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Getting the Most from your Phone System

As Computers and Communications Converge

By Tom Porter

The phone rings. You reach to answer it. You wonder who is it? What do I know about them?

You answer the phone and rack your brain to remember who this customer is and what they last bought. The meter’s running, your customer is waiting, and you’re trying to look up your customer’s records in your database.

If you’re wondering if there’s a better way, there is. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is transforming the way people use their telecommunication systems and provides the foundation for call center technology. Here’s how it works.

Your telephone system picks up the customer’s phone number as they dial in to talk to you. Using that as a key, it executes a database lookup to pull the customer’s records from your customer files. As the phone call rings through to your desk, your PC screen ‘pops’ up with the customer’s records. From the first hello, you know who you’re talking to, what the last transaction with them was, and can begin immediately answering the customer’s current need.

And for the call center operation, today’s technology can also automatically route a customer’s call to the next available agent. Lucent Technologies Definity(R) Call-Switching System serves as the heart of the center offering call handling applications in numerous languages and dialects.

Recently, Lucent announced a new generation of call centers that allows customers to browse the Internet and speak to an agent to place orders or ask questions and do both

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simultaneously on a single phone line. Small business customers, for example, can now design and order a customized Partner (R) Advanced Communications System (up to 40 lines) by simply clicking on several choices on its web site — www.lucentdirect.com.

More than a simple convenience, the convergence of communications and computers pays real dollar dividends in cost savings, customer satisfaction, and increased revenues. With many businesses today servicing their customers on toll free lines, every extra moment on line is costing you money. By knowing who you’re talking to from the moment you pick up the phone, with the records right in front of you, you save those precious seconds spent looking them up while your customer holds. For companies that do a lot of business by phone, those seconds can add up quickly.

More importantly, customers get the kind of quality experience that keeps them coming back for more. How often have you had a customer identify themselves and you didn’t remember them? Customers and business partners appreciate being remembered and valued, and with the customer records in front of you on your computer screen when you pick up the phone you can build business relationships that last.

Best of all, with rapport established more quickly the customer, most businesses find their opportunities for selling increase. One business found that its time on the phone didn’t change at all? but sales increased 33 percent! Why? By knowing the customer and establishing rapport faster, sales representatives were able to suggest other products that fit the customers profile. And customers bought.

But CTI really is just the forefront of a business trend commonly called convergence. Convergence is the growing integration and synergy between telecommunications and computers. There are plenty of other examples of it, the Internet being one of the most common. Using the worldwide phone network, computers around the world are letting businesses and consumers communicate like never before, with both the visual medium of a computer, and the personal touch of voice.

With the snowballing popularity of the Internet, and the growing business use of Intranets, it pays to think ahead about how to meet all your communications needs, both voice and data. If you don’t, then you can end up solving the communications problem twice, once for voice, once for data, as well as missing the opportunities and cost savings that bringing them together can provide.

And as if solving today’s business problems wasn’t enough, there’s the continuing

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challenge of reading the technology tea leaves to be prepared for the technology that will give you competitive advantage tomorrow.

Internet telephony, for instance, is starting to appear on the horizon. With the promise of avoiding costlier long distance charges, and letting businesses leverage their existing Internet and Intranet connections, Internet telephony is poised to reshape the way we make phone calls. Companies that depend upon the telephone risk being undercut by more fleet-footed competitors that knew where to apply the new technology to cut costs.

Multimedia conferencing and collaboration is another area that’s seeing exploding growth. The technology to let you both talk to, and share documents live with someone around the corner, or around the world is available today. While your competitor is faxing a proposal over to the prospective client, you could be talking to them, and showing them your proposal on their computer screen, editing in their requested changes as you talk. By the time you hang up, they’ve seen and approved the final document.

These are exciting times in the world of communications — and for business people who use the innovations that are emerging — Video, Internet fax and integrated messaging, to name a few. More than ever, your communications system is your lifeline to your customers, and it pays to make sure yours will survive the next technology wave.

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(Tom Porter is a Lucent Technologies area general manager overseeing sales of telecommunications equipment for large business customers in Southern California. For more information, or a hands-on demonstration of Lucent products, call 1-800-247-7000.)

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