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 onfigure 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:

• Longest idle – calls are sent to the agent who has been idle the longest
• Top-to-bottom – calls are sent in top-to-bottom order as defined in service administration
• Bottom-to-top – calls are sent in bottom-to-top order as defined in service administration
• Round robin – calls are directed to the first- through last-available agent in the queue, then repeats

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 Managment 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