Call center solutions

A Call Center is a business location that distributes a large volume of inbound or outbound calls to a group of agents or voice response systems. The goal of the Call Center is to provide the best possible service to its customers at the lowest possible cost, i.e., to minimize customer waiting time and maximize agent productivity. The Call Center architecture must be flexible enough to deal efficiently with peaks in offered volume, to provide the necessary data to manage Call Center operations effectively, and to add new customer services without significant changes to the existing architecture. As the range of services becomes more complex, the architecture must also support new elements, such as voice response units (VRUs), host interfaces, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) interfaces, and multi-site Call Center networking. We describe the basic elements of Call Center architecture, focusing primarily on premises-based solutions. We illustrate Call Center configurations using the integrated private branch exchange/ automatic call distribution (PBX/ACD) feature of AT&T's Definity® communications system. We highlight the current and future benefits of ISDN, which promises both to improve customer service and reduce costs.