So where does call center software fit in? Not in the switch space, at least for third party call center software providers. Nobody is going to write software to interface all the different switches and make them easier to configure. Biggest obstacle being the switch makers, who will *not* give other companies that kind of information and access. Switch makers want to sell *their* call center software which works with *their* switch and no other switch.

Let's take a look at what a switch provider has in the way of call center software. You still need to set up the switch once. Actually you should have the switch company set up the switch for you and all the phones too. As long as you don't change things radically (such as adding or moving lots of phones) you can have someone inhouse take care of the switch maintenance. But setting up a switch is hard. Dealing with the phone company is not for the novice.

The call center software that a switch provider sells can be used to define agents, what phones they use, define the ACD queues, define the call center hours, define scripts that take phone calls and route them to different ACD queues (or for advanced software, ad-hoc agent groups). All rather mundane things so far. But why define agents? Just knowing the phones should be enough. Unless agents can log in to any phone, in which case you need to define ACD queues via agent ids rather than teleset ids.

At this point we still have a dumb call center. What you really want are PCs that your agents can use to type in the orders or whatever and have them show up on your mainframe system and processed immediately (or at least faster than if they were not using PCs). Now, agents can answer the phone and ask the customer some information and type it in to pull up their records and so forth. That's an inbound case, in an outbound case the customer information would pop up and the agent would dial out themselves.

But what if the agent's PC could show the agent the customer information as soon the phone starts ringing? At their fingertips they could then answer the phone and say "hello Mr so-and-so, how may I help you?" Or they would know what your purchase history is so they can try to sell you other things. Or they would know immediately if you have a delinquent account and should be transferred to collections.

So the other thing the switch provider call center software does is send and receive information from a PC application. It can take the phone number of the customer and pass it on to the application. It can also take any IVR data the customer entered and pass it on. (An IVR is an Interactive Voice Response unit, an automated system to prompt for user inputs and reads touch- tone key presses).

By receive information I mean that the PC application can control the phone. The PC application can send commands to the call center software and control all the phone functions for the agent (automatically dial or forward calls or whatever). The third information thing is that the call center software can ask an external application where to route a call. The external application can take any data that the switch gathered, combine it with data from the company database and come up with an ACD queue or agent to route the call to.

All these things that the call center software does, in conjunction with the switch and PC application and other external applications, don't really add any necessary capabilities to a call center. But, they help make a call center work more efficiently. The more time agents spend talking to customers and not transferring misrouted calls or dialing out or writing things out or getting information from a customer the less agents you need. A professional third party call center is a low margin operation, one where saving a few seconds per call can make the difference between a small profit and a healthy profit.