Streamline Call Center Functions for Greater Profitability
Call centers have become important strategic business tools. A well-managed call center can serve customers quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively, providing an important competitive advantage.

Activated Communications provides solutions to enhance call center operations in several important ways:

• Efficient call handling
• Faster response to callers
• More efficient handling of peak hours traffic
• Effective back-up coverage
• Increased agent productivity
• Simplified staffing requirements
• Increased management control
• Grows with your business to protect your investment

Your call center doesn’t have to be complex to be powerful. In fact, the Strata Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is simplicity at its finest, running as an application on the Strata Media Application Server, along with ACD reporting, voice mail, and other value-added CTI applications.  

• The ACD application is available with Basic and Enhanced feature functionality, to fit the level of functionality you need. You can start off simple, and add more capabilities as you need them.
• Capacities are also expandable to meet your growing needs. The number of ACD groups and active agent size increments are configured to provide cost-effective pricing levels according to your specific needs.

A robust array of ACD features makes it easy to optimize call center operations, increase customer satisfaction, and improve efficiency. Here’s a few highlights:

• Advanced Call Routing directs calls based on Caller ID, account numbers, private lists, balanced call count, preferred agent treatment, agent priority, time-of-day, day-of-week, day-of-year, and user-entered data.
• Skills-Based Routing sends calls to the right person to handle the call.
• Priority Queuing enables you to answer higher priority calls sooner.
• Multiple Group Agent Log-in provides important call coverage between groups and tiered service levels.
• Agent Priority Routing gives you the ability to expand your agent pool when traffic increases.
• Intelligent Announcements play pre-recorded messages and inform holding callers of their place in the queue or estimated time before answer, as well as offering alternative actions like going to voice mail or invoking a call back reservation.
• If you have multiple ACD Groups, each group can have a separate music source and different announcements, providing the specific information you want callers to hear. When the number of ACD calls waiting reaches a predetermined threshold, calls can overflow to another ACD group or destination, ensuring that someone will assist callers even when no one in the primary group is available.
• Multiple Group Agent Login provides important call coverage between groups and tiered service levels. This assures back-up coverage and is also the foundation for skills-based routing and agent priority routing, enabling many advanced call center applications.
• ACD capabilities also allow supervisory stations to offer call assistance to ACD agents, and to monitor agent calls. This is very useful for training, performance evaluation, and providing second-level assistance.
• IVR Voice Assistant gathers and validates caller input, triggers responses, alerts agents when the queue gets overloaded with calls, and provides many creative application opportunities.
• Call Center reports let you analyze agent performance, call center group activity, and system status, as well as forecast future call center staffing requirements by analyzing call volume patterns.
• Strata ACD also interacts with additional applications can provide “screen pops,” on-line chat between Agents and Supervisors, and the OAISYS Net Phone, a CTI application that enables data/information exchange with the ACD application.

Maximize Call Center Effectiveness with Reporting Capabilities
On-line displays and reports are an important addition to ACD, to provide enhanced supervisory monitoring of ACD activity.  You can view screen displays and generate printed reports on call statistics and agent performance. 

Toshiba offers several types of PC-based display and reporting products that are ideal for use with ACD applications. 

• Insight provides custom real-time displays and custom historical reports for single supervisor terminal applications, offering four types of real time windows, four real time window templates, and 15 varieties of reports which cover up to a year’s worth of data, along with electronic wall board connection, and inView LAN-based PC display messaging.
• Insight Plus supports up to 100 supervisor positions and provides more extensive custom real-time displays and reports including graphical displays, forecasting reports, and data export capabilities. Insight Plus provides four types of real time windows, and an unlimited number of real time templates, 35 varieties of reports which cover up to a year’s worth of data, along with electronic wall board connection, and inView LAN-based PC display messaging.
• Insight can be upgraded to Insight Plus at any time with a simple software upgrade.
• Insight Reports can be compiled using statistics relating to any shift pattern, as defined by the call center manager. When compiling a report, the user defines the time period over which the report is compiled. This period can be defined to the nearest minute and is not limited to any time boundaries. The Automatic Reporting feature in Insight enables reports to be generated at user defined times. Different report templates can be set up to be generated at different time intervals and there is a choice of outputs, i.e., the reports could be sent to a printer, saved to disk, or exported. The reporting client must be operational for this option to be used.
• inView provides two types of on-line displays. These are the same windows available in the Insight or Insight Plus supervisor, real time client.
• Wallboard view displays statistics in a large character format. The user can configure inView to provide key performance information selecting up to 8 large character windows from the list available options.
• Status view shows the status of individual Agents with either long or short names. The status is presented using a colored background to represent each Agent’s status.
• Spectrum Electronic Wallboards are supported by Insight and Insight Plus. Up to six wallboards may be connected to each supervisor’s PC to display call center status data.
  • This provides visibility of important call center event information to both Supervisors and Agents.
  • The Supervisor can also send custom, user-defined text information to the electronic wallboard which can be used for general information or motivational messages.
  • Multiple Wall Boards can be connected to the Insight application PC. Wallboard templates can be created and added to a schedule which can provide key performance information to single or multiple groups of agents.
  • One Insight client can support up to 6 addressable wallboards which can be configured independently of each other to provide information relevant to any particular group of lines or agents.
• TASKE Contact provides a suite of easy-to-use management tools that enable a contact center supervisor to manage their agents, set and meet service levels and provide vital management information on call activity. TASKE Contact is a robust management application that's easy to use and includes ACD Monitor with Replay feature, Reports, WallSign, myTASKE and Traffic Analyzer. TASKE Contact has several add-on modules to further enhance the application and includes Contact Desktop Sign, TASKE Enterprise Client and TASKE Work Force Management Interface.
• myTASKE Reporter enables you to manage your contact center from any computer with web access. It is designed to deliver many of the same feature-rich capabilities as TASKE Contact, plus the use of browser-based technologies that enable you to monitor your contact center from any computer in the world with Internet access.
• TASKE Reports enable managers to generate more than 150 standard reports on call details, abandoned calls, individual agent activity, agent groups, extensions, trunks, queue groups, activity codes and more. With straightforward report templates that can be saved and conveniently used again, managers can quickly compile detailed call activity data. Reports cover daily, weekly, monthly and yearly timeframes, and reports can be customized to highlight key information. Automatic report printing can be scheduled for any time of the day, or exported to spreadsheet, database or text files, even HTML for the World Wide Web. With an Internet connection and Web browser, users can view reports posted on the company intranet or Internet site from anywhere.
• TASKE Desktop Sign enables agents to view and react to current contact center conditions in situations where wall-mounted reader boards are impractical. The Agent Desktop application displays user-specified, real-time contact center data on an agent's computer monitor.
• TASKE WallSign is a visual interface that simplifies configuring and managing reader board messages. WallSign not only provides the capabilities of user-defined messaging generally expected for reader-board software but also provides messages based on the contact center conditions, the time of day, the day of week and user-defined special days to one or more Spectrum® reader boards.

