Call Centres Call centres are the place where technology advances seem to be taken up with the most gusto and where the saying ‘time is money’ is so true. A call centre environment is a pressure bottle where agents are constantly trying to serve the customer, whilst keeping their interaction times to a bare minimum, they have been labelled the sweat-shops of the 1990s and gained a bad reputation for staff morale. | Next Generation Network Services Neill Wilkinson Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-471-48667-1 Hardback 0-470-84603-8 Electronic 11 Call Centres INTRODUCTION Call centres are the place where technology advances seem to be taken up with the most gusto and where the saying time is money is so true. A call centre environment is a pressure bottle where agents are constantly trying to serve the customer whilst keeping their interaction times to a bare minimum they have been labelled the sweat-shops of the 1990s and gained a bad reputation for staff morale. A call centre manager s job is to maximise customer satisfaction whilst minimising costs. The requirements for innovative technology solutions in call centres are vast and challenging. These needs have led to a number of creative solutions. In the early 1990s Automatic Call Distribution systems ACDs and Private Branch Exchanges PBXs were the mainstay of call centres. In just 10 years we are now on the verge of network-based softACDs that integrate web email and voice interactions with Customer Relationship Management CRM suites into a seamless service set. This has allowed the now re-branded contact centre manager to partition the customer base according to a complex mixture of business rules and to prioritise and route inbound contacts to the best available source of help. This change has been an evolution over the 10-year period with each year bringing incremental improvements to the technical solutions available to contact centre managers. In this chapter we explore the rise of the call centre from a single site solution through to a multinational operation with real flexibility in the way callers can be routed and on to the next-generation presence centre. 146 CALL CENTRES COMPUTER TELEPHONY INTEGRATION Computer Telephony Integration CTI signalled the move from ACD or PBX only services where call routing decisions are made by proprietary routing engines configured through text-based terminals to
