CTI Solutions

Your need and the customer''s satisfaction are the most important parameters.

Every country has its own set of cultural, social,

political, and economic complexities that define the products and solutions most suitable

for that environment. One should look at technologically successful solutions in other

countries for ideas, but the potential



success of these solutions must be evaluated within the backdrop of the restraints and
resources of the target environment.

In providing people access to information, the only

all-pervasive technology available in India, today, is the telephone. Though teledensity

in India continues to be low, most people, today, do have access to a telephone

within a hundred metres or so in metros, and a kilometre or so in rural areas. PCs and the

Internet will take a long time to have a comparable penetration.

Computer Telephony (popularly called CTI) enables people to

access information on the telephone without any human fatigue on part of the information

provider. The possibilities are far more powerful than what first comes to mind. Consider

this. There was a time when updated train arrival information was a figment of one’s

imagination. But now, not only is this information available on telephone (though only in

Delhi and Mumbai), one can also determine the current status of one’s ticket by

dialing the PNR number. The 50-line system (meaning that it can answer up to 50 incoming

calls simultaneously) running at Delhi alone receives an estimated 50,000 calls a day!

There is talk of upgrading this to a 100-line system. To my mind, this number is yet too

small. We should simply upgrade it to 250-lines in one go (the cost difference is small

for the Railways and the problem is solved once for all). Can you imagine the number of

humans required (and the associated management costs) to answer over 1,00,000 calls a day?

On the other hand, the CTI system runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, requiring

practically no maintenance at all!

CTI has come to affect our lives more than we would like to

believe. From the initial "I-won’t-talk-to-a-machine" resistance, we are

now beginning to break away from the first-generation applications like voice mail and

move to some really sophisticated productivity-enhancing solutions. Solutions at banks

like HDFC fall just short of letting you withdraw cash right on the telephone (you still

need to walk to the closest ATM for that).

But as a practical, middle-of-the-road prospective buyer,

what should you expect out of CTI? How do you evaluate the value-add that it can bring to

your business? This article attempts to answer these questions.

Whose Choice?



From the technology standpoint, CTI does not attempt to modify the modes of human
communication in place today: Voice, fax or e-mail. None of them is superior or inferior

to the others. It is a matter of individual choice.

Till now, there was virtually no way the receiver could

exercise that choice. If the sender sent a fax, the receiver needed to be near a fax

machine to receive it. On the other hand, if the caller chose a telephone to call, the

receiver had no choice but take the call that instant. As complexity in daily life grew,

so did people’s expectation out of communication systems. They demanded choice–the

choice to receive the communication in a medium of their choice, which could be

different from the sender’s.

CTI enabled this. You send me an e-mail; however, if I am

not near a PC (say, while waiting for my flight at the airport), I call up my CTI Server,

and hear your e-mail. If the message was long, I could choose to receive it as a

fax. CTI systems of this type are now being referred to as Unified Messaging–since

they integrate the various forms of messaging (voice, fax and e-mail). border="0" hspace="4" vspace="4">Figure 1 shows the

three core mediums in which messages can be sent or received. The sender’s choice is

on the left, and the receiver’s choice is on the right. The lines connecting the two

sides indicate the choice that the receiver has. However, there are gaps in technologies

that prevent perfect solutions. The links shown in red are less than perfect. If you

choose to hear a fax that you received, the accuracy will depend on the capability

of the OCR engine used to convert the fax image to readable text. On the other hand, if

you wish to receive a voice mail as a fax, then the accuracy of the embedded speech

recognition engine will eventually determine the accuracy of the fax. Considering the

accent differences in the country, speech recognition will probably not be very

successful. However, only time will tell.

All this is fine, you say; but how do I receive an e-mail

as voice, or a fax as e-mail? This, and more, is the subject of discussion of the next

section.

Cores And Binders



The future is moving towards the integration of voice, fax and data, e-mail, video, etc.
CTI traditionally, offers two of these three (voice and data) as core components. Data

transmission is fairly omnipresent today, thanks to the widespread use of LANs. Chances

are that any office having a few computers will have an installed LAN. The common

solutions employing voice or fax technologies are voice mail and fax on demand systems

that send static (unchanging) documents to callers.

hspace="4" vspace="4">To this base, we add what I call the

enabling (or binding) technologies to create useful solutions. Figure 2 lists some of

these technologies. Combining these with the core technologies create multi-product

opportunities. For example, if you combine database interaction with voice, you get an

Interactive Voice Response system. Combine voice with the Internet, and you have Voice

over IP, among the hottest opportunities today. Combine voice with text-to-speech to get

an e-mail-reader on phone.

