Customer Story

Versatility Relies on PC-DCE to Make
Call Centers Click

"Call-center application developers in a DCE environment benefit by having a service setup that's transparent to the customer's desktop. You don't have to do nearly as much configuration, hardwiring and mapping of drives that you have to do with other network setups. Instead, a desktop application can simply say it needs a service, and PC-DCE will find that service somewhere on the network and tell the desktop how to connect to it."

"With PC-DCE, you're getting a system that's easier to administer than other network configurations. It's dependable, robust and secure. By combining Versatility and Gradient's PC-DCE technology, we enhance both call-center representative productivity and revenues generated in customers' call centers."

Keith Roberts, Director of Product Development - Versatility Inc.

When a customer service representative takes a call or a telemarketer makes one, just how do they know so much about the customer on the other end of the phone before anyone speaks?

The secret is CTI, or computer telephony integration, and it is the technology behind Versatility Inc.'s success in the call center industry. With CTI, the Fairfax, Virginia-based company helps call centers automate a host of functions for their call-center representatives, thereby increasing their effectiveness, improving customer service, and boosting call-center revenues.

For instance, CTI can:

  • Identify a customer through caller ID then automatically display the details of the customer's prior transactions.
  • Help managers analyze variables in call-center activity patterns to ensure proper staffing, crisp customer service, and an efficient sales effort.
  • Remind customer-service representatives to phone prospects again if they werenÕt home the first time.
  • Automate "call blending," which presents a call-center representative with an outbound call when the stream of incoming calls slows down.

CTI is a complicated business, and it only pays dividends if it's easy to use, secure, and seamless. Those concerns are paramount for Versatility, a leading vendor of mission-critical call center systems and applications.

Versatility delivers advanced customer interaction software solutions to the most demanding call-center customers. Examples of customers that depend on Versatility call center applications include AT&T, British Telecom, Citibank, Humana Healthcare, Mellon Bank, Sanwa Bank, and Time-Life Libraries.

The company's success relies partly on its integration of Gradient Technologies' PC-DCE software with the Versatility Series, a family of state-of-the-art telesales, telemarketing, account management, order-taking, and customer-servicing applications. Gradient's PC-DCE software guides communication, ensures security, and synchronizes desktop clocks across Versatility systems, which can serve hundreds of agents at a single site and thousands of agents across an enterprise-wide network of call centers.

PC-DCE helps Windows desktop clients find such applications as call dialing, blending and assignment on Windows NT servers-without a lot of work by the users or systems developers. PC-DCE also safeguards the goldmine of customer information in call center databases.

And it ensures that the time kept on each system is accurate and consistent, which is critical for statistical analysis of call-center performance. For instance, if two desktops are five minutes apart, a phone operator could start a three-minute call at 4:17 p.m., transfer it to another operator and have the call conclude by "4:16 p.m." Consequently, managers could never track what really happened because of the unsynchronized clocks nor accurately measure how many calls were handled at a given time.

PC-DCE also acts as a universal translator, allowing Versatility to set up systems where desktop machines communicate with minicomputers and mainframes, which have different architectures and data formats.

Why did Versatility choose Gradient? "We needed a complete DCE implementation that ran on Windows and Windows NT," said Keith Roberts, Versatility's director of product development. "Gradient, which brought DCE down to the desktop, was the natural choice for that."

"Call-center application developers in a DCE environment benefit by having a service setup that's transparent to the customer's desktop," Roberts said. "You don't have to do nearly as much configuration, hardwiring and mapping of drives that you have to do with other network setups. Instead, a desktop application can simply say it needs a service, and PC-DCE will find that service somewhere on the network and tell the desktop how to connect to it."

"With PC-DCE, you're getting a system that's easier to administer than other network configurations," Roberts said. "It's dependable, robust and secure. By combining Versatility and Gradient's PC-DCE technology, we enhance both call-center representative productivity and revenues generated in customers' call centers."

Gradient's PC-DCE Product Family

Gradient Technologies, Inc. is the leading supplier of The Open Group Distributed Computing Environment (TOG DCE) technology for the desktop. Gradient provides DCE runtime services for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, and Apple Macintosh, as well as DCE servers for Windows NT. Gradient also offers the DCE Distributed File System (DFS), a system software service that enables computers to share files within and across enterprises, for Windows NT.