Roundtable: See You Later Integrator

Computer telephony integration keeps call centres on the ball, but its adoption is not widespread. Simon Meredith reports the views expressed at PC Dealer?s Roundtable

Sitting round the table this week to talk about the integration of voice and data in the network are: Gary Shepherd, managing director of specialist reseller Nationwide Voice & Data International; Pete Moody, desktop applications consultant at voice systems vendor Mitel; and Roy Band, CTI marketing manager for IBM

The industry has been talking about integrating voice and data in the network for many years. But the idea has never quite taken off. Products like IBM?s Callpath have been around for several years, but somehow dealers have never latched on to the concept.

The reason, according to Pete Moody, desktop applications consultant at voice systems vendor Mitel, is ?the wall?.

?The person in the white coat who looks after the network is totally isolated from the person who looks after the telephone system and they are not talking to each other,? he says.

Companies spend a lot of money on their network infrastructure and telephone systems, yet it never occurs to them to combine the two. And because there is no pull from the market, resellers are not getting involved in voice and data integration.

Yet the benefits seem obvious. ?How many telephone conversations start with the question, what?s your account number or, one moment Mr Smith, I?m just looking up your information? There is absolutely no need for that ? it?s a waste of time,? says Moody. ?If your telephone system knows who?s calling you, your data system should know.?

This is the classic case for the call centre, which is the current buzz-word in voice and data integration. The benefit of being able to put data on the screen the moment a customer dials in is obvious: it saves time and it improves customer service.

?It?s about business advantage?, says Gary Shepherd, managing director of specialist reseller Nationwide Voice & Data International. ?Everyone wants to do what Direct Line Insurance is doing. They want to be able to service the customers quicker, to turn that enquiry around in a minute instead of three minutes. You want to make sure that your staff are more efficient and that you get customer loyalty.?

Just about every business has some customer response function that is managed over the telephone, so the opportunity to sell the call centre concept is widespread, says Shepherd. Nationwide estimates that there are 20,000 types of call centre in the UK.

There are other, more fundamental benefits as well as increased productivity. There is the simple benefit of having only one set of cables to maintain and having a framework which will enable the integration of messaging. This is a potential benefit that has already been recognised by Microsoft and Novell. Their unified messaging concepts are really just a sub-set of computer telephony integration (CTI), says Shepherd.

?There are immediate cost savings in that area alone. If you look at the typical organisation it might have five forms of messaging ? an internal email system, internet email, fax mail and voicemail, all coming from different places. Because you?ve got to look in a different place for your email and for your voicemail, you are not getting your messages quick enough and you can?t react to the customer quick enough.?

Integration of messaging also means that organisations can be more flexible structurally. It is easier for outworkers to pick up their messages and to have calls redirected to wherever they might be working that day. The integrated voice and data system provides a framework for the development of new structures and work processes.

Cost-savings and efficiency gains are the two sides of the CTI shilling ? the key benefits that go hand in hand. But cost benefit must be proven, says Shepherd. ?There?s no way anyone takes this on without having a business case. You?d be mad to do it otherwise.?

If you can?t prove it, cost will put many users off CTI. Moody says: ?If you can?t see any business advantage, what I?d say to you is for goodness? sake don?t do it.? He believes, however, that Mitel could show most businesses that they will benefit from CTI.

Shepherd thinks users need to take a positive view of the technology. ?IT is not a one-off investment as most people know. The danger is that if people don?t keep up with the technology then they will go out of business because their competitors are going to do it. If you sit back and say, well I?m not going to do it because I don?t want to spend the time and I don?t want to spend the cost, two years later you might not be able to do it. The longer you leave it the more difficult it is to make that leap.?

But with even small businesses having to be persuaded to spend thousands of pounds on upgrading their networks, installing CTI software, ironing out problems and re-training, cost remains an issue.

CTI has already come down in price considerably according to Shepherd, but he does not deny that it can be expensive. ?It really depends on the infrastructure, but if you are mainframes-based and you want to go PC-based, there?s a fairly costly leap to take there.?

