TeleVantage Call Center

What is a Call Center?
A call center is the part or parts of your business dedicated to managing your relationship with your customers via phone. It's the "group" of your employees who take sales calls or support calls. An inbound call is not sent to a "person", it's sent to a group. These people are, collectively, your "sales" or "service" department and your phone system handles who gets what calls and when.

How does a "basic" call-center work?
In the simplest form, an inbound call is sent to a "group" of people acting as a single department. Let's say you have ten people in "sales" and one inbound call. You could make all ten phones ring at once OR ring the phones in a pre-determined (by you) employee order OR ring the phone of whoever has been OFF the phone the longest. If someone in the group is on "do not disturb" or on the phone or the phone is off-hook, they will get skipped-over instantly and automatically so your customers don't have to wait. It's ALL about getting your customers talking to a live body in the shortest period of time. Furthermore, if everyone's busy on the phone, a basic call center system will play a greeting, pause a few seconds for someone to get off the phone, play some cool inspirational message (provided by you), then send the call back into the group again. With basic call-center functionality, you can have a single person be a member of several groups and/or have back-to-back groups commonly referred to as "overflow". It's really pretty simple and with TeleVantage, you can design it and do it yourself. All of the features just listed are included FREE with EVERY copy of TeleVantage from the Small Office Edition to the Full Version of TeleVantage 5.0.

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What's the difference between a "Basic" Call Center and an "Advanced" Call Center?
Many regular phone systems incorporate some of the basic features I outlined above. Many companies, though, want more functionality and reporting to better manage their business. Let's ask a few "sets" of questions:

- What hour of the day is your busiest for your sales department?
- What day of the week is your busiest?
- Can you tell me what your busiest time is by day Monday through Friday?
If you have to guess the answer to these questions, your wasting manpower and money. Think about it! What if you KNEW exactly which times were the busiest and slowest. Couldn't you rearrange your employees breaks and schedules and have your office run WAY more smoothly? Maybe you have too many people in your support department. HOW would you know? Advanced call centers always want to know how to best staff their business. This is "reporting" and integrated into the TeleVantage Advanced Call Center.

- Have you ever dreamed of knowing how your salespeople handle calls?
- Would it help your business if you could "listen-in" on calls to ensure that your customers were getting great service?
This is another example of an "advanced" call center feature. All large call-centers record calls. Whether you would like to monitor an individual agent or random calls, TeleVantage gives you flexibility to record by agent or by queue "at random" every X calls.

- How about helping a new employee during a phone call with a customer?
- Would it make your business better if your lead "salesperson" could supervise and "coach" the newbie's?
This is yet another feature that an advanced call center needs. The ability to barge-in on and coach a call-in-progress (either as a conference call or without the customer hearing the "coach") is a huge advantage when training employees. It is, of course, built into the TeleVantage Advanced Call Center.

The TeleVantage Advanced Call Center was designed to be as-good-as if not better-than anything else available. It truly competes with the best-of-the-best. Better yet, it's a simple or as complex as you make it! All of the queue defaults are designed for easy deployment and management by your average computer-literate Joe. It's REALLY powerful and adjustable to suit the most advanced applications. Here are a few more features of the TeleVantage Advanced Call Center for the "call center" junkie: DID to queue direct, group permissions and variable wrap-up times, six distribution methods, automatic on-break status on no-answer, prioritized callers, multi-level overflow, skills-based routing, advanced entry and hold prompting including audible predicted hold-time, multiple simultaneous message on hold sources, opt-out voicemail and operator routing, many call recording options, many notification options, and more...

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What is involved? Hardware? Software? Do I have to buy a new phone system?
Understand that TeleVantage IS a complete and advanced phone system right out of the box! There are jacks that you plug your inbound lines into (or T1's into) and jacks for you to plug phones into. With a turn-key-system (as opposed to a do-it-yourself kit), you could literally pull it from the box, plug the power in, plug in a few inbound lines and a few phones and it would work.

You can purchase TeleVantage as a replacement for your existing phone system or, if you have an ultra large system, run it as a "departmental" system just for your call center and plug it in BEHIND your existing system. Both configurations are common and fairly easy to install. As a rule of thumb, if you have under two hundred people in your office, TeleVantage should REPLACE. Over two hundred, use it as a call-center server BEHIND your existing (big) switch.

I've never heard of TeleVantage. Is it reliable? A good investment?
TeleVantage is the new flagship telephone system from Artisoft. Artisoft is the company that pioneered Visual Voice, a popular Voice Development platform. It's the Visual Basic of Voice programming. In the Mid-Nineties, Artisoft put all of those cone-heads (rooms full of 'em) to work developing the worlds most advanced phone system. They succeeded. Today, Artisoft TeleVantage is recognized as the standard by which all other SoftSwitches (and acronym for a software-based business telephone system) are compared. If you buy a Toshiba Stratus CS, you've bought TeleVantage. If you bought an Intel "Converged Communications" Phone System, you've bought TeleVantage. Artisoft TeleVantage is incredibly feature-rich and reliable which makes it the standard by which all others are measured.

A TeleVantage system is almost futureproof. You could purchase a little $2499 4x8 Do-It-Yourself kit, install the cards and software into a good quality telephony server running Windows 2000 and ten years from now be using that SAME system with over a hundred lines and hundreds of extensions. Just add-on as your business grows. Not bad for an investment of under three grand! The voice hardware is made by Intel, The software is made by Microsoft and Artisoft. A good investment? Most call-center applications cost between one thousand and five thousand dollars PER PERSON! That's not even including a phone system. That's only for the "Call Center" part. TeleVantage Advanced Call Center "Add-On" Module is only $250.00 per person (when purchased separately) and is by far the most economical call-center software on the market today.

So how much does TeleVantage cost?
As discussed above, TeleVantage comes with a built-in basic call-center application. This is included free with both TeleVantage 5 and TeleVantage 5 "Small Office Edition". Below is the pricing matrix for both "Do-It-Yourself" Kits and "Turn-Key" Systems.