OVERVIEW

To receive email or telephone calls at a customer contact center, the center must be connected to the outside world.

Telephone calls arrive on trunks that are connected (the telephone term is terminated ) on the customer call center switching equipment. More frequently than not, this customer call center system is located on the customer premise. This equipment is termed customer premise equipment or CPE. It may be a key system, if the application is relatively small. If the application is larger, a private branch exchange (PBX) or switchboard may be used if there is a relatively undemanding environment. For a high volume application, a sophisticated inbound call processing system, typically a standalone automatic call distributor (ACD), may be used.

An alternative to buying a telephone switching system is now being offered by your local telephone company via a central office-based ACD service, which can provide a similar range of features to the ACDs based on PBX systems. The main difference is that there is little or no equipment on premise other than the agent station equipment located at the customer s call center. Every telephone call is made through this established and orderly set of control signals. This has expanded to include most of the long distance network providers who offer basic call routing and distribution, which can include customer controlled network-based services. This type of ACD service offers significant potential in far-flung enterprise-wide call distribution where small centers and at home agents are used.

The same physical telephone...