Cisco Agent Desktop

White Paper

Simplifying Computer Telephony Integration Solutions

Introduction

What is Computer Telephony Integration?

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) involves integrating computer systems with telephony resources to augment an organization's communications capabilities. In the last several years, the definition of CTI has grown to include call routing, the integration of multiple media channels—such as Web, voice, and e-mail—and integration with interactive voice response (IVR) units. For many organizations, the definition of CTI continues to include such "classic" applications as "soft phone" and "screen pop." Since its inception, the integration of CTI has been difficult for many organizations to achieve. Smaller organizations without dedicated IT staff often lack the funding necessary to hire consultants who can develop and maintain custom integrations. As CTI has matured, however, the requirement to integrate telephony applications with business applications—such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems—has created additional pressure for smaller enterprises to deploy CTI. Before defining a CTI strategy, organizations should consider alternative methods that do not require the dedicated IT staff or consultants traditionally associated with CTI projects.

This white paper will focus primarily on the soft phone and screen pop capabilities of CTI, as these applications are the ones that most enterprises are concerned with in the CTI realm.

Soft Phone Defined

Soft phone is an application that enables users to control telephone functions using a computer instead of a telephone. For example, a soft phone application gives a call center agent the ability to answer a call, put it on hold, transfer a call, and hang up, directly from their PC. Soft phone applications may also give contact center agents the ability to control their automatic call distributor (ACD) state from the soft phone. For example, the agent could login, logout, put themselves in a ready state, or put themselves in a wrap-up state directly from the soft phone, rather than using keys on their desktop telephone.

Screen Pop Defined

A screen pop is the use of telephony data integrated with a desktop application for the purpose of "popping"—or displaying—caller and customer information on the agent's computer screen. A typical example would be a customer who enters his or her account number into an IVR system, which then passes that number to the CTI application at the desktop. The desktop uses the customer's account number to pop the appropriate customer database record onto the agent's PC screen.

Why is Computer Telephony Integration Important?

Global competition has never been more intense, and the ability to retain customers and attract new business by providing better, more personalized service has become an essential corporate competency in this environment. Companies from financial services firms to airlines are recognizing that their success depends on meeting the unique needs and expectations of each customer by delivering products and services when, where, and how the customer wants them. For many businesses, the contact center serves as the primary interface for customer interaction—making it a strategic, mission-critical operation. As a result, the contact center can boost an organization's competitive advantage by helping companies provide services that enhance customer relationships.

Servicing the individual is not an easy proposition, especially when a business has a large number of geographically-dispersed customers who interact with the company using multiple communication channels including phones, fax, e-mail, and the Internet. To compete in this technology-driven and potentially impersonal environment, companies must be particularly focused, both strategically and operationally, on creating strong bonds with customers.

To that end, customer-service leaders in many industries are taking full advantage of CTI to cultivate customer relationships using whichever contact channel a customer prefers. The goal is to capture, evaluate, integrate, and utilize information held within multiple networks, contact center systems, and corporate databases to distribute each incoming request to the most appropriate resource while simultaneously delivering customer-profile and transaction data to the agent's desktop. By implementing this model, contact centers can provide individualized service to every customer.

The Benefits of Computer Telephony Integration

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Without a CTI application, a customer call frequently gets transferred to a series of different agents until an appropriate agent is found. To make matters worse, the customer typically has to re-state his or her identifying information and reason for calling to each new agent. These two phenomena are called re-routing and re-stating, and are the primary customer-service challenges facing contact centers today. A CTI solution helps organizations overcome these obstacles to promote enhanced customer satisfaction.

Re-routing

Businesses seek to gain a competitive advantage by quickly and efficiently servicing each customer from the point of first contact. A challenge facing organizations with multiple contact centers is the intelligent distribution of calls across sites. In many cases, individual locations operate as separate entities or silos, largely or completely unaware of the resources available at other sites. A CTI application combines real-time visibility into each contact center operation with network-level, data-directed routing to distribute each call to the best resource anywhere in the enterprise, the first time. This model eliminates both the customer frustration and the additional expense associated with re-routing.

Re-stating

A CTI system also eliminates the need for customers to re-state their identifying information at each leg of a transaction because this information is captured and carried forward with each new event. For example, a customer who contacts a service center and enters an account number in response to an IVR or Web prompt should not have to provide this information again upon transfer to an agent—nor should they have to repeat it yet again if they are transferred to a second agent who may be offering them an up-sell opportunity, for example. By using CTI connections throughout the communication path—at the network, ACD, IVR, Web server and agent desktop—CTI captures, maintains, and transmits caller-profile data throughout an entire customer transaction.

