Ventimo Corporation
July 23, 2003

Calltrol’s OTS lets our software engineers design, develop, and deploy the perfect enhancement solution for our clients. Whether they need a predictive dialer, inbound ACD/IVR, soft phone, screen pop, database development, or any other solution they can think up, we can develop it economically and deliver it quickly.

Jim Hogan
Chief Executive Officer
Ventimo Corporation

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ICM Group of Companies, Chennai, India
July 21, 2003

We are a value added reseller of Calltrol's dialing solution in India and other countries in this region. We have a call center office of our own to test Calltrol's solutions and see how best we can customize to suit our India based customers providing value for their investment.

In our research of over a dozen top quality dialing solution providers, we found Calltrol's solution work the best. Mainly because, we can embed their solutions into our CRM. You don't need to work in two different systems that are not integrated.

Calltrol's Object Telephony Server is simple, powerful, easy to use, and effective. We were able to integrate the dialing solution into our CRM in a matter of 2 weeks.

Kalyani Narayanan
Vice President
ICM Group of Companies, Chennai, India

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Convergence Success - Rooms To Go Furniture
Will Communications Servers Make The PBX Extinct? - Call Center Magazine
November 2000, By Lee Hollman.

Rooms-To-Go based in Seffner, FL with contact centers in Tampa and Atlanta is one of the nation’s most rapidly growing furniture retailers. In it’s quest for superior customer relations they offer multiple contact mediums for customers to communicate on issues like deliveries and quality control. They also take a proactive approach to customer service by calling and confirming deliveries in advance. This avoids unsuccessful delivery attempts and customer dissatisfaction, saving the company thousands of dollars.

Fred Beasley, the call center director for Rooms-To-Go spent many years searching for the correct multi-faceted telephony solution and recalls that when he originally sought a predictive dialer for the Tampa center he found Calltrol’s (then Buffalo International’s) Object Telephony Server (OTS™).

With myriad inbound/outbound, live/automated requirements Beasley’s task was not easy. While there were many vendors talking a good game, few could offer a concise plan to implement these features in a fashion highly integrated with the valuable corporate database applications already in place.

The present solution has fostered many benefits for the company. First year labor savings alone has paid for the OTS™ system AND the company’s phone switch.

Rooms to Go has made extensive use of the OTS™ function suite. This is an excellent example of how a single PC based Telephony Server can truly eliminate4 or more separate pieces of conventional telephony equipment in a business critical environment.

One example of how productivity has improved is as follows:

We like to confirm our deliveries before we go out, and give [customers] a four-hour timeframe of when we expect to be there,” he says. “We are using live [agents] to do our confirmation process,” he says. “When we’re confirming deliveries, we reach about 50% of the people. The other 50% of the time, we get an answering machine. Although agents still reach only 50% of customers live, with OTS™ they leave automatic messages on the other customers’ answering machines. He formerly employed 20 agents to make confirmation calls and now employs 6 agents for this purpose, a 14 person cut!

Agents also call customers after each delivery to conduct a survey about how satisfied they are with the service they receive, and to ask them if they require additional assistance. These calls are now made through the dialer.

Other uses for the new OTS™ system:

Beasley used OTS™ to expand the capacity of the call center’s phone switch. “All of our departments, [like] accounting and merchandise, were on our switch, which was full.” says Beasley. We connected OTS™ to the call center’s phone switch through a T-1 trunk and moved the customer service agents onto the OTS™ server. In addition to expanding his PBX’s capacity, Beasley used OTS™ to provide a touchtone menu for Rooms-to-Go’s customers. “When I started looking for a dialer, I also discovered that [OTS™] can also be used for some IVR routes” says Beasley. Customers can check order and appointment status by entering their order or phone number by touch tone. This saves time and keeps live agents focused on less routine inquiries.

We have various toll-free numbers to contact different departments or agents who speak Spanish for example. OTS™ takes the DNIS digits [from each number] to route [the call] to a specific group,” says Beasley.

Beasley explains that he purchased the OTS™ communications server from Touchstar Software, a value-added reseller and consulting firm. A team of in-house programmers worked with programmers from The Touchstar Software and installed OTS™ at the first location within two weeks. “The Touchstar programmers added the routing parameters,” says Beasley. “They also gave me some pretty neat features, such as call monitoring.” He adds that after Rooms-To-Go customized OTS™ to its specifications, the company’s Atlanta call center went live with it after a four-day installation period.