Maximize Agent Efficiency with Desktop Productivity Tools
Your call center agents’ tools of the trade are their telephone and computer. These critical communication tools are used constantly; yet in most businesses they are seldom integrated. Instead, users go back and forth for information and communication while reducing the level of customer service provided to callers.

Net Phone leverages the power of the computer and telephone to bring one superior tool to the desktop.

• Net Phone manages incoming and outgoing call functions and synchronizes with a company’s operations, CRM or contact software.  When a phone call comes in, Net Phone triggers the software’s database and automatically launches (pops-up) the caller’s corresponding contact information.
• The versatility of Net Phone allows you to control calls, capture important customer data and provide customers with superior service.
• Net Phone provides users with telephone features and call-handling functions directly from the computer. Dialing, answering, transferring, placing a call on hold and ending calls are all executable from the compact or expanded Net Phone view.
• Intelligent call keys display the Caller ID and status of each call, allowing users to efficiently manage multiple calls.
• Net Phone also allows you to dial a phone number from any program including contact, CRM, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications.
• Powerful directory features allow you to look up and dial PBX extensions with a click of your mouse. The directory is automatically generated by the system so it is always up to date with every extension. It can easily be searched by name, and printed or exported.
• The Call Notes feature allows users to attach important customer information to a call, which then follows the caller if they are transferred to another department or extension. This eliminates the need to ask a caller for the same information multiple times. Call notes can also display information collected from the IVR system.
• Net Phone automatically creates a log of calls dialed and received on the local telephone extension. The Call History can be searched for specific calls by date, telephone number, name, or account code. Calls can be automatically dialed by double clicking the call in the Call History window. The entire Call History or a search result can easily be printed or exported to a file.

Chat is an instant messaging tool that can be purchased as a standalone product or as a standard feature of Net Phone. Chat is a great tool for getting a message to someone when they are busy on the phone or to get information in a less intrusive manner than calling the person.

Improve Service with Call Recording and Monitoring Tools
Tracer is a CTI enabled digital call recording/logging system that records, stores, organizes and plays back telephone calls to avoid the disputed communications that can result in huge business liabilities. Tracer can also help improve the quality of your business operations including training, quality control and customer service.

Tracer taps directly to analog and digital (T1 and PRI) telephone lines and eliminates the need for converters, channel banks or patches. Calls are recorded from start to finish, and Tracer automatically inserts bookmarks in every recording whenever calls are transferred or put on hold. When used together with Net Phone, users can have a recording status indicator and the ability to start and stop recordings or insert bookmarks at important points in a call.

Tracer Replay is included with Tracer and used to retrieve and play back recordings. Replay streams the audio from wherever the recoding is stored and allows searching by any collected information criteria.

Tracer enables you to easily manage your call recording and retrieval function using the following valuable features:

• Cradle to Grave Recording captures every moment of the call, even while the caller is on hold.
• Look-Back Recording records an entire conversation, even if the recording was initiated after the call began.
• Call Monitoring allows authorized users to monitor calls as they’re happening, whether those calls are being recorded or not.
• Selective Recording records specific or random extensions, groups of extensions, or every extension.
• Bookmarks are automatically inserted in every recording whenever calls are transferred or put on hold. With bookmarks, finding particular calls or specific parts of calls is easy and significantly decreases the amount of time needed to retrieve and play back the recordings.
• After-Call Actions can be taken after a call ends, including sending an e-mail or instant text message, or launching another program to take some action.