In this model, when a call is routed to a particular resource, the caller's identifying information is simultaneously passed to the answering agent's desktop. The desktop application "pops" the customer's database record onto the agent's screen before the call is received, allowing the agent to greet the customer as an informed source. If the answering agent later transfers the caller, all collected data, including any data entered by the first agent, is automatically transmitted with the call, eliminating the need to re-query the caller.

Cost Savings

The two largest expenditures in a contact center operation are personnel and telecommunications service. Through screen pops and simultaneous call and data transfer, CTI shortens talk time by eliminating the need for re-stating. The time that agents spend asking customers for identifying information lengthens every call. While this may seem insignificant from the perspective of a single call, the aggregate time spent across all calls becomes substantial.

The most common figure cited for time savings through screen pop is 12-25 seconds on average for the agent answering the call, and 25-60 seconds for each subsequent agent. The first agent queries the caller for their name, account number, and other relevant information, then waits while the desktop application retrieves the customer record from a corporate database.

This time increases when the call is transferred because, without CTI, the second agent must query the customer both for the initial information gathered and for details of the first leg of the transaction. With CTI, organizations realize additional savings on a transfer because the system captures and forwards real-time information about the first leg as part of voice and data transfer. The second agent then begins the call not only with the customer's database record on the screen, but also with real-time information about the caller received from the first agent.

Win-Win Scenario

It is unusual in business to encounter a true "win-win" situation. Typically, to improve customer service, a company must incur costs that they may not be able to recover directly. The company is willing to make this investment in customer satisfaction to capitalize on anticipated increases in revenues and profits, market share, and customer retention. With CTI, a business benefits from immediate direct savings through reduced call length while simultaneously improving customer service—a true win-win scenario.

Simplifying Computer Telephony Integration Solutions

Despite the powerful benefits of CTI, contact centers have not fully embraced CTI. In fact, only 20 percent of contact centers have CTI capability for their agents.¹ With such tangible benefits available through CTI, why have CTI deployment rates remained so small? One potential reason is the perception that CTI is requires a dedicated IT staff, or consultants, to develop and maintain the integrations. Looking at traditional CTI solutions, that has often been the case. So, in order to truly realize the benefits of CTI, there is a need to have CTI installed quickly and easily—with little or no IT involvement—and be as easy to maintain as possible, preferably using in-house resources. Contact centers require ready-to-use solutions that improve agent productivity, resulting in more efficient customer service. As essential as CTI is to contact center productivity, its introduction and upkeep should not be a barrier to deployment.

Packaged Soft Phone versus Custom Coded Soft Phone

When it comes to software solutions, customers are often faced with the trade-off between packaged features and customized features. Certainly, the speed of deployment makes packaged software desirable, but custom solutions offer customers the ultimate in flexibility. Organizations need to ask themselves if their needs can be met with a packaged solution rather than a custom one. If you consider that most contact centers are going to require similar functionality, the packaged approach begins to seem more attractive. When you realize that a packaged solution can also be a full-featured solution, it makes packaged solutions all the more desirable. In the end, all a soft phone must do to ensure success is to replicate the functions that the agent has on his or her ACD phone.

If simplifying the CTI solution is the goal, then the packaged soft phone approach is most appropriate. A packaged soft phone should include the standard call control functions:

For contact center agents, ACD functionality must also be included with the packaged soft phone, either via agent state control buttons or by task buttons that automate feature access codes. Agent state control functions should include:

To be successful, the soft phone must be able to replicate the standard functions of the agent's desktop ACD phone. When successful, the soft phone replaces the functionality of the telephone and allows agents to focus their attention entirely on their PC. With a soft phone in place, the agent simply toggles between telephony functions and business functions on their PC, with no need to turn away from the PC to perform telephony functions.

Keystroke Macro Screen Pops versus Code Level Screen Pops

One of the most important aspects of a CTI implementation is the package's ability to provide caller data to the agent's application at the desktop. This is commonly referred to as a screen pop. To achieve the screen pop, the telephone network provides data about the call and the caller from the telephone network—caller ID information, which is also known as automatic number identification (ANI)—and the number that the caller originally dialed, which is also known as dialed number identification service (DNIS) to the CTI application. The CTI package takes that information, as well as any information collected by an IVR unit, and passes it to the desktop application. The desktop application can then do a lookup of the customer's information and "pop" the appropriate customer record screen at the agent's PC.

With screen pop, contact center agents are able to handle calls more quickly (because they do not need to query the customer for basic information) and provide better service (because customers do not need to re-state information that they may have already provided to an IVR). Screen pop should also be available to any agent who may subsequently join the call, for example, via a transfer or conference operation.