It can be a lot less than one recently quoted figure of #50,000, says Shepherd, but it still depends on the scale of the operation and what the company wants to do.

But even for a small firm, the cost-benefit equation can be made to work, he says. Staff costs are central to the argument, he maintains.

?Employment costs is the key is it not? It doesn?t get rid of people, it makes them more productive, so you do twice as much business with the same human resource and the biggest cost in a business is human resource.?

Before any organisation can benefit from efficiency improvements through voice and data integration, they must have the physical infrastructure for the integration and this is where the networking reseller comes in. And it has to be the computer dealer, not the telecoms expert, says Moody.

?It?s all data when you think about it. Voice has been data for a number of years ? it?s just that the telecoms people have tried to protect it as an analogue technology.?

But resellers don?t understand the benefits enough, says Moody, because the emphasis tends to be on the technology rather than the problem.

?The technology should be able to present the business case and emphasise the benefits. Understanding and being able to articulate the benefits clearly is vital to overcome the hurdle of cost.

Complexity is also a problem and the whole area of voice and data needs to be demystified, says Moody. ?They need to shrink-wrap the technology, get rid of the acronyms and just push it out.?

Part of the problem is that up to now, CTI has sold as a fairly expensive technology and indeed, it has been costly to implement, This needs to change, says Shepherd.

?You?ve got multiple vendors ? in some of the big CTI jobs you have 20 vendors involved in providing the solution. You then have to get project management and consultancy involved because you need someone to manage it because the company does not have the internal resource to do it. You are talking about implementation time of maybe six to nine months. It?s crazy.

?What customers want is something that they can deliver, that they can afford. They don?t want to wait ? if it?s a small insurance company launching a pension scheme it wants to deliver it next month.?

The market has been overcomplicated unnecessarily, and computer vendors have to take some of the blame. Nationwide is focusing on server-based solutions because that is the way the company believes the market is going to go and it is not that complex, says Shepherd.

?Basically it?s just: is there a business advantage for doing it, what is the cost of providing the solution, and what benefit is the business going to receive money-wise??

The struggle to win control of the standards has not helped. It should not matter from the users? point of view ? they should concentrate on solving the immediate problem, ensuring that the solution is scalable and that their investment is protected, says Moody. But the standards are clearly an issue in voice and data.

The two standards are evolving in different ways, says Shepherd. If you look at the TSAPI standard, it?s a third-party solution, it?s reliant on providing a PBX. In effect you have a standalone PABX talking to a server. If you look at TAPI or TAPI2, that can be based on either a SoHo environment, where you have one PC and one telephone ? the standalone consultant ? or it?s based on server technology where the server contains all the telephones.?

Moody says that the choice between the two is fairly straightforward. ?The choice of standards is just a numbers game. If you want to do single-desktop CTI, or a telephony-enabling application, if you want to try it out and find out if it does give you business benefit, then don?t do it for 30 people in one go, do it for one or two people first, then you have a desktop solution. When you want to do it right across the board for everybody on that PBX then do it at the server level and go TSAPI.?

The signs are that many users want to dip their toe in the water before investing heavily in CTI. According to Shepherd, BT has sold about 30,000 copies of its basic CTI package which retails for #200. This is cause for optimism, says Moody.

?It is warming the market up for us, which is good. What we?ve found in marketing our CTI products is that there are people who are connected to networks and who do have corporate-wide databases but they don?t want to implement CTI en masse first time round.?

This is important, he adds, because customers clearly need to feel that they can start small and grow the installation at a later date. But larger organisations are going ahead and taking a big bang approach to implementation, says Shepherd. If they are convinced, that?s good for the company, says Moody.

So far, however, the big deals have been few and far between, enough to support a handful of specialists, but not enough to gather momentum for a crusade from the channel on voice and data integration.

Dealers may be dragged into the market by their customers in the end. ?CTI has been available for a long time, but what?s happening now is that customers are actually asking for forms of CTI,? says Shepherd.

