One of the best places to add value to an organization is in the way contacts with customers or partners is handled. For many – this is the call center / contact center. This is how sales are made, support tickets are resolved, new customers are discovered, current customers are retained.
Up until now, MS hasn’t really had a hand in the contact center space. Several months ago, MS did acquire an ownership stake of the contact center giant, Aspect. But aside from that, there hasn’t been much activity.
But now, with Office Communications Server 2007 R2, MS has added Contact Center functionality to OCS. Not every last function has been packed into the product, but most of what isn’t native to R2 can actually be written using the SDKs that are shipping with R2. (I have a lot more to say about the SDKs, but that’s a topic for a later date). So before we start talking about what isn’t in R2, let’s take a moment to sort out exactly what is.
There are several new features that can be used for call routing. People can tend to get lost in a "blizzard of words" (™ Charlie Gibson) when discussing various different contact center bits and pieces so I thought I’d build a matrix to keep it straight:
|
R2 Feature |
Description |
Ease to Deploy |
Admin Control |
Deployment Options |
|
Call Delegates |
Have an admin answer calls for you, or multiple people |
Very Easy |
End User Controlled |
Built in to OCS R2 client – point and click interface |
|
Team Call |
Have calls ring a group of users simultaneously |
Very Easy |
End User Controlled |
Built in to OCS R2 client – point and click interface |
|
Basic Hunt Group |
Ring a group of users in various methods: longest available, circular, serial, round-robin etc. |
Easy |
OCS Admin can delegate mgmt. to any user |
Configured in OCS console, managed via web interface |
|
Enhanced Hunt Group |
Same as above, but with Welcome Message & Open/Closed Hours |
Easy |
OCS Admin can delegate mgmt. to any user |
Configured in OCS console, managed via web interface |
|
Response Groups |
Call queueing, music on hold, text-to-speech, speech recognition, open/closed hours |
Medium |
OCS Admin can delegate mgmt. to any user |
Configured in OCS console, managed via web interface |
|
IVR / Speech applications |
Somewhat Complex |
OCS Admin |
Using the UCMA 2.0 SDK, write "drag-and-drop" Windows Workflow applications / .Net applications |
|
|
Enterprise Contact Center Functionality |
Write your own contact center workflows |
Complex |
OCS Admin |
Using the UCMA 2.0 SDK, write "drag-and-drop" Windows Workflow applications / .Net applications |
Just to illustrate how the two "very easy" options work, I have some screen shots below…
Delegates
In the Office Communicator "call forwarding" options, select delegates to answer calls on your behalf:
This is totally end-user controlled on the client side – and as of now no current method to administer server-side. In my opinion, this is a good thing: give the power to the people!
Team Calling
In the Office Communicator "call forwarding" options, add people to your "Team Call" list who will receive calls on your behalf if you are unable to answer the calls:
Notice that I can specify a delay – in other words: first ring me, and if I don’t pick up after X seconds, ring Aaron and Travis at the same time. If no one answers, send the call to my voicemail. This is a powerful and flexible way to handle call coverage. Again – totally end-user driven, not requiring administrative overhead.
Hunt/Response Groups
As for the hunt groups and response groups, I will write separate blogs on those & walk you through setting them up.
IVR / Contact Center Applications with the UCMA 2.0 SDK
This is by far the most exciting feature of OCS R2. MS is giving away the toolkit (the Unified Communications Mangaed API aka UCMA SDK) to write your own IVR apps and contact center apps: anyone with an IM client can be an "agent"! No additional licensing necessary. This is going to change the way people do contact centers.
Chris Mayo, Oscar Newkerk from Microsoft and Joe Calev have been out evangelizing this technology. Some of this stuff is still under NDA until UCMA 2.0 so I won’t post any screenshots just yet. But please take a minute (or 73) to watch Oscar’s presentation on what you can do with this SDK.
The upshot is that you no longer need to purchase $100,000 worth of equipment and software to route calls, email, or chats to available resources in your company. With built-in speech recognition and text-to-speech engines, you can route customers to people based on their IM presence and/or skill sets via Windows Workflows. This is a huge opportunity for OCS to become a leading platform for contact centers.
Once UCMA 2.0 has been shipped and the NDA lifted, I will definitely be posting more about this.
