CRM solutions

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions facilitate firms to create the customer relationship needed to uncover new business opportunities and enhance client service.

Core Competencies

The solutions are designed to provide the knowledge needed to develop effective customer strategies and maximize customer profitability. CRM solutions deliver the robust functionality needed to achieve maximum return on customer relationships. Giving accurate and timely information is of extreme significance to call centre operations. CRM solutions are ideally suited for call centres. These solutions have increased the productivity of CSRs while providing a reliable presentation of their critical product and customer information.

The CRM software has the power and flexibility to manage virtually any call centre operation, no matter how large or small. Starting with database and development tools, the software contains a CRM application including telephony and web integration and a complete call centre phone system.

Advantages of CRM Solutions

IVR Systems

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System is designed to provide easy to configure automated call handling systems that can be tailored to individual needs. This comprehensive system leads to distribution of routing information with the help of FAX or pre-recorded voice messages.

It includes services like:

It is also very handy in reducing fatigue, increasing efficiency and decreasing time spent by agents in imparting information.

The Working

Organizations who are looking at reducing costs and improving customer service can contract their inbound phone and outbound voice messaging programs at the IVR call centres. The IVR outsourcing services provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace and making the inbound telemarketing services, affordable.

Voice broadcasting clients can download voice recordings and call lists and even manage the start and end of their calling campaigns that operate at the IVR call centre. Users can view call campaign reports and the percentage of completion. To achieve the maximum results from IVR and voice broadcasting phone programs, it is advised to use professional voice recording services. The voice recordings can be produced in minimal time at a professional recording studio.

The IVR Systems offer the following:

Voice Broadcasting and IVR Applications

Features of Comprehensive Voice Message Broadcast

CTI software

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is the advanced technology that serves as the focal point of the working of modern call centres. It integrates the organization's computer and telephone systems and the facilitates effective applications to make every phone call, inbound and outbound.

The Concept

Although the most widely-known CTI application is screen population or screen pop, CTI is also used by other call centre applications including:

The CTI software is a rich set of phone software library routines that enable the application programs to control the phone system. It helps increase employee productivity, enhance customer service and reduce costs by combining the capabilities of phone system with the custom functionality of Windows, Unix or Web applications. Data collected by the phone ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems can be passed to the PC, Unix or Web applications through the phone software.

Features of CTI Software

Products of CTI Software

ACD (Automated Call Distribution)

The Approach

ACD facilitates controlling the distribution of telephone calls coming into the department. ACD systems are call routing utilities for incoming calls and can be even used to route calls originated by the predictive dialer to the next available agent. The staff log in/out of the ACD system as they are available, and the system answers the calls and distributes them. When staff are unavailable, the ACD system holds a call in queue and then forwards it to the first available staff member.

Automatic call distribution is ideal for areas where multiple staff answers a high volume of calls e.g.

Properly managing calls can be key in providing excellent customer service, and the ACD system provides the tools needed to optimally manage incoming calls. Some of the tools an ACD system offers are:

Call Type Priority - The organization can customize the way its staff answers calls using several variables, including the caller's location (on-campus or off-campus, local or long distance) or the purpose of the call (help assistance, appointment scheduling).

Customizable Queue - The organization can record Custom Announcements that callers hear when their call is answered or while they are waiting in the queue. It can also add the Music on Hold feature.

Training Supervision - Supervisors can monitor calls to support employees and evaluate performance.

Call Metrics - The system can capture call statistics (e.g., call volume, length of calls, time in queue, etc.) on a scheduled or an ad hoc basis, allowing to further manage the staffing and call flow.

Almost any business can benefit from an ACD system but they are particularly useful to customer service centres, inbound service bureaus (that may be handling infomercials or direct marketing campaigns) and government agencies.

Features of Automatic Call Distributor

Windows over Web

Windows Over Web (WOW) or the thin client technology brings to the front, a new approach to program and application development. The technology is known as "thin client" technology as it reduces the software resources and computer hardware needed at each individual desktop.

The Understanding

Thin clients use centralized software provided over internal networks to serve a combination of PCs, Windows-based terminals and other network computing resources. Cost savings also result from less frequent desktop servicing requirements caused by software and hardware conflicts or installation problems.

WOW technology greatly helps remote agents and home based support centres. With secure applications, employees can work from remote offices and from the convenience of their homes using the same applications that are running in the office. Thin client technology helps enterprises:

It offers a viable alternative to the desktop PC for many, making access to business data and applications easy, secure and affordable. With a thin-client system, the client sends keystrokes and mouse movements to the server over the network or dial-up connection, and the server sends back changes in the display. Any PC can be a client, but because very little processing is performed at the desktop, businesses can also use low-cost terminals that have no moving parts (no hard drive) and a generally small amount of memory (RAM). Since each client is just a terminal, all data and settings-and even the applications-are on the server. To back up everything for all the users, the organization only needs to back up the server. And for disaster recovery, backups are easier and more centralized, making it easier to take the backups off-site.

Features of WOW/Thin Client Technology

Call recording & Call Monitoring solutions

Call recording and monitoring solutions help to train the agents and improve customer service. They are designed to be a complete call centre solution including Predictive Dialing, ACD, IVR, and Digital Voice Recording.

The Concept

Call recording plays a significant role in the call centres and help monitor agent performance while performing quality assurance tasks. Order entry verification and confirmation can be easily accomplished when the calls are recorded. Call centres can thus, record and retrieve phone conversations in real time. The recording can be customized to meet virtually any set of business rules.

