CB's Web Log

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Beyond interactive voice response - connecting data and voice communication channels

Connecting a voice and a data channel in the context of a customer interaction is a fundamental challenge for call center technology.

Attaching a data channel (IM, Screen-Sharing, Web-Sharing, Video) to an already established conventional phone call requires manual interaction by the customer. The agent needs to provide a "session ID" to the customer, so that the customer can initiate the data session (using the web browser or a custom software e.g. for screen sharing) and by providing the session ID he will be able connect it to the existing voice session, i.e. route the data connection to the agent who is already talking with him on the phone.

The more elegant alternative is to establish both connections at once. Through the web browser or custom software the customer requests a combined session. The session request needs to be routed through an ACD engine in the call center. As soon as an agent is available, the data connection is established. Then a unique phone number for the session is generated for the customer, the customer calls this phone number and is directly connected to the agent. Alternatively the customer has supplied a call-back number with his session request and is now automatically called back. The third and most elegant option is using the existing data connection for voice with VoIP.

If an agent needs to refer the caller to someone else, the data channel should be handed over together with the voice call.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Staff meetings

Two things to ask from time to time:
1. If you had my authority in the organization, what changes would you make right now?
2. What am I doing that gets in the way of you doing your best work here?

How many times over should you pay for software?

"No on-demand customer pays simply for the privilege of accessing the software. They pay because the software delivers business results. The traditional applications software industry's products don't actually work until they've been tweaked and customized by customers or partners, and therefore the licence of itself has no out-of-the-box value to the end user. Asking people to pay for the privilege of using the software isn't offering a service, it's taking a liberty. If I'm paying a fee to watch a movie, listen to a song, or use an application, I expect to experience a professional, finished execution. True on-demand application vendors understand this. Conventional software vendors seem to think the world still owes them a living, just for bothering to write some software." (Copyright ©2005 CNET Networks, Inc.)

Sunday, October 30, 2005

"Asking questions instead of arguing is a rhetorical technique that scales very well."

Friday, October 28, 2005

Local Instance Networking by Silver Peak

These appliances are designed to provide high performance IT services to remote offices from a central datacenter, i.e. without having local server infrastructure. Instead of just doing compression and QoS like conventional WAN optimization appliances, Silver Peak goes a step further by analyzing the network traffic on a byte level and by detecting recurring byte patterns. Those byte patterns are cached locally on disks. This is similar to the WAFS approach (wide area file system), however they are not optimizing on the application layer but on the networking / packet layer. They call this approach "Network Memory". They even support high availability deployment (1+1 for N+1 with failover and load-balancing). In addition they support compression, per-application QoS, and "latency and loss mitigation". I have no idea how "latency mitigation" works ... They support inline deployment / bridge mode(between Ethernet LAN and WAN-Router) or out-of-path deployment (router mode) where only some traffic is routed through the appliance.