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What does CTI mean?
Types of CTI Applications
Voicemail & Automated Attendant
Unified Messaging
Administrator
Management Systems
ACD Management Systems
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Screen Popping
Soft Phones & Attendant Consoles
Predictive Dialers
Product Specific Information
CTI on the Samsung DCS Family of Telephone
Systems
CTI on the Tadiran Coral Family of Telephone Systems
Computer Telephone Integration or CTI is a general term describing the capability of a telephone system to integrate with a computer or a network of computers. CTI allows a computer to control a telephone system or allows a telephone system to control a computer. Integration can be between a single phone and computer which is called 1st party call control, or it can be between multiple telephones and one or more computers which is called 3rd party call control. CTI brings a whole new world of applications to a telephone system. Following are some examples.
Automated Attendant & Voicemail
Although auto attendant & voicemail were really the first CTI applications, the term CTI usually refers to applications above and beyond your everyday auto attendant and voicemail system. Traditionally, voicemail software ran on a PC which was external to the telephone system. Calls were transferred from the telephone system to the voicemail system. The two systems communicated instructions to one another via touch tone commands. Modern voicemail systems are now available as an expansion card that are "plugged in" to the telephone system. This can provide a greater level of integration between the two by using control methods other than touch tones. For example, a telephone display can show the number of messages waiting or provide "soft-key" control. Soft-keys are buttons that change dynamically and make it easier for users to work with the system since they do not have to remember touch tone codes for each function. For example, the user's telephone may display options like "Save, Forward, Delete and Call Back" when the user is listening to a voice message and display "Change Password and Change Greeting" when the user is administering the system.
Wouldn't it be great if you could access all your email, voice, and fax messages from a single in-box on your PC? Wouldn't it also be great if you could call your voicemail from a remote location and listen to your email messages or have your fax and email messages forwarded to the nearest fax machine? This is exactly what unified messaging provides. Watch out though, unified messaging systems differ in their ability to integrate the three message types. Some simply attach a voice message as an audio file to an email while others are more advanced and control the voicemail with the PC. The former often has several limitations. For example, if you delete the email with the voice attached, it may not be erased from the voice mail system, requiring you to delete it once again there. Or it may forward the voicemail to the email server preventing you from accessing your voice mail from a telephone, i.e., you may only be able to listen to your voice messages when sitting down at your PC and not with your cell phone.
Back in 1998 the Radicati Group studied the total cost of ownership of a unified messaging system and found that it added 25 to 40 minutes of productivity per worker, per day. With the proliferation of messages in enterprises today, we can safely assume that number will now exceed 20 minutes --time that can be better spent generating sales and providing customer support.
Screen Shot of Tadiran ViewMail
for MS Outlook
Administrator Management Systems
Save time and money by administering your own telephone system. Administrator software makes it easy to program and update phones and make system wide changes. Web based software allows access from anywhere on your LAN, WAN, or the Internet.
More and more organizations are using call centers with automatic call distribution (ACD). ACD management systems provide real-time status of call center agents and traffic, call center traffic and performance reports, and other tools designed to help the call center supervisor. Some ACD management systems provide skilled based routing that make decisions on where to route calls depending on the skills of the call center agents.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVR systems use touch tones to get information from a caller and can then store the data in a database or provide information in return. If you have ever called the automated service at your credit card company, then you have used an IVR system. Generally, the IVR will ask you to log in using your account number and password and then present you with options such as, "to listen to your account balance press 1, to report a lost card press 2, etc. When you select the account balance option the IVR system looks up your balance in a computer database and then reads the information to you. At I.T.I., our technicians use an IVR system to report information about service calls that have been completed.
By using information that is associated with a call such as caller ID or the number that was called, a computer can look up a database record associated with the caller and display it on a computer screen. This can really speed up customer service since the agent doesn't have to ask the caller to identify themselves with an account number and then wait to look up the caller's information. Simple systems can be created by using a single phone and PC with personal information management software like Microsoft Outlook or Symantec Act!. Sophisticated systems can be created by integrating whole call centers with a centralized database. When a call is transferred to an agent's telephone, the database record is "transferred" to the agent's PC simultaneously.
Screen Shot of Samsung OfficeServ Call
Soft Phones and Computerized Attendant Consoles
A soft phone is a PC based, software telephone that runs on your multimedia PC. Using a soft phone is very similar to using the actual phone it represents but uses the microphone and speaker of your PC for audio.
A computerized attendant console is PC based software that is specifically designed for telephone system operators and is usually used in conjunction with an actual telephone. By using the computerized console, operators can see at a glance the status of each telephone and can transfer calls with a simple click of the mouse. They can also see how many calls are coming in, how many on hold, etc.
Screen Shot of Tadiran Computerized
Attendant Position
Predictive dialers are computers that call everyone in a database and then "sense" when an actual person has answered as opposed to an answering machine. These are the engines that drive many of the telemarketing calls that interrupt your dinner. I.T.I doesn't sell these! Products like the TeleZapper can help thwart these supper time annoyances.