Scaling Issues | Call Center Technology

A conventional phone system (PBX) lets a large group of people share a smaller number of CO lines. The assumption is that everybody isn’t going to be talking on the phone at the same time.

An ACD - a call center phone system - makes the opposite assumption. You want everybody to be talking on the phone all the time, which means you’ll need at least as many trunks as you have agents. You’ll also need to queue calls and keep them on hold until an agent becomes available. There are several ways to do this.

The simplest way is to rent more trunks than you have agents; and buy premises equipment that can terminate these trunks, queue the calls they provide, play clever on-hold messages to keep callers from hanging up, and offer automated facilities (voicemail, IVR, etc.) to let some callers help themselves.

This works fine when traffic to your center is relatively constant - buoyed up by frequent catalog mailings, regular advertising, or other publicity.

But heavy seasonal variation, promotional campaigns, the need to blend inbound and outbound calling, serve callers from multiple time zones, etc., can throw a wrench into your ability to predict traffic and provide facilities for dealing with it. If you anticipate this kind of situation, it makes sense to explore call center systems that leverage the public network to provide greater call handling flexibility.

At the simplest level, both digital Centrex and ISDN service let a single line manage multiple call appearances. When you set up a Centrex- or ISDN-based ACD system, inbound calls can be held at the CO until agents are available. Waiting calls can be polled, played messages and music, and given the chance to transfer to IVR, voicemail, or other facilities - all without you shelling out for extra hardware, physical ports, and trunks to your premises.

At a more global level, you can use specialized CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) and network services to create a “virtual ACD” that distributes calls among multiple physical call centers according to different criteria: availability, time of day, the call’s point of origin, or other variables. The most obvious benefit of this approach is that it lets you tie remote agents together for a seamless-appearing center, while saving money on overhead.

Given the choice between waiting in a hold queue and writing email, people often opt for the latter. But those “info@” or “support@” addresses on a Web site are seldom monitored efficiently.

Over the past year or so, however, a number of companies have created a major breakthrough. They’re building software that routes inbound email around a call center and queues, prioritizes the traffic, lets agents respond to emailed queries using semi-boilerplate messaging, and keeps stats on the whole process.

Here are some things to know about inbound call centers: