Contact Center Overview

Contact Center Overview

The schematic above displays the general architecture of a contact center.

Contact centers operate as either inbound (the customer initiates the communication with the enterprise) or outbound (the enterprise initiates the communication with the customer).

When a customer wishes to contact the enterprise, he is offered a selection of communication methods, such as telephone, web interface, video, e-mail, SMS or fax. Depending on the complexity of his current need and his personal preferences he may choose any of the offered methods.

As soon as the customer initiates the procedure, his request is channeled through a variety of systems, depending on his contact method choice. In most cases, the customer first encounters an automated interface, which is designed to gather some initial information about the customer and his request. Typical information that can be gathered in this stage are the identity of the customer and the general category of his request. Depending on the contact method again, this initial information gathering can be either a predefined procedure (for example, when using SMS, the customer should already be informed about specific keywords that indicate specific intentions/needs) or an interactive procedure (such as a phone call Q&A session with an automated IVR system).

After the initial information gathering procedure, the data acquired are forwarded to appropriate application servers within the enterprise, which contain the business logic that determines how the customer's request will be handled. The customer may then be provided with more questions/options and the procedure is repeated until the customer is satisfied.

A similar procedure is followed in the case of outbound communication. The only difference is that the communication is initiated by the company. The method of communication chosen in this case is determined by the enterprise business logic as well as preferences that the customer may have previously stated (which may be recorded in the CRM).

The schematic shows the most important systems typically encountered in a contact center. We will briefly explain  the functionality of each one of these, and how it fits in the procedures described above.

The Ethernet bus denotes the enterprise LAN. In IP contact centers (which are the foundation of unified communications) all the information is exchanged using IP communications. In case a communication channel uses different protocols (like SMS for example), appropriate gateways convert the traffic to IP based, as seen in the schematic.

The PBX (Private Automatic Branch Exchange) and the ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) are the systems responsible for controlling the telephony part of the contact center, and distributing the calls either to other automated systems and/or to appropriate persons that will serve the customer. These can be either classic telephony based systems or IP - based.

The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is an automatic system that gathers information from the user (either using DTMF input or speech recognition) and also fills in the self-service part of the system.

The Outbound Dialer is an automated system that calls the customers of the company, in the case of outbound communication.

The Call Logger is an automated system responsible for recording calls.

The Application Servers is a cluster of various servers that process the data exchanged through the contact center. One of their key purposes, is to provide the business logic behind every automated action undertaken by the rest of the systems. Application servers can also be used for data consolidation, providing statistics about the contact center's operation and various other functions.

The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a complex database - based system that stores information about the customers of the enterprise and their interactions with the enterprise.

The agents and the supervisors comprise the human part of the contact center. Their role is to serve the customer whenever the automated systems are not sufficient. They are responsible for handling phone calls, web chat, e-mail etc. The integration of the humans working at the contact center and the automated systems is typically achieved using CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) technology, which is responsible for retrieving customer data from the automatic systems and presenting it to the agents.