at a software house that does just this sort of work (Unified Messaging, Voice Mail Servers, etc). Initially I was utterly confused by telephone/IP network integration, but in my time here I have come to understand a decent amount of it.

Our office just recently moved to enitrely IP phones, which is really cool. We use a 3com NBX box to handle all the calls as they come in, and our software does voice recognition, call supervision, voice mailboxes etc, etc. When someone leaves you a voicemail, it appears as an attachement in your Outlook, email is read back to you over the phone by the system. You basically get all your messages in one place.

We do all sorts of other things too, but the most interesting part of it for me is learning about how the phone system and network tie into each other. They are quickly becoming the same thing, no mistake!

I just had a presentation at work today by Siemens for their IP telephony solutions. They briefly touched on their unified messaging product, Expression. It seems like it would be cool to have everything tied together. Do the voicemails get saved on the exchange server? If so, doesn't that take up a lot of space? I know at my company most voicemail COS allow a minimum of 20 messages and 180 seconds per message.

The company I work for is thinking about going to IP sometime in the future. Does it offer all the features that you w/ you other switch? What kind of switch did you have before?

One cool thing the sales rep told us about were soft phones. I'm not sure how wide spread they are, but i never heard of it before. It's a program on you workstation that looks like a phone. You click on the numbers to dial, but people on hold, etc. The only physical thing you have is a USB headset to talk into and listen.

We're supposed to get a loaner IP switch to play with for 2 months in January, so I'm excited.

 

[Saltin]

Do the voicemails get saved on the exchange server? If so, doesn't that take up a lot of space?

Yes, but with proper limits set it's not too bad. The important thing is to set a policy and educate the end user in regard to proper use of storage.

We currently use the 3com NBX as our switch. We actually write their Unified Messaging Software (still in beta), so it helps us alot to have it live in the office. Before that I am pretty sure we were on a run of the mill IWATSU PBX, which didnt offer anything fancy. The 3com NBX has alot of nice features, and works via TAPI. The entire thing is configurable via a slick web-interface and it's priced reasonably.

My company writes a piece of software that is pretty similar to soft phones. When calls arrive, you get a "screen pop" that tells you who is calling (name/number) and gives you many options about how to handle the call. You can send the caller straight to your Voicemail, forward it, hang up, etc, all without actually picking up the phone.

 

[Kell]

Typically the call management system you're thinking of involves (1) some setting up of specialized telecom lines, (2) the installation of call monitoring/routing hardware, and (3) the development or purchase of call monitoring/routing software.

You would generally get the hardware here. (Dialogic is now part of Intel, btw). Some companies (like my former employer, which I would rather not name) work at integrating Dialogic hardware into running, tested, fault-tolerant rackmount servers. Other smaller players (like Aculab and Pika) also manufacture hardware to compete directly with Dialogic. Generally all of this hardware can be used in industry-standard PCs, as long as you observe the power and cooling requirements.

For the software, you would generally either write your own, outsource to a company specializing in (very expensive) bespoke computer telephony software, or get a pre-rolled solution. The two big pre-rolled solutions I remember:

Artisoft Televantage--also nicknamed 'Teledisadvantage' because it was quite a piece of shyte. It came with an extremely broken installation routine that never worked like the instructions said it would, and if you didn't do the technical equivalent of sacrificing a goat during software installation, you'd blow it out of the water and have to go back to square one (sometimes reinstall the entire O/S). Needless to say, we didn't sell many copies of that.

Enterprise Interaction Center--EIC for short. It's a large, extensible, very expensive (somewhere in the six-figure realm IIRC) mater-and-pater of all call management systems, developed by Interactive Intelligence, Inc (I3 for short). It practically even makes the coffee for you in the morning. Most people who use it barely use a tenth of its full capabilities (some never even change the default on-hold music ), but they still buy it for the simple reason that it's often still cheaper than bespoke software.

Dialogic makes development for their products fairly easy by providing an SDK as part of their drivers. The Dialogic SDK and drivers are available for Windows platforms, SCO OpenServer/UnixWare, and Linux (and perhaps other platforms by now). Cross-brand portability of this software (i.e. taking binaries or source code written for Dialogic SDK over to Aculab SDK) is pretty much nonexistent. Last I heard, Dialogic was creating a software package called "CT Media" partly to address this portability problem.

When you integrate all this together, it's actually pretty cool. At my last job, we were running an EIC server with a few Dialogic T1 and fax boards, plus EIC clients on all the workstations. We could actually receive voice mails in our inboxes--whenever someone left a message on my phone, I'd get an e-mail in Outlook with the message embedded as a PCM audio stream I could play back. Same went for faxes; they got routed to our inboxes as scanned images. It may have even integrated with our Pivotal CRM software (i.e. you could pull up a contact in Pivotal and maybe double-click on it to dial the contact number). And of course, the basic call management stuff (caller ID, mouse-click to put on hold, etc.) was all there.

 

[Garion]

Y'all are getting two different technologies mixed in together..

Unified messaging is when you combine your voice and data network - Voice mail can be accessed from your mail system, etc. It's fairly straightforward and there are many affordable products that do this.

What PLD asked about, ICM (Intelligent Call Managemt) (or at least that's what Cisco calls it) is the integration of telephone systemns and sophisticated databases to provide additional services to people receiving calls from the outside - Screenpops of caller history and account information, for example.

The are somewhat related, but really different beasts.

- G