Voice Technology Basics
Example: Personal Telephony Services
One of the greatest advantages of the new
world IP telephony system is the ease of intelligent integration
with existing applications.
End users can use their Web browsers to graphically define
a “personal rules engine” to create filters on
incoming calls, or scan and organize voice mail with the same
ease as organizing e-mail; creating personal phone configurations,
such as speed dial, and building a valet service that could
scan your personal calendar to intelligently route your call.
Traditional PBX call routing and embedded features are based
on proprietary applications that are specific to that particular
system. Traditional PBXs were an island independent of all
the other applications running on the corporate network. Voice
mail and e-mail have traditionally been separate because they
have been developed on separate systems. In the new world,
IP PBX voice mail and e-mail are all part of the same application
running in a distributed fashion across the entire corporate
network. A single mailbox can now hold your voice messages,
e-mail, fax, and video clips.
Example: Integrated Web Search and Calls
Integrated Web search and call applications
can be very powerful. If a user is on the Web looking for
a product or service and has a question, they can click an
icon on the Web browser to speak to an agent. The agent can
recognize the user by a cookie file and see the Web page the
user is looking at, so the agent is ready to help without
having to ask for account information each time the user calls.
The call is also intelligently routed based on the information
the network has retrieved from the user’s computer.
This “click-to-talk” application is one place
where convergence is helping to differentiate one service
from another.
With integrated Web search and call features, a user can click
on a button and talk specifically to an agent who is qualified
to address the user’s specific question. The user does
not have to go off-line to use the phone, but can actually
do it live while on-line.
What this means for e-commerce applications is that sales
cycles that could not be completed using just the Web page
because a user had a question can now be completed, increasing
revenue.
This is not just “pie in the sky.” Cisco does
80 percent of its business through its Web page—that’s
$8 billion a year. More importantly, 90 percent of technical
support questions are answered through the Web. This not only
reduces the number of agents, it gets the information to the
customers quickly and increases customer satisfaction. There
is a click-to-talk feature in place. To do this, you need
to have all your services—data, voice, and video—on
a single infrastructure. Now, whether customers are on the
Web or on the phone, agents have access to them.
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