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What I do

Ever since Jed ribbed me a little over my lack of technology posts, I’ve been trying to look for more to post about it.  The problem is that I don’t think anyone would be interested in the technology with which I work.  To get people to even understand what I’m talking about, I often have to go through a litany of definitions and descriptions, and after all that I get an “oohhhhhh, so can you fix my PC at home?” 

I often run into this problem at family gatherings.  I have been trying for years, but have not been able to come up with a short answer to the question, “what do you do for a living?”  I have resorted to saying, “I’m a geek.”  That’s usually enough to discourage any further questions.  It’s not that I mind talking about what I do.  It’s just that it’s difficult to do with people who don’t have a similar background and I am keenly aware of their boredom with me when I see their eyes glaze over. 

So, for those of you who care, here’s what I do for a living:

I work in the world of computer telephony.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with telecom, here?s how the industry grew up:

In the old days, the phone company controlled everything and businesses got phone service just like individuals ? by leasing the phone from the phone company.  Eventually, there came a point when companies wanted more control over their communication, so the phone company, and other manufacturers, created the PBX (private branch exchange).  The PBX is a piece of hardware that sits at a company?s location and routes calls.  It allows a company to buy, for instance, 5 lines from the phone company, and have 20 users behind the PBX, rather than having to buy 20 lines. 

As time passed, companies began to have other needs for their business.  Now that they had some call routing ability, they needed to have some method of telling their callers where to go, so the phone companies made an Automated Attendant.  An Automated Attendant is the recorded voice that tells you ?press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, etc.?  Then the PBX hears the DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency ? when you press a touch tone phone, the number emits 2 tones of different frequencies) from your phone and routes your call.  The Automated Attendant is a second piece of hardware that sits beside the PBX. 

Well, what happens when someone isn?t at his or her desk?  Now we need voicemail.  Voicemail was another piece of hardware that sat beside the PBX and was integrated with it.

The next major application was an ACD.  ACD stands for Automatic Call Distribution.  When you call an 800 number for support, there may be 100 agents sitting there waiting to take that call.  An ACD decides who gets that call.  In the simplest of ACDs, the agent who has been available the longest gets the call.  A more advance ACD is a skills-based ACD.  With a skills-based ACD, each agent is assigned a variety of skills and skill levels.  For example, say you are working in the Dell support center.  You may have a skill for Windows XP with a proficiency of 80 out of a 100 and a skill for Windows 2000 with a proficiency of 20.  The ACD, then, will determine which agent gets the call based on who has the highest skill level for it.  You can also take into account the cost for the agent, and a host of other factors.  As you can see, ACDs can become very very complex.

You might be asking at this point, ?how do you know what the caller wants??  That?s where an IVR, or VRU, comes in.  An IVR is an Interactive Voice Response.  A VRU is a Voice Response Unit.  They are the same thing.  An IVR is an Automated Attendant that touches a database.  The simplest example is you bank.  When you call your bank and transfer money from your savings account to your checking account over the phone, you are using an IVR.  The IVR is hitting the database to access your account information.  Another example is the airlines.  When you call in to check your flight status, you are hitting their database to find that information.  Most IVRs are just touch-tone, but Voice Recognition is also becoming more prevalent as the cost of doing it drops.  IVRs can be very simple or very complex, depending on what you need.

Another thing that companies started wanting was a way to automatically dial people.  We are all familiar with these, because these are what telemarketers and collections people use.  This kind of equipment is called a Dialer.  There are basically 5 kinds of Dialers.  A Predictive Dialer uses an algorithm that predicts when an agent will be available to take a call and makes the call.  It goes through a database and says to itself, ?I get a connection on every three calls I make; an agent?s average talk time is 3.5 minutes; I will place 3 calls right now and by the time it connects, an agent will be available to take the call.?  When you get a call at home and hear dead air for a few seconds before anyone picks up, that?s a predictive dialer at work with a poor algorithm.  The second type of Dialer is a Power Dialer.  A Power Dialer waits for an agent to actually be available and then place the 3 calls (from the previous example) under the assumption that only one of them will connect.  If two connect, one will be disconnected.  The third kind is a Preview Dialer.  This is what collections use a lot.  The Preview Dialer pops the customer?s information to the agent?s screen to allow them to prepare, and will then place the call after agent presses a button.  The last two Dialers are very simple.  An Automated Voice Dialer calls people and plays a recording (think: political blasts), and an Automated Fax Dialer sends a mass of faxes to a bunch of folks.

Speaking of fax, that?s another device that companies started wanting: a Fax Server.  This is a piece of hardware that automatically receives faxes and distributes them digitally and sometimes allows users to send faxes from a digital format through a print driver. 

