Applications and Automation

Automation is all about making your phone system do more for your company. The majority of people see a phone system as little more than a means of placing and receiving calls and servicing voice mail, but it can be much more useful to your company than this.

Overview

This page introduces some of the ways in which you might apply automation to allow your company to improve its profitability. Traditionally this automation has been beyond the budget of all but the largest companies but Bluestone has now integrated many of these capabilities into its standard service. The advanced facilities (that use speech recognition and the like) may require additional payments, but these are still much more affordable than they have traditionally been. The list below provides an overview of the examples that will be covered, showing both application category and a specific example.

  • Call Screening and Routing
    • Example - a "Fone-Firewall" that intelligently determines who and when someone has access to you.
  • Process Automation
    • Example - a phone system for an automotive parts dealer that uses the insurance adjuster's area code and entered part number to route a call to the nearest supplier. Replaced an inbound call center that was manually doing the same thing.
  • Customer Interface Automation
    • Example - automating the process of processing new prescriptions. People call in, enter a prescription number which is checked for validity and refills permitted. The caller can then proceed to leave messages for the pharmacist, delivery instructions and the like.

Call Screening and Routing

How often have you wanted to have a way in which you can:

  • Have your calls filtered by time of day and caller ID?
  • Had the means of giving certain customers special attention by routing them around menus, or getting access to people out of hours.
  • From a single national 800 number route calls to the nearest district office based on the caller's area code.
  • And so on, there are many examples ....

The Bluestone service comes with a powerful inbound call routing capability that is easy to harness – you simply fill out the following routing table on the configuration site and attach it to a "special" extension number. You can then route calls to this extension from a DID, or "IVR option" to this extension number. You can also attach this to the call routing to any phone.

The above function can then be referenced from a script entered on the configuration interface, like so:

Process Automation

A company with a used automotive parts business, had locations in different parts of the country. They were able to replace an inbound call center with an automated solution that did the following:

  • Insurance claims adjuster calls an 800 number, enters a PIN number and the part number he is looking for.
  • The phone system uses his caller ID to determine his location and looks up the part in a database and finds the nearest location that has it in stock.
  • The phone system then transfers the call to that location.

The savings the removal of the call center equipment and staff is a major cost savings, plus it operates 24 × 7 x 365 and (if needed) it can interface to the customer in any language.

Customer Interface Automation

Its common today to encounter IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems that will allow you to pay bills on line, get status information on when a service technician will call and the like. Using Bluestone's service your business can now enjoy the same facilities. You can review this script for an IVR to a pharmacy that does the following:

  • Ask for the prescription number - checks that it is valid and has refills.
  • Gets the caller's contact information.
  • Asks for delivery/pickup preferences.
  • Allows the caller to leave a message for the phsrmacist.
  • Notifies of the pharmacy of the order.

The variations on this example are numerous, but they can all be handled with the facilities available through the web configuration GUI.