Agencies Experiment With New Call Center Tech.

<B> Agencies Experiment With New Call Center Tech.</B>

By Sarah Welt

As call center technology rapidly advances, the mega travel management companies are testing and deploying more advanced systems in their large reservation centers. In perhaps the toughest marketplace they have ever faced, they are betting on call routing, new point of sale systems and Internet-based solutions to increase their productivity without sacrificing the quality of the service they offer.

All the mega agencies have sophisticated call routing, the latest telephone switches and some level of telephony that brings up traveler profile information instantaneously with an agent's keystroke. The technology and training have meshed to the point where travelers do not know if they are being serviced in Nebraska or New York. And the systems are capable of handling not just telephone calls, but also e-mail, fax, mail and Internet reservations.

Indeed, even the name "call center" is being modernized because of the increase in multimedia requests. Didina Burok, a Lucent Technologies system engineer for call center platforms, said instead call centers now are being referred to as "customer care centers."

Philadelphia-based agency Rosenbluth International is replacing its call routing technology with a new Geotel system that AT&T private labels as AT&T Resource Manager. Like older systems, the technology calculates which agent will next become available and sends calls to that queue in preparation. But the new system goes farther still, allowing for calls to be taken out of a queue after being placed there and moved to a different office if another agent becomes available first.

Rosenbluth also is experimenting with a technology called Voice Over IP, where the "IP" stands for Internet Protocol, designed to send voice transmissions over the Internet instead of telephone lines. Together with AT&T and one of its CRS providers, Rosenbluth is testing the concept of using Voice Over IP to run its CRS traffic over the Internet, especially to link Rosenbluth's at-home agents to its call centers.

Another new call center option being explored at Rosenbluth is using multimedia technology to allow customers to interact with reservation agents through their computers rather than telephones. Dubbed Project IP, it has been in testing with Lucent and AT&T for the past year.

With such a system in place, a customer using an online booking system or corporate intranet site could click a button and transfer "the entire conversation, including the particular Web page they were on" to an agent's screen, noted director of global operations Bob Simmonds. He also acknowledged, however, that the agency has "run into challenges" and has not yet "found a lot of need" for the product, since most callers don't yet have the digital phone lines and fast modems necessary to link to it.

Rosenbluth also is considering improving Upstream, the point of sale tool it launched a year ago, which adds a graphical front end to the Apollo/Galileo CRS. Simmonds noted that while the agency had expected the system to increase the number of calls processed by each res agent by 10 percent, the improvement actually has been between 15 and 30 percent.

Still, rather than build a new version in-house, Rosenbluth is considering switching to Apollo's new Viewpoint product this time around.

"We are always looking at different alternatives. Possibly something could be as good as Upstream, and if the CRS supplied it, why not utilize that?" Simmonds said.

Meanwhile, Maritz Travel Co. of St. Louis this month plans to complete a beta test of an enhanced version of the telephony product it uses in conjunction with its Proview point of sale system, after working with a scaled-down version of the software for the past 18 months. The new telephony system has a "screen pop" on agents' desktops as soon as a call is routed to them and allows them to transfer calls, complete with profile information, to other agents. Technology marketing product director Becky March said studies with a client in the Southeast found that having a screen prepopulated with a traveler's profile saved agents an average 32 seconds per call.

Using the enhanced version, agents also can place calls through the computer, rather than dialing the telephone. And since the system remembers the last 10 numbers dialed, agents can just click on a number to make an outgoing call. Agents also can set warnings to flash on screen when a call is on hold for more than 60 seconds. "Consultants can click on a button and it dials the number for them," said project manager for technical implementation and corporate travel Jennifer Brda. "They pretty much have full control over their phone via their computer screens."

Maritz, too, is interested in Voice Over IP technology, and will pilot it internally within the next six months before considering a rollout to call centers six to 12 months later, said corporate vice president of information technology Richard Spradling. But for now, he said, "our view is that given the mission-critical nature of reservation traffic, it is a little early" to deploy the technology broadly.

The merger of WorldTravel Partners and BTI Americas, meanwhile, has given WTP all six of BTI Americas' large call centers, as well as the software developed for them by Electronic Data Systems. The mega plans to create a new point of sale tool combining the best features of WTP's CRS Screen Highlighter and BTI Americas' Mantis Point of Sale, said co-president Danny Hood. And having a system built and updated in-house allows the company to save money and deploy the product "in every res center, not just huge call centers," he noted.

Unlike some of its agency counterparts, WTP-BTI Americas does not believe in utilizing one graphic front end for all the CRSs. Instead, it focuses its efforts more on mid-office quality control, file finishing systems and agent training.

"We've found that customers are not willing to pay because there have been minimal agent productivity gains with a common front end," Hood said.

WTP-BTI Americas also is improving its profile management system, which matches up the human resource profile databases of its corporate customers with CRS profiles. Hood said two-thirds of the code already is complete, but WTP's Travel Technologies Group now is adding a feature to allow travelers to create and maintain their own profiles through an Internet booking engine. This will be synchronized with the H.R. and CRS profiles, so all customer information in all call centers always will be consistent.

The system should be completed this year. Hewlett-Packard is utilizing a version of it already, and WTP-BTI Americas is "writing our software to interface with PeopleSoft's H.R. database," Hood said.

American Express, which already has quite a bit of sophisticated call center technology, now is enhancing its routing capabilities and developing the next generation of a staffing product that should be complete within six months. Moving to a client-server environment, it is working with TeleCenter Systems of Nashville to create one virtual office, said director of call delivery strategy Michael Laughlin.

When a call comes in, agents will be notified through a beep in their headsets and an automatic phone display, and be able to bring up the traveler's profile with a single keystroke.

While Laughlin agreed that Voice Over IP technology is not yet ready for market, "at the current rate of development, in probably less than a year the quality will be sufficient to provide to our client base," he said.