For more information on Rooms To Go Furniture’s Calltrol implementation see:
Will Communications Servers Make The PBX Extinct? - Call Center Magazine, November 2000, By Lee Hollman.

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Calltrol Customer Success - Innovative Software For Remote Agents
Piecing Together A Customer Care Network - Call Center Magazine
June 2000, By Lee Hollman.

An outsourcer of both live calls and email response Innovation Support, Doraville GA, operates two call centers and employs 450 “at-home” agents. The company provides services to a variety of clients and has been using Calltrol’s OTS™ since 1998.

The company expanded into employing telecommuters after developing the necessary OTS™ client applications to support real time CTI from the typical residence.

Randall Romanow, one of the key members of that team and also the owner of Innovation Support recalls the effort that designing the software involved.

It took about six months before we could begin using the system on a limited basis and another three months to work out the bugs,” he says. “[We wanted to] provide screen pops and data access through the Internet. We approached [several software vendors] about off-the-shelf software for that purpose, and they said they couldn’t do that. The name we gave it is AWARD: Automated Web-Assisted Remote Dialing.”

Innovation wanted to create a very reliable, inexpensive architecture, limiting the investment necessary to get someone up and running from the comfort of their own home. “All the agent using the system from their home needs is Internet access and two phone lines,” said Romanow. “One line is dedicated to voice, and the other to their Internet connection.” Agents log in to a Web site, pick up their phones and hear a confirmation message from our central OTS™ server stating they are successfully connected. Using a web browser agents see a context appropriate user interface showing for example that they’re in queue for the next available call. Agents may join a queue, enter customer information and save it to Innovation’s database.

Innovation Support’s AWARD software works with Calltrol’s OTS™, which the company first licensed in April 1998. OTS™ is software that helps developers build predictive dialers, IVR systems and ACDs. Romanow says that OTS™ enables Award to route calls and customer information to agents whether they are located in the call center or in their homes. It also lets supervisors view call statistics for all agents through a Web browser, store recordings of agents’ conversations, do live call monitoring and agent coaching and listen to conversation recordings from their PCs.

Romanow is quick to extol the virtues of working with remote agents. “The advantage over a traditional mega-center (he is the former owner of a 1500 agent operation) is that we avoid additional brick and mortar costs,” he says. “Every time we want to hire another 100 agents, we don’t need to build more stations.” An additional 30% savings results, because the remote agents work as independent contractors rather than as salaried employees. While he is firmly convinced from this experience that “the days of the mega-centers are drawing to a close” he also believes that live agent contact centers will not become 100% obsolete. There is an important balance between home agents and call center agents that Romanow believes will always exist. Both types of agents worktogether on the same calls. Home agents go through the initial presentation, qualify customers and transfer calls to our contact centers,” explained Romanow. “We prefer to have directly supervised “in-house” agents handling sensitive information like credit card and checking account numbers”

Between 50 and 70 of the more experienced at-home agents are qualified to act as supervisors at any time. Overall and individual performance information and management tools for things like monitoring and quality control are available to them at home via the web. These “remote” supervisors can view information like agents’ hours, the number of calls that agents handle each day and how many sales leads they confirm. Remote supervisors can also listen to agents’ calls and view the information that they have onscreen. They can even coach them over the phone or, if necessary, join the call to assist customers.

A team of supervisors at Innovation’s Atlanta and Norfolk call centers also monitor remote agents and delegate certain tasks to the at-home supervisors. There’s also a separate team exclusively supervising the agents at both traditional contact centers.

The benefits of at-home agents are clear. Not only does it reduce operating costs and improve staffing flexibility, it also enables Romanow to find its workforce from labor markets throughout the US. While they advertise in newspapers and on-line when necessary, most new agents come from word of mouth and referrals from existing agents. The possibility of working from home appeals to many prospective employees, including students and working parents. “Getting agents to work from home is not a problem. We have more agents who want to do it than we have work for them to do,” says Romanow.

For more information on Innovation Support’s Calltrol implementation see:
Piecing Together A Customer Care Network - Call Center Magazine, June 2000, By Lee Hollman.

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Calltrol Customer Success-Calling Solutions
Predicting The Future of Predictive Dialers - Call Center Magazine
December 1999, By Lee Hollman.