As companies got larger, management also wanted to start being able to record calls.  There are 3 reasons for recording and it breaks down to the acronym CPR: Compliance Performance and Risk.  You record for Compliance when there is a legal mandate for you to record and archive.  Performance is when you record to improve performance.  This is often called ?Quality? recording.  People generally record a random sample of calls, like 5 calls per person per week, and have supervisors evaluate the sampling for training purposes.  Risk is when you don?t have to record, but you do it to prevent lawsuits.  For instance, a brokerage house records EVERYTHING, so that when you lose a pile of cash and call them to say, ?I said SELL, not BUY!!!?, they?ll pull the recording and cover their ass.  After we started recording calls, companies also started recording screens.

The telephony world is older than the data world, but the data world has changed the telephony world forever.  Once everyone started doing everything on computers and such, companies started wanting to integrate their telephony network to their data network.  So the phone vendors created CTI gateways (Computer-Telephony Gateways) to integrate everything together. 

As you can imagine, this is a total mess.  Keep in mind that all of these boxes are usually different operating systems, sometimes different manufacturers, with different maintenance contracts, and usually completely proprietary.  So things like consistent reporting, call handling, and such are a nightmare.  Furthermore, whenever you change any of these devices, you have to take into account all of the other devices.  Here?s what a normal business? telephony environment looks like:

A mess.

So, now we get to what I do.  As you can see, companies need a lot of things to run their business.  I work primarily in a product called Interaction Center (IC), which is manufactured by a company called Interactive Intelligence Incorporated (I3).  Essentially, I3 took the lessons from the data world and applied them to the telephony world.  I3 realized that each of these separate and proprietary boxes were just different applications.

Compare the office of 1950 to the office of today.  In 1950, a person might need to type a letter, so they would pull out the typewriter and type it up.  A person might need to run some numbers, so they would pull out the slide rule and go to work.  A person might need to do a presentation, so they would get out the easel.  Each application had a standalone, proprietary device to accomplish it.  In today?s environment, you would boot up your computer and run MS Word to type that letter.  Then fire up the calculator or spreadsheet to run those numbers.  Then launch PowerPoint to make that presentation.  You have a single device, your computer, which is running multiple applications. 

I3 does the same thing for telephony.  They took all of the applications (PBX, IVR, ACD, Dialer, Automated Attendant, Fax, Reporting, etc.) and put them into software on a single server.  So the company ends up with a single, open system to manage all of their telephony needs. 

And then we go a step beyond traditional telephony.  Phone calls are just one form of communication.  There?s also fax, email, web chat, voice over net, web callbacks, etc.  IC can manage all of these different forms of media through a single environment.  This means that a single contact center (no longer a call center) agent can take a phone call, some emails, and maybe a web chat or two simultaneously.  Plus, management can go back through the reporting and see that in the past month, customer X called us twice, emailed 12 times, and chatted once, and here?s how long it took, and here?s what we said, and here?s what he bought, and here?s our cost of sale, etc.

I3 is the manufacturer of the software, they use distribution channels called ?resellers? or ?value-added resellers? to actually distribute the software.  So, my company sells it, designs it for the customer, installs it, and supports it.  Since we are a small company, I am involved in every part of the process. 

Since IC sits in both the data and the telephony environment, we are forced to learn just about everything because we touch so many pieces of equipment.  I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Cisco certified, and certified in a number of other specific products.  We can do everything from programming routers to installing email systems.  It?s a fun business.

The latest trends in telephony have more to do with transmission method rather than applications.  The big push is for ?convergence? or ?IP telephony.?  This is taking your voice traffic, packetizing it, and transmitting it over the data network.  We work quite a bit in IP telephony.  It?s still evolving, but it?s coming along.

That?s a high level view of what I do for a living.  If you want to talk about it or would like me to post about something in my field, I am more than happy to do so.  But perhaps you can see why I have trouble finding things in my field that people might be interested in. 

So, like I said, I?m a geek.

Posted by Owen at 1619 hrs
Off-Duty + Technology

1. So what you’re saying is, you can’t fix my PC at home?

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on August 20, 2003 at 1835 hrs
   
   
   

2. WOW.  If I study this for a lo-o-o-o-o-ng time, I might know what you do, but then probably not.  Geek I know.  Love you, Mom

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on August 20, 2003 at 2228 hrs
   
   
   

3. So, can you can fix my PC, and help me with my voicemail?

   *wink*

   Posted by Daniel Morris on August 23, 2003 at 1228 hrs
   
   
   

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