El Futuro de Mensajes

By Kevin Beale, Director R&D Software, AMTELCO

Los días de mensajes escritos en papel rosa han disaparecido. Actualmente, clientes de centros de llmadas están exigiendo un procesamiento más y más avanzado y inteligente de mensajes. Today's call center clients are demanding more and more sophisticated intelligent message processing. How can our industry keep up with these demands? The call center systems (software and hardware) of our industry have to provide our operators with the intelligent tools they need to meet these demands.

Operators have to be extremely adept at challenging personalities and skills for each call they handle. On one call, they may answer for a small service company to provide after-hours customer service. On another call, they answer for a Fortune 500 company, look up information on their Web site, and place an order for one of their products.

Providers of call center systems essentially become partners in each of their customers' businesses. The success of the call center depends. to a large degree, on how well the system handles their calls, takes messages, and dispatches the messages to the clients. The call center system is a very important point of contact with their clients.

These systems have to be very proficient at gathering information from callers and then quickly dispatching that information to the call center's clients. Dispatching is one area where our industry has changed tremendously. Clients no longer accept having the call center take messages and hold them until they pick them up later in the day. They want the messages immediately. They also want control how they receive the messages based on time of day, their current location, or type of device they may be using. In other words, they want and demand intelligent messaging.

Kelli Harrington of Spectrum Communication Services, Inc., in Brookfield, Wisconsin, had this to say when asked about how messaging and dispatching are evolving;

"Clients call us saying that they just want a basic account (i.e. 'just take a message and call it out') but upon further examination, we find that they usually want to build in exceptions to virtually every rule, and need to be educated as to what their opinions, and capabilities are. We have very few clients where we truly 'just' take a basic message. Our clients' messaging requirements have become more sophisticated, often requiring customized scripting, which can often get very complex. And quite often we are doing more screening for the clients - between spam e-mails, telemarketing calls and the various media, information overload is rampant and this can provide us with ab opportunity to be a 'screener' for some of our clients - allowing them to focus on the things that are important to them, and we take care of the rest.

All of this, in turn, requires us to be constantly vigilant in out training and our programming of accounts - to strive to make things as consistent as possible for training purposes while still meeting the customization needs of our clients. With regards to dispatching, our clients today ar also more used to instant messaging, e-mail, etc., so they expect that every action we should take should be immediate, which, on our part, requires us to automate as much as possible to eliminate operator time spent reading through instructions, and to eliminate potential operator error.

To address these needs, Spectrum Communication Services is using the Infinity and eCreator call center systems from AMTELCO, Infinity and eCreator provide Spectrum Communications Services with the toolkit they need to meet the unique needs of each of their clients.

Some of the critical pieces of a messaging call center toolkit include:

• Message scripting - scripting the message-taking process has become increasingly important using message templates and forms, controlling the flow of gathering information for a message. This process is becoming more and more sophisticated with the introduction of branching, database lookups, and validation of information. Flexibility and ease-of-use are the keys here.
• Operator dispatching - after a message is taken, it must be dispatched to the client. Very often this is handled by your operators who make decisions about the best method to dispatch the message. Providing your operators with the information they need to select the best dispatching method and the ability to quickly perform the action is a critical piece of your toolkit.
• Automated dispatching - the dispatching of messages to many clients can be automated. This reduces the burden on your operators by allowing the system to handle the dispatching process.
• On-call scheduling - many clients assign coverage for various departments based on the time of day, or day of the week. You need to be able to quickly locate who to reach for each situation. Automated on-call scheduling is a great tool to manage dispatching messages to these clients. An automated on-call schedule can display who a message should be dispatched to and allow the operator to quickly contact the person.
• Automated reminders and follow-up - dispatch attempts are not always successful. CLients are not always reached on the first attempt. In these situations, your messaging system needs to provide automated reminders to assist the operators, with following up on the dispatching process to ensure that the client gets the message in a timely manner.
• Flexible dispatch methods - it seems like every day a new device is introduced. Clients expect their call center to be able to send messages to their new devices. THe devices include pagers, cellular phones with Web and e-mail support, PC's with Web and e-mail, PDA's, and many more.
• IVR (Interactive Voice Response) - many calls that are currently handled by operators can be automated with IVR scripting. This can reduce the burden on your operators and allow them to focus on the tasks that require operator involvement. Look for IVR tools like call scripting, text-to-speech, and speech recognition.

The future of messaging is strong. A human touch will always be required. Our industry will continue to grow as long as we stay flexible. Now go and take an intelligent message.

For more information on Infinity and eCreator, contact AMTELCO at (800)356-9148, visit www. amtelco.com, or send an email to info@amtelco.com.