Screen pops have traditionally been accomplished by incorporating custom code that integrates the agent's business application—such as the customer database or CRM system—to the telephony system. Writing such custom code typically requires at least 30 days of a programmer's time, with each deployment of such custom code tailored for the customer environment. While custom coded screen pops allow for ultimate flexibility, consideration should be given to a packaged approach that may meet the same business requirements.

As an alternative to custom coded screen pops, keystroke macro recording can be utilized to allow users to create macros by pressing the appropriate keys in a Windows application and inserting telephony data—such as ANI, DNIS, and caller entered digits—where required. Screen pop applications using this technology then automatically replay these macros when the call arrives or is answered, opening relevant Windows-based applications, customer records, or even fields within a record.

Configurable Solutions versus Custom Solutions

Some may argue that the appeal of a customized solution is that every feature and function can be developed and tuned to address specific site needs. Customized solutions have their advantages, and these benefits may outweigh the additional development time and project costs required. Packaged solutions may be attractive, but not all contact centers have identical needs. So how can a packaged solution be flexible enough to provide maximum value?

A configurable solution addresses these concerns by recognizing that most contact centers share a common set of features and functions. If the features providing this functionality can be configured, but not customized, the contact center can gain the benefit of a more tailored solution.

Take, for example, the case of the soft phone. A "turnkey"—or ready-to-use—soft phone solution simply would require an administrator to consider the rules for operation of the contact center and to translate those rules in a straightforward manner into an administrative interface. This is vastly different from requiring a developer to write code to create soft phone capabilities. The administrator performs the initial configuration quickly and efficiently, and handles change management in the same manner. For example, the administrator considers whether all work groups in the contact center require the same functionality. It is quite possible that some agents could require the ability to redirect a call to another answering resource, while the administrator might want to limit this feature for other agent groups. A configurable system allows the administrator to do this using a Windows framework rather than by writing custom code.

Screen pop setup and administration provides another example of the advantages of a configurable solution over a custom solution. To generate a screen pop application in a configurable solution, the administrator uses a Windows framework to instruct the application on when the screen should pop:

The administrator then considers the various screens that should appear and the circumstances under which they should appear. For example, if the DNIS is 8001, the caller's menu selection is "2" and the customer has provided their account number, then the master order screen for the customer should pop. The Administrator creates a rule with these requirements and specifies an action sequence to pop the appropriate screen. Again, all of this can take place in an administrator screen, rather than at the code level.

Key Features of a Simplified Computer Telephony Integration Solution

While there are significant benefits to a simplified CTI solution, those benefits are only achieved if the solution incorporates the specific features that the contact center requires. As noted earlier, a custom CTI solution makes any feature or function possible, but consideration should be given to the expense, development time, and risk involved with custom development. Simplified CTI solutions based on packaged, configurable software do not provide the flexibility of a custom solution, but must provide certain important features that can enhance productivity and improve customer satisfaction.

The first requirement that the CTI solution must meet is the ability to provide a screen pop to the agent's desktop. Again, this functionality has greater benefit if it can be delivered reliably, without a custom coded screen pop solution. The screen pop must integrate into a variety of agent desktop environments, including CRM databases, help-desk packages, server-based databases, sales force automation programs, personal information managers (PIMs), contact managers, word processors, spreadsheets, customized inquiry systems, or a combination of these applications. The application must be able to reside on the user's personal computer, a LAN server, mini-computer, or mainframe. If these requirements can be met using higher level keystroke macros, then the simplified solution merits consideration over the custom solution.

Next, the simplified solution must include a configurable soft phone that incorporates the key functionality expected from a soft phone. These features must include full call control (Answer/Drop, Hold/Release, Make Call, Transfer, Conference, Redirect), as well as productivity tools such as user-managed telephone directories to make outbound calls, transfers, and conferences. Other features that enhance the value of the soft phone application include the ability for agents to communicate with each other via text chat while on a conference call with a customer. Agents should also have the ability to send text messages to their supervisors. In addition, if the soft phone can provide user-defined task automation buttons, that will further enhance the productivity that the soft phone can deliver.

Finally, a simplified solution must include supervisory features, enabling lead agents or other supervisors to observe agents and to improve agent performance, resulting in enhanced customer satisfaction. For example, the supervisor application must have the ability to view agents in their current state—for instance, supervisors should know that Agent 2001 is on a conference call with Agent 2010 and one customer. This at-a-glance view provides supervisors with quick feedback on the activity in the contact center at that moment in time. Additionally, supervisors should have the ability to communicate with agents via text chat. This chat capability should allow supervisors to send a message to a single agent or to a group of agents. Supervisors should also be able to set a "marquee" message—a message that scrolls across each agent's individual PC screen—alerting all agents to a point of particular interest, such as high call volumes, end of month specials, company meetings, and the like.

