Siemens To Introduce Next-Gen Call-Center Software

By using IP telephony in their call centers, companies can better manage inbound contacts and keep agents informed of one another's activities. Siemens Communications Inc. hopes to tap that trend with the latest release of its HiPath ProCenter call-center applications, due later this month.

With an application for small call centers with up to three shifts of 150 agents each, and one for large operations that have three shifts of up to 750 agents each, Siemens is looking to provide businesses with an expanded arsenal of presence-based collaboration capabilities for improving internal communications and customer service. The technology takes advantage of the widespread use of voice over IP in call centers by allowing phone and Web queries to be handled as a single queue.

The new apps also come with improved visualization tools and dashboard-style reports that let call-center managers react more quickly to changes in center activity, says Al Baker, VP of product management for Siemens. The ability of agents to use instant-messaging-style presence to detect not only the status of other agents in the call center, but even of remote agents and other knowledge workers elsewhere in the company, should help companies answer their customers' questions faster, Baker says.

For instance, an insurance company's call-center agent could bring a claims adjuster immediately into a customer call, rather than telling the customer that a claims adjuster will contact them later. "This is not ad hoc communication," he says. "This is about companies who've decided that first-contact resolution is a priority."

Detroit Medical Center has been running the beta version of Siemens' new release for the past few months and was set to go live with an early deployment of the general-availability version this week. The nine-hospital system deployed the previous version of HiPath ProCenter last summer. But the enhanced presence capabilities, and the new version's ability to merge phone and E-mail queries into one support queue, was attractive enough to consider an upgrade after just six months, says Kathy Ingalls Hefni, corporate director of Detroit Medical's health access center.

The center manages three types of activity--physician referrals, nurse triage, and hospital equipment scheduling--and with patient health on the line, it's important to get questions answered as quickly as possible. Ingalls Hefni and her crew have used the presence and reporting data to create a broadcast ticker that constantly scrolls across agents' desktops, keeping them updated on the call center's activity and clued in to where they should be directing their efforts at any given moment. The merging of phone and Web support lets agents respond wherever they're needed, whether it's helping with a backlog of calls or answering waiting E-mail queries.

During the beta test, the center increased its call-handling capabilities by 58% and reduced the call-abandonment rate to less than 3%. Plus, systemwide revenue grew 31% in the first month. The decision to go ahead with the upgrade was easy. "If we need to get a nurse available to us, the staff will know who has the ability to take that call and can intervene on their part," Ingalls Hefni says. "Having a clinical component makes it very compelling for the staff to know what's occurring in the call center at any time."

Pricing for the new version of HiPath ProCenter starts at about $10,000 for a deployment that supports 10 agents.