Call Center Technology

Call Centers, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), and Predictive Dialers

A call center is a group of people, called agents, who, with their associated phone and computer equipment, do the same, repetitive, type of work.

Inbound call centers handle incoming calls (and faxes, email, and queries from Web sites), and outbound call centers make outgoing calls, usually telemarketing or research-related.

Inbound Call Centers and ACD

Most traditional call centers handle inbound voice calls. Special software and software/hardware combinations for call centers called Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs) distribute these calls to agents that can handle them using any of a number of call allocation and distribution schemes.

An ACD does two things. It minimizes the amount of time that a customer spends waiting to be helped, and it maximizes the amount of time that agents spend interacting with customers.

ACD systems are becoming more sophisticated and are competitively priced. Even small businesses can enjoy the benefits of logical distribution and management of inbound calls.

Once a call arrives at an ACD, sometimes directly from the outside telephone network, sometimes from the internal phone system or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system, the ACD distributes the call to whoever is available in the group that is handling those particular calls.

The ACD system decides which phone will ring next and puts overflow calls into a holding pattern until someone is available. This holding pattern (or queue) keeps track of the order of the callers, plays music-on-hold and can play update greetings for the callers. Update greetings assure the caller that he has not been forgotten or can give him the option to leave a voicemail message instead of continuing to wait.

Some ACD systems can inform the caller of the average wait time in the queue or update them whenever their position in the queue changes. This feature lets the callers to judge whether or not they want to continue holding and puts them more in control of the situation.

A small office can use an ACD system to evenly distribute calls from prospective clients to sales representatives or to balance the incoming call load between all employees (or a designated group) in the office to ensure that all calls get answered immediately.

You could configure your ACD system to distribute all incoming calls to all employees, for instance, only if the receptionist (if you have one) is on another call.

Some systems can send the customer’s data file with the voice call, so the file reaches the agent’s computer as the call reaches her headset. Some ACD packages let callers punch in a phone number at which they wish to be called back, hold their place in the queue, then automatically call them back when an agent is available.

An ACD integrated with the Internet displays a button on the associated Web page. When a caller clicks on the icon, they’re usually given a screen-based form to fill out. The customer can request an immediate callback from an agent or a callback at a later time.

Internet applications with video capability are available on ACD systems, usually larger systems, and they require the customer to have a video camera attached to his computer. Video technology that provides fairly respectable smoothness of motion is possible at 128 Kbps (two channels of a BRI ISDN line). Internet-enabled agents can push Web pages to callers and/or use text chat.

Agent Callback lets an agent flag calls, and the system uses ANI (Automatic Number Identification) so if a caller dials back within a set period the same agent can receive the call.