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  Raj Sharma 5:28 AM on January 29, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
  Tags: call center (7), Cloud Computing Services (3), Dialer, SaaS (6), SaaS security call center CRM financial services credit card numbers social security numbers, Software as a Service (4)   

  Security And Data Lock-In Concerns with Software as a Service (SaaS) 

  Whenever I read an article about SaaS or participate in a discussion that has anything to do with SaaS, concerns about security and data lock-in always surface at some point. When call center software is being delivered as SaaS and if the client application is in the financial industry, security requirements may even become show stoppers for the call center service to be delivered as a cloud service. The financial client may mandate that confidential customer information such as credit card numbers and social security numbers cannot be transmitted or stored outside of the customer premise. Traditionally such stringent security requirements dictated that the call center solution be deployed on customer’s premise. Only if there was a solution that would let the financial customer have the cake and eat it too i.e. opt for the call center solution as SaaS while ensuring that sensitive customer information never leaves its premise.

  Marrying distributed computing architecture for a call center solution with SaaS, it is possible for customers to have their cake and eat it too. With a distributed computing architecture for call centers, sensitive and confidential information is stored on-premise close to where the call processing is happening on agent’s desktop. And non-sensitive information about that customer record such as name and phone number is stored in the cloud and used as a pointer to fetch sensitive information from a local database or a CRM application when the call is connected. All the management, reporting and analytics for the call center is still delivered from the cloud. Sensitive and confidential information such as call recordings are stored locally on customer premise instead of storing these in the cloud. This is possible because with a distributed architecture there is no centralized dialer operating in the cloud. Recordings are done on agent’s PC where the call processing is also done and the recordings are streamed to a local server for retrieval later on. If all this sounds like “just-in-time” security for call center SaaS, it is. And it is made possible by combining distributed computing with cloud computing services.

   

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  Nitin Gupta 7:25 AM on December 18, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
  Tags: Dialer, Hosted (4), Predictive Dialer   

  How is Server based Central dialer different from Distributed 3CLogic dialer? 

  To put it simply, a dialer is a piece of code that dials a number automatically.

  The goal of the dialer can differ with requirements. As an example, consider that Jane wants to call all her friends to invite for dinner. She will do this in leisure and will call all the numbers sequentially and will repeat them till she has called them all. This is what 3CLogic calls a Power Dialer.

  Now consider that she has a 10000 guests to call. She will definitely hire some, George, to call on her behalf and let him make the calls. Since she is paying hire per hour, she will like to make sure that her hire talks a maximum in an hour(That’s being Scrooge). If I assume that some of these 10000 guests must have their phones on answering machine, she will be paying George to identify her guests on answering machines. What if most of her guests get to the answering machines, she will be doubly poor because she is paying George for time he spends. One of the obvious goal for dialer then becomes is to identify if the number is on answering machine using standard heuristics called Answering Machine Detection. When the dialer detects answering machines before handing off the call to George, 3CLogic calls such dialer, Rapid Dialer.

  What if she has one day to complete the calls? By golly, she will have to hire Sally to work with George. Other than doing this, she will like to save on time. This makes dialer a little interesting, because now dialer applies artificial intelligence to determine when her hire is going to put the receiver down so it can start dialing a little earlier than that. Uh!! Why?

  If you have ever made a call (definitely , stupid me), you must have noticed:

  • There is some time consumed in dialing
  • There is some initial silence, while your call is being connected
  • There is some ringing before caller picks up the call

  If dialer somehow, saves this time for Sally and George, they are likely to make more calls per hour and will likely to complete the calls in a day. This is what we at 3CLogic call, Predictive Dialer.

  Let us come to the real question, How is Server based Central dialer different from Distributed 3CLogic dialer? To start with, it saves Jane cost of the central server which runs into thousands of dollars. 3CLogic dialer uses free computation cycles Sally and George have on their laptops. This saves her greenbacks on power requirements. 3CLogic dialer uses heuristics and algorithms which outdo best central dialer available in market today. Saving her a few hours on commissions.

  To give you an overview of why 3CLogic dialer works better than a central dialer, let me expand the number of hires to a bigger value, say 64 and calls to be made running into a few millions. Now imagine how many quad core central server will compete this raw power available. Did you say 16? Well, you have just made a point why distributing the calls on 3CLogic dialer makes sense.

  If it does not satisfy your technical urges, let me make another point. Every call that is made, requires a little RAM, a little of CPU cycles and a little of bandwidth (Is this technical?). Well, yes, if you know that there is limit to the amount of RAM you can have on a single server and the cost of high end CPU. To make matters worse, suppose your hires are distributed across the world, you will be paying double of the bandwidth requirements. And who says that saving of bandwidth is futile? Not Jane Of course!!