The Future | Toll Free & Long Distance Services

You’ll find information about the coming together of call centers and the Internet. It’s impossible to leave the subject of buying telecom transmission services without saying something about what the Internet revolution will do to call centers.

Though I’ve focused on three carriers here, there are dozens more that provide advanced networking services to large businesses that include call centers. We are poised on the edge of a new networking world, one in which a bewildering array of higher bandwidth networks will be available for piping into your center. Frame relay,

ATM, xDSL, ISDN, all sorts of IP permutations — they are strange, and the market economics haven’t been worked out yet. I don’t know yet what combinations of voice and data traffic will win out, and which carriers will offer what two or five years down the road.

What I do know is that, as the pipe grows thicker and stronger and more varied, the cost of each individual call gets lower and lower. As I said before, it’s going to be the value-added services that differentiate carriers. It’s going to be harder to tell who is a carrier, as data networking melds with telecom. And it’s certain that some form of digitized packet-based traffic will be part of even the most traditional network, driving costs down and opening up new international dialing vistas. The moral: don’t box yourself in, get the best deal you can and prepare to turn on a dime when someone offers you something cheaper or throws a killer application on top of their core service.

What They Offer | Toll Free & Long Distance Services

In previous editions of this handbook, I detailed precise product offerings from the three main carriers. I’m not going to do that this time out, and here’s why. Information like that changes so rapidly that there’s no guarantee that they won’t have changed a brand name, feature set or pricing schedule by the time this book gets into your hands.

Instead, what you’ll find here are broad brush outlines of what kinds of things you can do with their services. Please don’t beat me up if you try to buy these services from the carriers and they’ve changed some from the way they’re presented here. For more details about exactly what they do offer, I recommend visiting their websites. In general here, I’m going to refer to these services as toll free, because that’s what call centers are most interested in. This isn’t a bias against outbound-based centers, it’s just a fact that inbound call routing is more complicated, a more feature-rich set of tools, and because it’s more expensive, you have to work harder to get exactly the right deal.

AT&T. AT&T has the most to lose in any competition for long distance or toll free services. By ridding themselves of Lucent, they said to the world that what they wanted to be was a transmission company, once again a true carrier rather than a phone systems company. And they did that after seeing exactly how cutthroat and expensive a battle for market share can be. So they must really mean it.

One of the more interesting things they’ve come out with is called Transfer Connect with Data Forwarding. Data Forwarding uses ISDN technology along with computer telephony integration to let your agents forward each customer’s data along with their calls. It lets the agent or voice response system that initially receives the call forward the customer information to the receiving agent. This information can range from name, address and account number, or application-specific data like frequent flier information, insurance plan specifics or personal IDs. The data instantly pops up on the receiving rep’s desktop.

They also offer Enhanced Announcements — essentially the ability to use the network to pepper your holding callers with promotional information. This is just one small way to use the power of the carrier network to manage calls. AT&T has tools that route calls based on caller input (what they call Recognition Routing), and those that let you balance loads between centers for optimum staffing.

Quick Call Allocator lets you make changes as often as necessary: routing percentage changes can take effect within five minutes, and your customers won’t experience any service interruptions. This feature is especially useful for call centers that have traffic patterns or staffing levels that constantly change — despite frequent fluctuations, Quick Call Allocator lets you maintain a superior level of customer service.

There are packages that let you route by time of day, geographic origin of the call (down to the exchange), and countless custom preferences that you set and reset any time you like.

Next Agent Available Routing lets you reroute toll free calls to up to 99 alternate locations if the primary location is “busy.” If the primary location is busy, calls are instantly rerouted to the first available termination, decreasing customer “on-hold” waiting time. You can customize NAAR to match your call volume needs: you determine what is considered a “busy” location by defining the Maximum Calls Allowed (MCA). You can set this value in advance and override it at any time. When the MCA threshold is met, all toll free calls will be automatically rerouted to an available termination.

With Network Queuing, you can automatically queue calls without investing in any additional equipment. This feature allows your call center to optimize call distribution and improve call completion rates. Calls can be queued for multiple call centers or for locations with a single queue. Network Queuing can help boost sales by preventing customer hang-ups and increasing call completion rates. Of course, you can do this with premise technology built off the ACD, so you have to plan in advance where you want your call control to be handled.

