R.100

The Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum (ECTF) (Fremont, CA 510-608-5915, www.ectf.org) nurtured development of R.100, an interoperability agreement that addresses the need for easily gathering, consolidating and reporting call center data. It was released in December of 1999.

The R.100 standards consist of a call/thread model and employs open application programming interfaces such as TAPI and JTAPI, and sits above the ECTF call-control architecture to define how to derive data from both circuit- and packet-switched voice calls.

Today s call centers contain a proliferation of systems that enhance the effectiveness of the center, but each one collects separate information on individual calls. All of the data collected by these different systems is needed to intelligently modify and fine-tune call center activities, but this very proliferation of systems presents a barrier to the correlation of data for an individual call. R.100 presents standardized techniques for gathering this data in a consistent manner from all the devices in a call center.

R.100 defines three types of records:

• call segment basically a piece of data representing a call transition (similar to a state change)

• a call record for Call Detail Recording (CDR) purposes.

• a thread - that ties all sub-operations together.

These techniques make the reporting process much easier and more effective. R.100 is available now, and can be downloaded from the ECTF web site at http://www.ectf.org.

The availability of R.100 represents an important milestone for making call centers an ever more potent element of successful business strategies, says Ed Verney,...