Automation and Integration Of Telephony And ...

Sci.Int.(Lahore),26(4),1503-1505,2014

ISSN 1013-5316; CODEN: SINTE 8

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AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION OF TELEPHONY AND TICKETING SYSTEM FOR BURDEN MANAGEMENT IN CALL CENTERS Muhammad Sharif, Mughees Ahmed, Asma Shaheen, Samia Riaz, Mudassar Raza Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Wah Cantt-Pakistan [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

ABSTRACT. Call centers are playing a major role nowadays in current telephony systems (VoIP). The researchers are working on telephonic speech recognition to develop more intelligent systems. Call centers, sometimes, face the burden of calls the problem of calls burden on their end with having limited human resource. This issue can be solved by dividing the customers into different groups under different classifications. This paper represented an automated system for complaints which will look at call center’s performance. Keywords: call, automatic, burden, VoIP

1. INTRODUCTION The call center plays a vital role in the success and growth of key businesses. It is frontline support for a company. A company’s vital mission is to develop a deep and good relationship with its customers but it becomes a problem in case companies have huge number of customers. Although these companies have hundreds of agents at their call centers but still they cannot respond to all of the customers promptly and thus does not meet the desired efficiency.[1; 2] The basic things which companies should realize regarding their business and customers are that they must understand the needs of market (customers) and offer required product and service solutions and support[3; 4]. There are some ways to reduce the agents work burden in order to give them ease and also reduce their seats in call centers to make quality assurance effective. The technological use to make systems intelligent can help us to develop strong relationship between customers and also take burden form agents. [5] There is also need to keep record of all customers’ actions in order to generate reports which could make it easy for administrative authorities to take decisions for smooth functioning. The main focus of this paper is to explore the work codes which do not need an agent to respond. Some systems are deployed with the use of IVR to facilitate customers. The major problem comes when customers wants to log their complaints. It takes lot of response time per customer. This paper is about exploring work codes and a proposed automation system is against those work codes which log complaints from customers. 2.

BACKGROUND The major operation of call centers is to entertain the customers’ requests and give them information about company products. The other main purpose of call centers is to provide technical support to the customers about products, assuring the solutions of their billing and service quality problems and examining their requests and complaints.[4; 6] The major classification of work codes in call centers operations are:  Product and services information.  Ordering Product and Services.  Logging complaints against customers’ services.  Obtaining and paying Services Bills.  Instruction.  Providing Technical Support.

 Reporting Services Failure.[1; 4; 6; 7] Some requests and complaints are not directly handled by agents. These work codes need proper technical investigation and have delayed response to customer. That response can be verbal or in same cases it can be delivered through text by using GSM or Email technologies. The focus of our study is call centers of Telecom companies and their work codes. Telecom companies have large number of customers using variety of services. It is not easy to cope up with their calls all the time. The chance of human error probability is also there which can become a major hurdle between companies and customer relationship values. 3. EXISTING SYSTEM The existing operations of telecom call centers are quite efficient but the calls’ frequencies demand more quick response time of agent. We have taken notel call center as an example. [8] It has been observed that it increases the frustration on part of agent when the customers ask to log their requests and complaints and he is not capable to solve them or not having enough information because of security issues. The basic reason of not having enough security and given access to agent is that it is not possible to monitor and audit large number of agents and because of having large amount of work codes it is impossible to train agents about everything. 4. PROPOSED SYSTEM The proposed idea is to remove the interdependency by taking calls automatically of that work code, record it and log into the database. The application interface of ticketing system (Complaint and ordering System) is integrated to the telephony system through database. The companies call centers’ work codes are divided into three categories. Work codes requiring Agent Support to Customer.  Work codes having Complaints and Demands against it.  General Information about services and Tariffs. The second classification must need intelligent systems to entertain complaints from customers. Another major issue is the site or location as in most of the cases the call center is at different place and technical support team is somewhere else far from location of the call center resulting in weak communication. The major issue of existing system is that agents and technical support teams are dependent on each other.

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ISSN 1013-5316; CODEN: SINTE 8

Customer

Customer

The system is working on agent complaint interfaces in which agent receives the call and logs the complaint on web interface. These web interfaces require selecting some fields and then typing the complaint in complaint box. It requires time and thus becomes overhead for agents to stick with a single transaction. The overhead time is displayed in the following graph which shows the complaint log time frequency over different calls. [8]

Customer Re

ply

To C

u st om

er

Log Info Database

Asterisk Server IVR

Agents

Agents

Agents

Agents

Sci.Int.(Lahore),26(4),1503-1505,2014

Agents

Agents

Support Interface

Data Entry

Agent Interface

DB

Log Fig. 1 Customer

Existing system

Customer

Customer

Asterisks IVR

Information

Agent

Request or Complaint Work Code menu Complain or Request Recording

DB

Web Interface For Support

Remarks SMS through GSM

Fig. 2

Proposed system

The Proposed system gives a web interface which can be used remotely from anywhere. The ticketing system integration also gives the desired reports which can easily evaluate the error reporting and failure rate of services. This system is tested in various ways to identify whether it meets today call centers’ requirements or not.

5. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS The comparative analysis shows the difference of both systems’ efficiency and their operational complications. 5.1 Manual Agent Complaint Logging Overhead

Fig. 3

System overhead graph

Not Ready Time in Agent Complaint Logging Systems. The previous graph gives the results for time taken in logging complaints manually on web interface by agents. It makes agent busy and keeps incoming calls on hold while agent remains busy on the same call. We have taken a sample result of Best Air agents. The following table shows the ready and not ready time of these agents. [8] Table 1: Comparison Average Talk Time

Average Not Ready Time

Casey

00:04:31

00:00:09

Reginald

00:02:54

00:00:00

Roy

00:09:18

00:13:23

Robert

00:02:25

00:00:59

Rick

00:12:05

00:32:14

Agent Name

The comparative graph shows that the average talk time of these agents is less than the average not ready time. It shows the system limitations and requires heavy use of human resource. This means that companies should spend more on their call centers than their actual operations which is definitely not cost effective. [8] Performance Graph of Proposed System. The major advantage of our system is that it doesn’t need any person to work on it. The interfaces are reduced to a single interface and customers can log their complaints in their desired department. This automation also increases the efficiency of system. It logs complaints and complete transactions in less time as compared to the previous system. The performance graph shows the complaint log time frequencies on different calls.

Sci.Int.(Lahore),26(4),1503-1505,2014

Fig. 4

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ISSN 1013-5316; CODEN: SINTE 8

Comparison graph

Performance Graph

Comparative Graph of Agent and Automatic Complaint Logging. The comparative graphs show the difference between the proposed and existing systems’ efficiency. The graph is just mentioning the time of logging complaint from the agent on an interface. The call time and “ready not ready time” overhead is shown before. [8]

Fig. 6

Comparison graph of both systems

6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK The Automatic Call Centre Complaint System can be very useful in modern call centers. All call centers have basic purpose of making a strong relationship between companies and customers. The better relationship needs providing good care and services to customers by the companies. The call centers’ operations depend upon the work codes. Some work

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codes need delayed response. This system supports all these work codes to reduce the burden on agents and also facilitates customers to register their complaints easily. The response of the system is also fast by using GSM technology. This system is quite flexible in that it can be changed according to companies operations. This new system is introduced after analyzing all the operations and working of call centers and many work codes. The main focus of our analysis is call centers dealing with telecom business because of huge frequency rate of calls and customers. These types of call centers are ideal for the implementation of proposed system. The main issue for the support Agents is to play the file and analyze the contents of the customer. This can become an overhead for agents to do in that manner. The future work for this system is to make it more intelligent so that it could convert the recorded file into text format which is easily readable to agents and takes less time for analysis. This approach can increase the response time on part of agents. [1; 9] REFERENCES 1. Tanir O. and Booth R. J., Call center simulation in Bell Canada, Simulation Conference Proceedings, 1999 Winter, IEEE, 1640-1647 (1999) 2. Whitt W., Decomposition approximations for timedependent Markovian queueing networks, Operations Research Letters, 24(3), 97-103 (1999) 3. Whitt W., Partitioning customers into service groups, Management Science, 45(11), 1579-1592 (1999) 4. Whitt W., Staffing a call center with uncertain arrival rate and absenteeism, Production and Operations Management, 15(1), 88 (2006) 5. Perry O. and Whitt W., A routing policy for the X callcenter model designed to respond to unexpected overloads, Citeseer.(2008) 6. Massey W. A. and Whitt W., Peak congestion in multiserver service systems with slowly varying arrival rates, Queueing Systems, 25(1-4), 157-172 (1997) 7. Whitt W., Dynamic staffing in a telephone call center aiming to immediately answer all calls, Operations Research Letters, 24(5), 205-212 (1999) 8. Esselaar S., Gillwald A. and Stork C., South African telecommunications sector performance review 2006, LINK Centre public policy research paper(8), 1-64 (2006) 9. Hämäläinen A., De Veth J. and Boves L., Longer-length acoustic units for continuous speech recognition, Proceedings of the 13th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Antalya, Turkey(2005)