Sprint. Sprint’s basic toll free offerings are designed for companies whose calls terminate at one location. They are pretty basic, but they’ll suit the vast majority of single-site small- and mid-sized call centers. You get things like DNIS and ANI call identification popped to the agent screen. (A simple thing that can shorten calls by 10 to 20 seconds, and when you add that up, call after call, multiplied by dozens or hundreds of agents, that’s a lot of money.)

You can distribute calls across a trunk group (very rudimentary), and designate a secondary location for calls to terminate in case of overflow. Sprint also offers a Carrier Diversity program that helps manage and coordinate service provided by multiple carriers through a single point-of-contact. You can allocate calls to carriers by percentages you set or based on location, time of day, day of week and day of year. (Very sporting of them.)

More advanced service includes what they call Network Call Distributor, a sort of virtual call center facilitator. NCD collects activity information from each ACD in your system every 20 to 60 seconds. It then uses that information to automatically route your toll free calls to the best location at that time. They have another, similar feature that’s for Call Allocation, distributing calls to your toll free number across locations. You specify a percentage of the calls for each location, matching your call volume to each location’s capabilities.

SiteRP is something that’s been around since the early ‘90s, and it was revolutionary when they first came out with it. It lets you route your toll free calls on a call-by-call basis. You define the parameters, customizing the routing system to your specific needs. With SiteRP, you can identify new callers or repeat customers and route each to an agent trained to handle their individual needs. It was revolutionary because it was one of the very first times the carriers allowed call centers to manipulate the network themselves, using their local premise equipment. It was, in fact, a strong competitive feature until the others came out with similar services. This was the first sign that adding intelligence to the carrier network was a way around the free fall in per-minute pricing that went on through the 1990s.

MCI. MCI’s Enhanced Call Routing (ECR) product line provides automated voice response, voice processing, and call routing. It’s their network-based call handling service, and it doesn’t differ a great deal from those offered by the other carriers.

Since coming together with WorldCom, they have been much more active in connecting their data and voice networks, and creating odd and interesting service offerings based on that, than they have on upgrading their standard voice-only toll free and long distance services.

With MCI’s offerings you can move in baby steps from a call center with technology that is exclusively on-site to a call center with virtually no technology on-site. In between you can have some of your functions based in the network, while others are based in equipment on-premises.

MCI also offers extensive outsourcing and service bureau capabilities. From total management of a large call center to on-call service for weekend or holiday traffic, they can handle a variety of application sizes. Available services include direct response, customer service, help desk, order entry and fulfillment.

Toll Free & Long Distance Services | Call Center

After the center’s physical parameters are set, and the agents are hired, the most important element (at least from an ongoing cost standpoint) is the pipeline into the center. The toll free and long distance services that you choose will be so expensive, and yet so rich with features and possibilities, that it’s imperative that you choose carefully, and that you revisit your decision again and again for as long as the center operates.

Toll free service was once amazingly simple. You had one company to buy from, and very little leverage in the kinds of pricing plans and service offerings you could get. By very little, I mean: none. Companies didn’t begin to build call centers until there was a cost-effective means of making nationwide toll free calls, roughly thirty-some-odd years ago.

Wide Area Telephone Service, originally an AT&T creation, was the first iteration of toll free. It discounted long distance service, put the cost onus on the called party, and so began our journey down the call center road.

With divestiture and long distance competition, there were naturally more choices and the price of call center telecom began slowly to descend. And then, in the early 1990s, just as the three main long distance companies competed fiercely in a very public battle for the home consumer long distance market, a not-so-public but just as vicious fight for the call center market heated up, too. It was helped along by resellers and aggregators, which are essentially secondary marketers of long distance service. Resellers would buy bulk minutes from phone companies at a tremendous discount, and resell them at a very small profit margin, making money on the spread. Aggregators would combine the telecom traffic generated by lots of small companies until they were able to go to a phone company and commit to buy big packages of minutes, hence qualifying for the same deep discounts the telcos gave to their largest customers.

All these things worked to drive the cost of a long distance or toll free minute down past 10 cents, in some cases to as low as five. Of course, things are never as simple as they seem.

