Inbound and outbound calls

You may have heard about contact centers, also referred to as call centers, and that's because their telephony roots began in the 1980s and '90s. "Call center" really refers to customer interactions via voice over a telephone. Contact Center is the updated term and an evolution from call center that refers to not just voice calls, but all of the other digital media channels that customers utilize to interact with an organization such as e-mail, chat, SMS, or business messaging platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

So, first let's look at inbound calls. To begin, a customer picks up the phone, dials an organization using the PSTN, which stands for public switch telephone network, meaning AT&T, Verizon, or any number of other phone service providers. Once their call gets through, the first thing they typically encounter is an IVR platform.

IVR stands for interactive voice response. The IVR can be used for a number of things. Most often it's simply used for call classification, which is to first determine the intent of the caller in order to route them to the appropriate resource. A call comes in and the organization wants to be able to qualify what that customer is calling about before they know where to send them to resolve their issue. So, they are presented with some options to choose from, either using their touch tone keypad or using speech recognition to enter choices. Speech recognition and text to speech capabilities allow for more interactive customer self-servicing, which is another use for the IVR.

The IVR can play prerecorded or interactive prompts and then collect the speech responses from the caller, which are then processed and converted to text. The responses can be stored or used to make further decisions. Text to speech is the opposite, allowing the IVR to audibly read back almost any information to the caller, including letters, numbers, words, addresses, or even complete sentences. If you've ever gotten a bank account balance over the phone you were using IVR, self-service with text to speech.

You may have also heard the term PBX - which stands for private branch exchange - back in the '80s and '90s. When companies wanted to install a phone system for their office, they would put in a PBX to route and carry all the telephone calls either internally or externally, such as customers calling into the contact center. It is the phone system for either a single office or an entire enterprise, including their call center traffic. After a caller qualifies their intent in the IVR and their issue is not resolved using IVR self-service, they are then typically passed on to the ACD, which stands for automatic call distribution.

I'm sure you have all called into a contact center at one time and gotten queued when an agent isn't immediately available. That's the role of the ACD. An ACD can be embedded in the PBX or a completely separate system, but functionally the role of the ACD is to match the customers' needs with an agent who has a skill required to solve the customer's issue. Agents are pre-assigned skills based on their training and knowledge, so customers are queued and routed via the ACD to an available agent who resolves their issue. Then, the agent would wrap up the call and go on to the next one.

Now let's talk about outbound calls. There are instances where organizations want to proactively reach out to their customers. This is done by what's commonly referred to as an outbound dialer. The very first use of these were for sales calls. You know, the mostly unwanted calls that all of us have received, and it always seemed to happen right when you were sitting down for dinner. Outbound calls could also be used for conveying information to customers.

For example, if your utility company has an outage in your area and they want to proactively notify you that they are aware of the outage and the expected repair time. The way most outbound systems work is they receive a list of numbers to call from an external database. The dialer then starts calling the numbers on the list and uses algorithms that listen to the call progress to determine if it receives a busy signal or ringing, no answer, a voicemail system, or a live person. If the system detects a live person, it can then immediately connect them with either a live agent, play a prerecorded message, or even connect the person to an IVR.

If the interaction is more complex, dialers may be embedded into a PBX or could be a separate platform, but functionally they perform the same tasks.

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