The Call Center Dictionary: The Complete Guide to Call Center & Customer Support Technology Solutions
This book is your guide to the technology, techniques and trends in today's call centers.
TABLE OF CONTENTS The Call Center Dictionary: The Complete Guide to Call Center & Customer Support Technology Solutions
Chapter 16: O:OAI OWS
- OAI Open Application Interface
- An opening in a telephone system that lets you link a computer to that phone system. It lets the computer command the phone system to answer, delay, switch, hold etc. calls.Typical applications include simultaneous data file and call delivery (such as in a call center where a client record is pulled up with ANI and delivered along with the call), message desks where a single telephone switch serves more than one company and predictive dialing. Also known as switch-to-host interface and, when the telephone switch is a PBX, PHI, PBX-Host Interface.In the early 1990s, OAI was an important concept through the telecom industry, but it is particularly important to call centers. Among the first OAI applications were call center applications. The economy of scale in large call centers, where shaving a few seconds of each call results in thousands or millions of dollars in savings, provided the first market of OAI applications. That economy of scale continues to make OAI applications attractive to call centers of all kinds.
Before OAI the link between the telephone system and the computer system was the agent, sitting at a desk with a workstation and a station set. And it certainly seems that every call center application requires access to a database. The old way was pretty hard on the agent, and wasted time. With OAI the computer system and the telephone system are tied together for the benefit of the agent. Agents work more effectively and serve...
Copyright Keith Dawson and Madeline Bodin 2002 under license agreement with Books24x7