Of predictive dialing, Mike Pryor, VP of information systems at Calling Solutions, says, “Agents like it because their calls come quickly. Idle time varies with each calling list, but there’s been less of it with all of our campaigns.”

Founded in 1981, Calling Solutions is a leading provider of customized, customer relationship management solutions for Fortune 50 companies. Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, with over 1600 employees and multiple locations, Calling Solutions' clients include telecommunications, financial, hospitality and technology companies. Calling Solutions makes more than a million outbound calls and receives between 1,500 to 20,000 inbound calls a day.

Since 1987 Calling Solutions has been using Calltrol’s Object Telephony Server (OTS™) to dial and route outbound calls in conjunction with their Nortel Meridian ACD which handles inbound calls. Pryor plans to connect inbound agents to OTS™ soon to take full advantage of it’s call blending capabilities. He estimates that between 10% and 50% of inbound agents at the center will use predictive dialing by next year.

Our inbound operations manager loves the blending feature because he doesn’t have to place agents in specific call groups,” he says. “We can set inbound calls at different skill levels so that agents receive only the calls that they’ve been trained to handle.”

Companies with large call centers such as Calling Solutions often select a Telephony Server type of predictive dialing system. They appreciate the power, scalability and flexibility that these systems offer. If you’re seeking a predictive dialer that can accommodate a high volume of calls and give you complete control over your scripts, databases, reports and other surrounding technologies, a Telephony Server like Calltrol’s OTS™ may offer the right combination of “off the shelf” performance, ease of implementation, cost effectiveness and internal MIS control.

Calltrol offers OTS™ as software only or installs it on an industrial PC with call processing hardware (mostly Dialogic) appropriate for a customer’s needs. OTS™ provides your center with a robust platform for call routing, call blending and predictive dialing. The predictive dialer runs an algorithm that reviews 20 different factors before it places a call and has yielded performance exceeding some of the most well known competitors in the industry year after year. OTS™ also supports advanced contact center telephony functions internally such as agent monitoring, coaching, conversation recording, conference calling, intelligent and skill based call routing. The system supports thousands of ports whether T1, E1, ISDN, Analog or VoIP and dynamically allocates lines for outbound calls, inbound and agent connections.

Calling Solutions evolved from an inbound telemarketing service bureau to a large-scale provider of outbound, inbound and web collaborative services. Key to their success has been consistent and high quality response to clients. They provide customized solutions on an individual basis rather than modifying campaigns to conform to established formats. The flexibility of OTS™ has been instrumental in this success.

Calling Solutions has maintained the following principles for success: Leveraging leading edge technologies - effecting the lowest cost of goods; maintain efficient operations supervised by veteran managers and incentive pay; create robust client response suites with customized programming; provide rapid and accurate turn-around on client requests; offer multilingual services; develop focused agents through initial training and concurrent instruction

Rapid turn around on complex campaign criteria and scripting that cannot even be done with other telephony systems has made Calling Solutions loyal to Calltrol’s OTS™. When it comes to supporting Fortune 50 companies, many of which are in highly regulated industries like Telecommunications and Insurance this is critical. Calling Solutions custom develops all of it’s inbound and outbound user interfaces & scripts in Visual Basic. This eliminates scripting, data access and call handling limitations of other contact center solutions.

Calling Solutions typically records both an agent’s pitch and customer acceptance, does internal quality control and uses off premises independent verifiers. These types of campaigns entail complex coordination of conference calling, conversation recording, and supervisory monitoring, all coordinated with logically branched scripts that can often exceed 100 screens. The unified structure and flexible nature of OTS™ permits Pryor to customize these types of scripts at will and deploy changes to agents in the form of a single, simple, Visual Basic application at the desktop. The company plans to switch development environments in the future so that all campaign scripts can reside on a web server. In any event, the OTS™ system doesn’t require modification to address campaign specific needs. It is a true server that runs with the Calling Solutions custom client applications.

Calling Solutions supports a large number of outsource client campaigns that are constantly changing. Visual Basic, SQL and OTS™ provide a virtually limitless environment for customization. Client scripts can exceed 80 screens.

For more information on Calling Solution’s Calltrol implementation see:
Predicting The Future of Predictive Dialers - Call Center Magazine, December 1999, By Lee Hollman.

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