The list of the binding technologies is by no means

complete; rather, it is demonstrative in nature. The central point is that powerful

solutions can be easily created by gluing one or more binding technologies with the cores

offered by CTI.

Interestingly, since the binders give shape to the CTI

solution most suited to you, it is difficult to package CTI solutions into shrink-wrapped

packages. Some products like Voice Mail can be packaged to reduce cost for the medium

level end-user; however, the most useful CTI applications tend to be custom-designed

around core modules that the CTI vendor has carefully developed. The skill with which he

can carve a solution for you using as many pre-existing modules as possible will determine

the final cost to you, and the time that the solution will take to stabilize. Hence beware

of vendors who routinely quote customization charges on a man-month basis.

The last area of interest in CTI is call centres. These

applications help distribute incoming calls equitably among a group of agents trained to

handle large numbers of incoming calls. A class of Call Centres helps automate out-bound

calls. Examples of establishments who need such solutions include large sales or support

centres that get many calls a day.

Useful for You



We have discussed the various groups of CTI solutions available today. But how do they
translate to your needs? Well, first of all, take a close look at your business structure,

internal communication needs, and customer interactions. Then decide the CTI cores that

you need: Voice, fax, and/or data.

Having done that, now concentrate on the binding

technologies that you need. You may have databases that customers need to access (for

example, account holders in a bank need to know their latest balance), in which case you

need database connectivity. You may have an E-mail Server, and want to enable your

employees to listen to their e-mail over the phone. To do this, you need to get e-mail

connectivity and text-to-speech.With the cores and the binders in place, the dark room that

CTI has been hidden into is now brightly lit up. You know exactly the CTI applications

that can be built to suit your environment. Consider a scenario where your CTI vendor has

sold you voice mail, fax mail and IVR. You have invested in voice and fax cores along with

database connectivity as the only binder. Your vendor has linked voice to database (for

IVR), but what about linking fax to database? Your callers could access the information in

question by receiving a fax on the matter. The hardware component is already in place, and

by making a relatively small investment in the fax-database connectivity software, you

will get a significant value-add. In this way you can derive more out of your investment.

Let’s look at some more examples:

* Would you benefit if your customers could reach you in an

organized manner? Chances are that you would, even more so if your business belongs to the

Service industry.

(Consider the following scenario: "A senior

executive of a large company who has taken a car loan from you calls the CTI Server at

9:00 p.m. on Thursday night, and retrieves the latest statement of account. He is

surprised to see that the last cheque that he sent is not showing up. He calls up again,

and leaves a voice message. On friday morning at 10:30 a.m., he receives a call from the

finance company, acknowledging the mistake and confirming the credit". What you

have at 10:30 a.m. is a happy customer, satisfied with the thought that he is dealing with

a company geared to handle issues, quickly and accurately in an organized manner).

Evaluate further whether you would serve your customers

better if they were empowered to leave you voice, fax and/or e-mail messages. If you

answer yes to more than one, then invest in Unified Messaging. You need it now. However,

buy only the modules that you need today, and upgrade as you go along.

* Do your customers complain that your sales or

support numbers are difficult to get through? Do they feel that they keep getting

redirected to different people, with everybody wanting to know their name, ID, etc., but

not really helping them?

You may need a call centre along with IVR, Fax on Demand,

etc. You start with a very simple solution that merely distributes incoming calls evenly

and slowly graduate to a sophisticated solution that lets you distribute calls based on

agent expertise, etc.

Whatever you do, be sure that you invest only with

technically sound CTI vendors, and not with mere box pushers.

The Myths



The most common one is that the rate at which the Internet popularity is growing will
eventually kill the CTI industry. Well, I do not think so. CTI and the Internet actually

complement each other, and the growing number of on-line users is actually a boon. Humans

do not like to type if they can speak. Imagine a "Call Me" button on a web site

that connects you to the company’s call centre. You pick up your telephone here and

speak, at the cost of a local call, to the agents situated half way across the world!

Solutions like these are already beginning to get into place. Like I said before, the

Internet is a binding technology that can be integrated with CTI core technologies to

create powerful solutions.