You almost never buy telecom minutes just bare — they are just the beginning of the process. It’s all in the value-add. What’s a long distance package without some kind of service assurance policy, for example, or without network reliability guarantees?

Or better yet, would you pay more per minute if the carrier let you manipulate the network according to your own traffic needs? Routing calls here for one reason, there for another — that’s a pretty powerful ability and they all have it.

What about being able to hold calls in the network, instead of queuing them up in your ACD? Or park them in the carrier network, while the net queries the ACDs at several centers to determine which one has the right person to answer the call? You can do that too. The more complex the routing dynamic, the more likely it is that you’ll have to go to someone other than the carrier for the actual software that makes it work, but the carriers are now eager to help hook you up. (They were not always so eager; phone companies tend to be less than far-sighted, as technology companies go.)

The carriers have also experimented, with mixed results, with services that actually perform transaction processing, even fax processing, in the network. It’s like having an outsourcer handle your calls and your transactions, but there’s no actual outsourced center; it all happens automatically.

They want you to take advantage of a lot of these advanced services, whether or not they provide the mechanics, because quite frankly, call centers are a gigantic consumer of telecom minutes. The more time your callers spend hanging out in their networks, the better off they are.

Add to that one other critical reason. If you posit the notion that long distance and toll free are pretty much the same from carrier to carrier, that Sprint, MCI and AT&T are all equally reliable, clear, inexpensive and available, then what keeps you from hopping from one to another at the drop of a hat? They hook you by getting you to buy ancillary services. I can foresee a day when the value-added services are more important to the carriers than the presentation of transmission minutes, and they end up giving the minutes away to their best customers as a loss leader. Especially when we enter a world with packetized networks and all sorts of alternative transmission methods that reduce the actual cost of moving a call from here to there to effectively zero.

So what was once simple — buy on price — has become complicated. But wait, there’s complexity on another level. Until 1993, if there was a particular phone number that you wanted to have in the 800 toll free code, you had to buy service from the carrier that had custody of that number. You had no freedom to change carriers and bring your number with you — if you had significant brand equity built into your number (800-CAR-RENT, for example, or 800-MATTRESS), you were stuck.

Until 1993. That was the year that 800 Portability reorganized the way 800 numbers were given out, and changed the whole dynamic of how you acquire and route 800 numbers. Portability meant (and still means) that you have custody of your toll free number. You can keep it if you want to change carriers. This, of course, gives the carriers added incentive to serve you better, to offer more interesting features in their toll free networks to keep you as a customer, now that you’re not a hostage.

Remember also: they need your business. Call centers are monster consumers of toll free and long distance service. They will make deals with you. If they do not serve you well, you can and should leave. In fact, you should absolutely have arrangements with at least two out of the three main carriers for your core service. At a minimum, that protects you against service outages. But it also allows you to compare, month by month, the offerings and prices they charge.

At first there was a lot of concern (generated by AT&T, in part) that portability would cause degradation of service (especially longer call set up times) because each call to a toll free number has to be passed along a more complicated pathway to query a database and determine which carrier routes it before it can be connected. Happily, those problems never materialized. Portability became part of the competitive landscape, and I think was a strong factor in the rush to grab 800 numbers a few years back. That rush, in turn caused the 800 number series to run out and forced the opening of first 888, and then long before anyone thought possible, another series, 877. (Other reserved series are warming up in the bullpen.)

Portability made toll free an intelligent network application. Users with multi-site centers who wanted features like Least Cost Routing, or sophisticated queuing options benefited immensely. Many of these services are expensive, though. In some cases they can add as much as 50% to the cost of a call, putting the options out of reach of many small and medium sized call centers. High volume users have been the main beneficiaries of price-cutting and volume discounts, leaving smaller users with higher costs and no appreciable gain in service.

Through bundled consulting plans and alliances with hardware manufacturers, the three majors are trying to be more to you than just a series of trunks and switches. Offering everything from complete outsourcing of your center to simple “press one for” service, phone carriers are providing more options for call centers than ever before.

Will the call center of the future be paying for carrier services by the transaction instead of by the minute? This is just one of the possibilities raised by the brave new world of call center offerings from the three major long distance carriers.