The call center that built ...

We have - strictly American phones for customers, several support teams scattered around the world, and we don’t have time at all (“yesterday!”). It is urgent to bring the mountain to Magomeds.



In fact, everything is not as simple as (now) looks from the outside. Just imagine - the client is calling the call center, preferably a toll-free number that is never busy, hoping to hear something useful, probably press some buttons, and if you're lucky, get to the person who will help, and if not it will help, anything can happen - or not this person, or does not understand - then in karma, or rating, how lucky.



Those. need to:

1. Find and connect an American toll-free toll-free number, and not just a number, but a serial number with unlimited capacity of incoming calls so that it is never occupied
2. In some cunning way, bring it to Russia, Europe, China or somewhere else, maybe tomorrow to New Zealand, or Argentina, you never know
3. Find and set up something that will tell the utility to the client on the phone, carefully listen to him pressing the buttons, or, better, wishes in an ordinary human voice
4. This is something that will communicate with the client, in some tricky way, should, after all communications, connect the client with the person who will help, i.e. with anyone to succeed, but with the right
5. For order, and everybody loves order, you need to record all the conversations, little-if, suddenly, someone got sick and started swearing is not the case
6. To make everything beautiful, you need to collect some numbers, statistics there, some beautiful reports for the authorities and for yourself.
7. For complete beauty, I want clients after the conversation to tell what, how much, what they liked, what they didn’t, i.e. collect polls
8. I really want it all to be worth less, and run faster, or in general - immediately worked

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Not much for such a simple task? Now we can say with confidence - no, not a lot. Those. some time ago it seemed almost impracticable, yes, but now that passwords, turnout and buzzwords are already known - it is simple. Highly.



The so-called IVR provider, i.e. the very thing that communicates with the client and connects with the right person - Angel.com, and Vonage helped to come to Russia and other places.



So, we buy an account on the Angel, set up a so-called Voice Site, if you need it very quickly - just take a ready-made template and copy it yourself, order boxes from Vonaj (and later it became clear that this is not required either - there is a softphone for all platforms), we connect to the Network and telephone sets, in the Angel we prescribe the telephone numbers of these boxes and - voila, you can work.

IVR provider



Fully web – based interface, very simple, but with the ability to configure the most complex logic, for example, for a particular queue you can have several agents with different qualifications for different products (Skills), and have call routing depending on this qualification, time of day, current agent downloads, and speak to the agent in the phone before he takes the call, who is calling and for what reason.



What is:

• American phone number, regular and toll-free , from Angel's Pool;
  
  if you already have your number, and you want to connect it - you need to negotiate separately;
  
  You can hang as many numbers as you like, but since Angel provides a virtually unlimited number of incoming calls, it makes no sense to get more than two numbers (toll-free and normal, international) no;
• as many voice sites (Voice Site) on one account; paid phone number and incoming minutes;
• touch-tone only (buttons on the phone press) a site or a full-fledged IVR (answer questions or select menu items with a voice; only English is supported) for each site, you cannot mix;
• IVR parameters can be configured for each page;
• already ready pages , with spreading options:
  
  
  
  for example Call Queue Page:
  
  
  
  and Logic Page:
  
  
• agent monitor (sees only its slot in the queue, i.e. can manage calls that have been received specifically on its phone)
  
  
  
  and supervisor (sees all agents and part of reports in turn)
  
  
• in the agent monitor you can view information on the call, checkin / checkout / away,
  
  
  
  and redirect through the Angel (Call Transfer points) to any other agent, a queue or separately registered subscribers (clicked in the monitor where we want to transfer, notified the customer and laid the pipe - Angel does the rest);
  
  the supervisor can do the same, but for any agent in his turn;
• many different alerts (alerts) - to the missed call, to the refusal of some page or script, etc .;
• in addition to the monitor, voice and touch-tone management for agents - checkin / checkout / away / available (log in / log out / retreat / work), listen to mail, etc .;
• at the post – call handlers, you can hang your pages, for example, to record the parameters of the conversation in your own database, or for polls about the quality of the service;
• system and its variables, including private;
• any page can be called directly, or as a hidden option, or for testing;
• Of course, there is voicemail; they send a link to .wav to an email, you can also listen via the interface;
• Record all conversations, again with links to .wav
  
