Bluestone Telecommunications

A Software Company with Call Center

A simplified view of the call flow for this company is illustrated in figure 1 below. The essential characteristics of this company are as follows:

• They require time of day, day of the week routing of calls through hunt groups
• They have a 8 agent, inbound call center that largely receives sales calls.
• Sales calls need to be recorded for review by supervisors.
• They have 40 traditional phones with voice mail, "find me follow me" and unified messaging.
• They require 2 general purpose voice mail boxes.
• Some employees require phones for home offices, or work from the road.

Figure 1 - Call Flow Diagram for the Software Company

We will now review the major building blocks of the system with a view as to how they could be employed in your system.

A Review of the Major Building Blocks

1. Hunt Groups on the Bluestone system can be programmed to do the following:

• Route calls to a group of phones by time of day and day of the week. For example we could call phone1+phone2+phone3+... for 20 secs, and if nobody picks up then call phone3+phone4+... etc for as many phases as you want, finally ending up with an action that could be go to a voice mail box, or play a track.

• The above routing can change as a function of time of day, and day of the week. For example in the illustration above we can see the hunt groups are routing calls to one set of IVRs between (8AM to 5PM - the blue lines) and another set of IVRs for the early evening (5PM to 7PM - the red lines) and finally to a third set of IVRs in the evening hours (7PM to 8AM) and on weekends (the green lines)

• We could of had a fall back to a voice mail box, but as the calls are routed to IVRs which are guaranteed to answer the call no fall back is required.

2. IVRs or Interactive Voice Response blocks are the elements that play a message and prompt for the user to enter 1 for "this" and 2 for "that". In this example there are different IVRs for 1) Sales and Technical Support 2) different times of the day. The user is able to program different routing or functionality for the keys 0 through 9. Commonly these keys are programmed to route the calls to particular internal extensions, ACD groups or voice mail boxes, but they can also have scripts attached to them to implement more complex functionality.

3. ACDs or Automatic Call Distribution are blocks that can put callers into a queue and then route them to agents based on their availability and optionally their skill set. They can be programmed to deliver sales messages, queue wait times and much more.

4. Call Recording any call, whether inbound or outbound can be recorded. The recording can either be enabled statically (permanently) or dynamically (on the fly). Call recordings are accessed from the CDR browser where they can be downloaded or played and edited directly from the web page.

5. IP Phones are generally one of the following types:

• Polycom Desk Phones these are excellent phones that can be obtained at very reasonable prices from many suppliers. There is a separate article on some of the more popular models here. One of the features of Bluestone's interface is that it fully supports multiple extensions on a single phone. This can be invaluable to have one employee support multiple functions.

• Android and iPhone softphones are great solutions for mobile use, there is more information on these phones here.

Operating Cost

There is no charge for "hunt groups", "IVRs" and the like, the price is solely a function of the number of phones deployed and the outbound calling plan (ie minutes bucket). Phones on ACD queues have a higher price, whereas secondary phones have a much lower price. Secondary phones are the second or subsequent phone that is allocated to a particular user, for example assume an employee has both an office and home-office phone, then the first phone is called the "primary extension" and is charged at the standard rate, whereas the home phone is classified as a "secondary extension" and is billed at a much lower rate. A detailed price listing is given here, the cost for this deployment is given in the table below.