The call recording and monitoring systems are very scalable and flexible Windows-based voice recorders, live monitoring and archiving systems. Besides being fully prepared for all current and future needs, they offer superior voice recording quality and huge recording capacity. By effectively using this software system the organizations can manage:

Telemation campaigns can be developed with call recording enabled on a campaign wide basis as well as per individual agent. This system software may also include Voice Broadcasting System, through which the contacted party can be prompted to leave a recorded message after listening to a message left by the IVR phone system. This message recording feature greatly improves the productivity of call centre agents while adding flexibility to the calling campaigns.

The features of call recording and call monitoring can also be added to the Computer Telephony (CTI) Softphone and API library, allowing application programmers to embed call recording and retrieval features in existing PC, Linux/Unix, or Web applications. Call recording can thus, be a standard feature within any existing application that requires a phone interface.

Features of Call Recording and Monitoring Solutions

Predictive dialing

Predictive-dialer is a computer based dialogic predictive dialing system that handles inbound and outbound phone calls for small to large call centres. It brings about cost savings, improved control, maximized productivity and efficient use of resources.

The Understanding

The system automatically dials the telephone for telemarketers and connects only the live voice contacts. It does this by listening and filtering out the answering machines, busy signals, operator intercepts and other types of non-functional calls. Telemarketers no longer waste time dialing numbers or listening to no answers - all they do is talk to prospects. A complex mathematical formula (predictive algorithm) is used that predicts when each telemarketer becomes available, allowing the telemarketers to flow seamlessly from one call to the next. Calls are either initiated by the phone system or accepted from the outside and distributed in an intelligent fashion to service agents using ACD systems. The process thus, improves the telemarketing production as it doubles the amount of contacts telemarketers make per day.

Functioning

A predictive-dialer performs all telephone line switching, dialing and call progress function inside electronic hardware designed specifically for predictive dialing. This allows custom tailor functions for maximum performance to increase call centre productivity. It is a feature where outbound calls from a user selected list are automatically initiated and answered calls are passed to available service agents. The predictive dialing algorithm determines the average time taken to get a live answer and the average length of each conversation.

The Predictive Dialers are extensively used for:

Features of Predictive Dialing

Soft phone

SoftPhone is an ideal solution for employees who are out of the office frequently traveling on business, workers that work both at home and in the office as well as those who require the interaction of data with their work such as a remote ACD agents.

Soft Phone includes features like:

Functioning

The softphone functions on the Local Area Network (LAN) over the Internet, enabling the employees to work either in corporate offices, satellite remote offices or from the convenience of home.

The soft phone system can be used to generate real time reports and graphsis important measuring system helps erve and control the performancecall centre and phone system with clear and meaningful displaysaphs and charts of operational statistics help to measure the effectiveness of each user campaign. Reports and graphs include both inbound and outbound statistics.

Features of Softphone

Text to speech software

Text-to-Speech software is used to convert words from a computer document (e.g. word processor document, web page) into audible speech spoken through the computer speaker.

The Understanding

The text to speech software reads text words with different voices that can be chosen. The text words may be on the screen, in the clipboard, from a text file or other source. The technology synthesizes natural sounding speech from ordinary text. The text can just be copied to the clipboard or imported from text files. The software then reads the text to the user or converts the text to mp3 or wav file. It also allows the conversion of text into a MP3/WAV audio file that can be listened later.

Call centres in particular can become instantly more productive by letting the phone system provide the caller with information and by determining the best service representative to handle other requests.

Applications of Text-To-Speech software:

Voice recognition

Voice recognition software allows the system to recognize keywords or phases from a caller. Voice recognition is an excellent application to aid callers who do not have access to the touchtone keypad or are using rotary phones.

The Concept

Enhanced voice-recognition functionality promises lower call-centre costs facilitates the call-centre agents to handle only those calls that require human intervention. There are multiple types of voice recognition such as:

It makes a voiceprint of customers' voices and enables the call centre to automatically recognize customers each time they call. This is done once the call centre has programmed the voices into the system. Instead of pressing prompts on a telephone keypad, the customer can speak requests and the system can automate them, lessening the burden on call-centre representatives. An administrator sets tolerance thresholds that will alert a call-centre agent should a person fall below the threshold of probability, adding another layer of security to customer accounts.

Voice recognition systems help machines understand a caller's voice and extract meaning from the words. Callers do not have to say specific words such as 'collect' or 'refund' for the technology to understand the meaning of the caller's request. The machine gets a transcription of the text of the customer's request and attempts to classify the request. Depending on the caller's need, help could be provided by a human agent or an interactive voice response system.

Programmable/soft switches

Programmable switches are becoming increasingly important weapons used by Internet telephony providers to bridge the gap between IP and circuit-switched protocols.

The Concept

Programmable switches operate seamlessly within traditional network infrastructure and provide a path for transmission between two communication devices and the routing of information between them.

Programmable switches serve as flexible solutions for network operators. They are the Multi-Protocol-Application for intelligent networks and are applicable as gateway and for conversion of protocols. With these switches, customization can be done on an application-by-application basis, thereby giving service providers the ability to differentiate their service from the competition quickly and cost effectively.

Through openness and configurability, programmable switches have the versatility to provide a platform for multi-service applications. They offer a superior return on investment owing to their excellent price performance and enable more capacity. Thus, a service provider can support larger subscriber population-and consequently, receive greater revenue per configuration. These programmable switches are flexible and adaptable and thus deliver a greater versatility of function per system.