Moody agrees. ?If you are an IT company you have got to be telecoms aware because your customers are going to ask for TAPI hooks, TSAPI hooks, and if you are in telecoms you?ve got to be aware that people are going to plug these boxes into your system.?

For telecoms vendors, the problem may be particularly urgent. PABX is becoming redundant, says Shepherd. It has less power than the average PC and runs bespoke software. It makes sense to put the control of telecommunications on to the computer system. Companies such as Mitel, with its Mediapath system, are taking functionality out of the PABX and putting it into the server. This puts the ball firmly into the computer reseller?s court.

Or does it? One of the problems with the voice and data market is that applications that deliver specific benefits have not yet been developed. And there has been a shortage of companies that have both the skill to develop applications (either bespoke or off-the-shelf) and are prepared to make the investment necessary to deliver a product or service to the market.

This has been a problem for CTI, says Roy Band, CTI marketing manager for IBM. ?Lack of skills with good application programming knowledge and with suitable telephony knowledge has been a significant inhibitor,? he says. ?That is, to a large extent, moving away now with much higher level APIs becoming available.?

But there is still not a massive amount of third-party applications ? not off-the-shelf applications, says Shepherd. The bigger call centres have tended to want something tailored round our application and that?s quite an expensive way of doing it. What we are seeing now is some third-party applications coming out.?

The kind of applications appearing include electronic call distribution and helpdesk software, an application that works with products such as Schedule Plus, enabling you to dial into the office-based PC and ?talk? to the application, asking it to make an entry in your diary. It can also respond to verbal requests such as ?call John Smith?.

The applications are appearing because the demand is starting to come from the user base. Shepherd says Nationwide is looking to deliver applications that are 90 per cent off-the-shelf. It does not believe the market is mature enough to accept a totally pre-written finished product as a package.

To deliver even this type of application may not be a straightforward matter for most dealers though.

Shepherd says: ?We are talking about knocking the walls down and bringing the white coats together. The issue, though, is that you have got to have different levels of expertise in your organisation because you are still having to deal with the telephony aspects of what you are doing and the computer aspects and you are never going to get somebody who has a total knowledge, right across the board.?

Even so, there are organisations such as Nationwide which do claim to have across-the-board skills.

But developing those skills is not very easy and Moody thinks there is no clear answer to the question of where the CTI resellers are coming from.

?It will be a hybrid. There are people on the telecoms side who can convert to data and people on the data side who can convert to telecoms. An interesting question would be: what is the easier conversion??

The training and assistance required to enable dealers to acquire the new skills is most likely going to be provided by distributors, and it is the IT business that is driving this, in spite of its lack of real telecoms expertise.

Microsoft and Novell are trying to provide the hooks for applications developers and companies such as IBM are working with networking distributors like Azlan to promote CTI systems.

Band, who is CTI marketing manager at IBM, says that the technology is becoming less complex and more open, and available and skilled resellers are emerging.

?There is a whole raft of systems integration companies as well as software providers and people like ourselves of course, who have the appropriate skills. But we?re trying to move it away from any specific skill area to general computer platform knowledge and make it easy for them to hook in and use the telephony function.?

Having said that, IBM has only a handful of resellers signed up for its telephony services and has been focusing on the AS/400 agents.

But its distributors, like Azlan, have been developing their skills and are trying to work with dealers to get them interested in CTI as well as providing the service and support backup for those firms.

The vendor?s role, IBM?s role, says Band, is twofold: ?As a leading solutions provider, where we are supplying both product and value-added services and also as a provider for channels and our agents and dealers.?

They are necessary, he says, to address the wider market. There are hundreds of third-party Callpath applications and third-party support programmes, although these are much more mature in the US.

They need more people to get involved in the UK. There are only four or five AS/400 agents involved at present and the PC reseller activity has all been funnelled through Azlan at the moment. For those who believe the opportunity is there, it is still early days: you can still be one of the pioneers in this market.

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