  
• if you don’t want to mess with greetings, or don’t really like text-to-speech, or if you don’t have native speakers, you can order the words you need to say from the Angel;
• reports which can only be thought up: both by queues, by agents, by calls, and by page popularity, but, unfortunately, only in the last 90 days, not more;
• you can collect and store some information on the side of the Angel, for example, the same polls, and receive an ordinary Excel file from there, sent every day by email, well, or how to set it up;
• Any wonderful things like Whisper, when Angel talks the engineer with the ticket number (text-to-speech), the customer’s first / last name and other useful things into the receiver, even before the engineer confirms that he will speak with this customer;
• well developed API ; already have integration with SalesForce ;

Of the shortcomings of the Angel, you can probably mention the English interface, and that you can write in the agent slot the American numbers (and even these ), but not the Russian ones. SIP and other wonders of civilization are not supported. Also, only unique numbers can be in the same queue (that is, you cannot buy a series, and register all agents for one number).



Support works by default only during US working hours, but self-service is quite good (although some articles are already out of date), plus you can buy 24x7 support. The speed of response is not Schumacher, but because most of the problems are not critical, then you can suffer.

VoIP provider



Vonage is a box the size of an ADSL modem or switch, with one Ethernet port and two RJ-11s:





We buy on the site, receive by mail (about a week), connect to our network, allow the firewall to go out, turn on - the box connects to where it needs, and we get two full-fledged American lines in RJ-11. Easier does not happen.



Again, a web-based control panel and a bunch of features:

• American phone number in almost any state;
• Call Forwarding (non-response timeout call forward),
• Call Hunt (a simple round robin hunt group for non-response or busy timeout)
• Bandwidth Saver (30, 50 or 90 kbps per telephone line),
• Caller Waiting (you can see / hear another incoming call, as in a regular cellular),
• Voicemail (send the link to the .wav file to the email)
• International calling (there are very good tariff plans without restrictions - for ~ 140 dollars you can call around the world without restrictions, in general)

Because Most of the functions are already set up on the Angel, now everything is turned off except Caller ID Block, so that the most intelligent customers will not call back to direct numbers when someone from the engineers is concerned. This is not because we are so angry, but for the order - all incoming calls are strictly through SCC.



In fact, you can buy Vonaj for yourself, put it at home, and have the most ordinary American line here in Russia.



As elsewhere, the problems were yes, but only because of their own curved hands. Now everything is set up and works like a clock.



The support responds instantly during American working hours. Over the past year they have been treated twice.

Now not so many engineers are working at the same time as in many Consumers Call Centers a – la cellular operators (only a few hundred thousand), but the system is scaled and deployed very easily. Using Vonage allows you to easily and quickly add new agents / engineers or entire sites, no matter what country or city, the main thing is that there is a normal Internet channel (90k for each telephone line in the best quality, or 30k for the “worst” quality) and place for boxes. In the simplest case, a regular telephone is connected, configured on the Angel and the agent is already running.



So, Vonage can, if desired, be replaced with a T1 stream (buy from an American telecom provider), and receive calls from Angel directly to Tsisku, bypassing the analog-to-digit conversion, on the Vonage – Cisco site. You can immediately in the city where communication is required, for example, in Moscow. But we must understand that to bring the flow of T1-E1 (in Europe and Russia, other alarms, unlike the States) will cost a lot of money. And why, if you have softphones?



The most remarkable thing about this scheme is that everything is ordered without leaving the office, and it is set up by an IT housewife (if you exclude Ziska from the scheme), and does not require any special knowledge in telecom, call centers or voip. It just works.