Additionally, supervisors must have the ability to listen in on agent conversations with customers to monitor the quality of service that the agent is providing. Supervisors should also have the ability—when necessary—to join the call that he or she is monitoring (this is also known as "barge-in") to provide guidance or additional assistance. In extremely urgent situations, supervisors should have the ability to join the call and force the agent to drop out of the call (this is also known as "intercept").

Ease of Administration

In order to ensure the success of a simplified CTI solution, ongoing administrative and maintenance tasks must be as easy to accomplish as the initial deployment. The solution's administrative interface must be presented in business terms—as opposed to a programming language—so that technicians and contact center managers can provide ongoing service, rather than a programming or IT team. This capability gives contact center management the control to make changes—such as adding applications, changing parameters, or modifying workflow—when they need them, thereby decreasing IT dependency and increasing efficiency at the contact center level. This capability is particularly critical for small to mid-sized contact centers where IT and telecom resources may be limited.

Administrators must be able to use a Windows interface to make changes to soft phone features and behavior. Additionally, administrators should use the same interface to make adjustments to the screen pop application, or to create new screen pops or other workflow automation. The administrator must be able to create and manage workgroups from the administrative application. Finally, the administrator should be able to manage the dial plan from the administrative interface.

In addition to providing a Windows-based administrative framework, the simplified CTI solution should allow for centralized administration, enabling administrators to make changes only once and automatically populate those changes to any affected agent desktop.

Deployment Considerations

While custom CTI development provides a solution designed to meet an organization's unique requirements, it does require organizations to invest time and resources in addition to those that are required to deploy and maintain the initial solution. Organizations that can predict a substantial savings through CTI, however, can afford such projects.

A simplified CTI solution provides a packaged alternative that lowers the barrier of entry, provides a substantial set of functions, and allows rapid deployment. The customer begins with a clear idea of what the package can and cannot do. Deployment at the desktop happens quickly. The customer begins to recognize a return on investment more quickly. Because its functions and telephony integration capabilities are pre-loaded, pre-tested, and pre-configured, a simplified CTI solution can be deployed and operational in about one week. Moreover, deployment can be done by technicians rather than developers or engineers.

Maintenance Considerations

Once installed, a CTI solution is dependent on the applications that it is integrated with to remain constant. Any change to these applications may require the integration to be adjusted, or worse, rewritten altogether. As we know, change is inevitable. New versions of software are released with new features, new functionality, and new architectures. Customers are encouraged to upgrade to get the latest features and the best support. How can a CTI solution keep up?

A simplified CTI solution provides the answer. By using keystroke macros as the integration point, administrators can modify, edit, or simply re-record a macro to keep the integration current with the latest applications. As long as the user can navigate the application through the keyboard, a macro can be written to automate this task. Simplified CTI saves the organization from concerning itself with ongoing CTI maintenance costs and delays—allowing them to take advantage of the latest software with confidence that their CTI solution will continue to deliver important benefits to their organization.

Summary

As customers increasingly interact with companies via channels such as the telephone, the Internet, fax, and e-mail, the contact center is evolving into a strategic business function designed to generate revenue by enhancing customer relationships.

CTI enables a company to deliver consistent, high-quality service across multiple contact channels and geographically-distributed resources based on a caller's profile as well as business rules. By determining a customer's needs and preferences before a call leaves the network, selecting the most appropriate resource to service each request, and delivering profile and transaction data to the agent desktop before the call arrives, CTI eliminates re-routing and re-stating—improving contact center efficiencies, lowering costs, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Despite the clear benefits of CTI, contact center management often views CTI as out of their reach. No doubt, the perception of CTI as a custom integration effort has been true in the past, however there is an alternative. A simplified CTI solution can provide the specific features required for enhanced agent productivity, improved customer service, and reduced operational costs, without the custom integration traditionally associated with CTI implementations.

The simplified solution must incorporate important soft phone, screen pop, and supervisory features. Just as important, the solution must make these features accessible and configurable by an administrator, rather than by a programmer.

Finally, the simplified CTI solution must be easy to deploy. It must integrate with the contact center environment quickly and easily, and allow contact center administrators and technicians—rather than developers and engineers—to install and configure the solution successfully. This decreases the contact center's dependency on IT staff and enables call centers to reduce costs and improve efficiency at the contact center level.

Simplified CTI solutions do exist. The simplified CTI solution will not offer the flexibility available in a custom CTI solution, but it will offer the robust, feature-rich functionality that many contact centers require, while adding the benefits of quick time to market and ease of maintenance. Contact centers that are looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction, increase agent productivity, and reduce operating costs can find the answer today in a simplified CTI solution.

Simplified CTI solutions are available today from Cisco Systems^®. For more information, contact a Cisco^® sales representative or visit http://www.cisco.com .

1 Pelorus Group, 1999.