The epik Hosted Call
Center application provides a valuable integrated
hosted service for those business customers who have
a help desk, order entry department, or any contact
group, especially with variable or seasonal call volume.
Instead of lost calls, busy signals, and expanded
staff to accommodate peak periods, the Hosted Call
Center handles incoming calls in an orderly and professional
manner, whether agents are immediately available or
there is a period of call overflow.
The Hosted Call Center receives calls coming into
a contact group and distributes the calls among agents
of the company assigned to that group, whether the
agents are in the call center, working from home,
or at other remote locations. The automatic call distribution
(ACD) capability helps with busy call periods to present
a professional customer interface and maximize caller
satisfaction. epik can
easily configure multiple queues per agent, with custom
choices for announcements, time of day routing, and
music-on-hold, meeting customer needs and call-center
capital expenditures.
Call Distribution
With
the epik Hosted Call Center, calls are always answered
in the order they were received and callers only have
to remember a single number to call. Incoming calls
roll to the first available agent for the most efficient
response time.
With the Hosted Call Center, any number of ACD queues
and agents to a queue can be set up. Queue routing
types include:
The maximum number of calls in a queue defaults to
“unlimited.” If a limit is set, then an
overflow action must be set. The overflow actions
may be an announcement then disconnect, route to voicemail,
roll-over to another line, hunt group or queue, or
route based on time-of-day or day-of-week rules.
Hunt groups offer another type of incoming call distribution.
The Hosted Call Center has two different types of
hunt groups: multi-line and directory number, each
with a variety of available call distribution patterns
to which a call overflow destination can be assigned.
Routing choices for multi-line hunt groups include:
longest idle, top-to-bottom, bottom-totop, ring all,
ring all idle, and round robin. For directory number
hunt groups, the choices are circular or series completion.
Agents can belong to multiple queues and hunt groups.
They log in and out of their assigned queues with
a simple push of a phone button or star code sequence.
Agents can be centrally located or dispersed wherever
there is a broadband Internet connection giving access
to the epik network. Employees at multiple sites in
an epik Voice network can function as a unified queue,
helping businesses with queue coverage issues.
Other epik Hosted Call Center Features
While waiting for an agent or employee to answer,
callers can hear a mixture of voice menus, music on
hold, advertisements, and break-in (multi) announcements.
If all lines in a queue or hunt group are busy, an
announcement and music mix will play until an agent
is available.
The standard announcements can be used, or custom
announcements can be set up easily, tied to a call-routing
plan, and then recorded from a phone. Since the epik
Hosted Call Center is a part of our Total Voice Management
Solution, agents using the Web Portal have mobility
by easily being able to:
- Reassign a phone, such as when moving to a new
or temporary desk, with complete services following
the assignment
- Physically relocate an IP phone to any other
broadband connection with services following, such
as when moving desks, or when working occasionally
from home or another location
- Use the remote phone feature to continue to answer
calls for the call center while on the way home,
running errands, or while on another call at home
Agents as well as supervisors can be provided a
visual indication (phone dependent) of how many calls
are waiting in queue which can replace or used in
conjunction with call center wallboard applications.
Supervisors can use the Night Service key (phone dependent)
to temporarily or permanently change
Queue routing in the event of an emergency.
Administration is integrated into the epik Server
administration and user interfaces for ease of setup.
If an enterprise administrator is given access, via
the epik Admin Portal the enterprise customer can
manage setup and changes to call queues and hunt groups
from the administrator ACD or hunt group
wizard interface.
Reporting features can be added by downloading a
call statistics file to a third-party application
or can be integrated with existing applications using
the call control SDK.
epik Hosted Call Center
Benefits
- Saves business customers’ capital while
improving their customer service
- Provides a variety of call distribution methods
to meet varied customer needs
- Enables flexible call center staffing by supporting
both centralized and remote agents
- Helps promote customer business with flexible
announcement-on-hold structure
Features
- Simple button or star code sequence for agent
log on and off
- Broad choice of call-distribution methods
- Integrated with the epik Server announcements,
dial plans, and other features for smooth interactive
voice prompts, hold music, time of day routing,
custom announcements, and queue overflow handling
- Wizard-guided setup
- Multiple administration levels to enable enterprise-level
administration
