The “Call” In “Call Center” Can Be A “Video Call”

By Sagee Ben-Zedeff

Categories: Innovation

January 29th, 2009

Video calling is becoming more and more common. One may argue that it hasn’t reached a critical mass yet or debate whether it needs a “killer application”, but people everyday are discovering that adding live video to their communication makes it much more personal. No matter if you’re using a desktop client (like RADVISION’s Scopia Desktop), an instant messenger (like Skype or Google Chat) or even your 3G handset, once you use video you won’t settle for less.

Using video for your personal communication is one thing, but what about using it as a customer?   I’ve already written here about the visual contact center, a contact center which enables you to contact them using video (not only audio), browse menus and folders, watch videos and even use video conferencing to talk to personnel, making your customer service experience much more effective (not to mention enjoyable).

This sounds very promising, but the hard truth is that most of today’s customer service centers are not equipped with the ability to receive or send video. Most enterprises have already invested significant amounts of money in voice-only call center equipment and tailored customizations, and are obviously not eager to replace it.

A solution to this situation, where the desired is not available and replacement is not an option, is to add the desired to the existing. In other words, provide some (miraculous) way for video to be implemented on top of the existing infrastructure.

This might sound complicated, but fortunately RADVISION has developed such a solution and filed for a patent on this piece of innovation and that was made public recently. So now I can go into details and explain how this problem can be solved.

Separating Audio and Video Made Easy

Bottom line – existing equipment supports audio only. A video call, however, is made out of audio and video. We want to keep the existing voice-only deployment and make the video enablement as easy as possible.

How can this possibly be done? Well, the idea is simply to separate the video from the audio and provide the video to the agent/customer on a bidirectional overlay channel that exists in parallel to the regular call flow of the contact center.

The solution basically works are follows:

• For incoming calls, separate the input channel to video and audio, route the audio through the legacy system and on to an agent’s telephone. Then route the video to some terminal used by the agent for video.
• For outgoing calls, join the audio originating in the agent’s telephone and go through the legacy system, with video coming from some camera used by the agent, into one stream and send it out.

As can be seen in the drawing above, an existing (legacy) call canter (in black) which supports voice-only is connected via a PBX and an automatic call director (ACD). A call may reach an IVR system or an agent’s phone.

In blue you can see what the invention adds to the equation – a unit responsible of handling the audio/video split/merge and a video processing unit. The audio/video split/merge unit splits the video and audio between the video processing unit and the PBX respectfully. The agent can now use a video-enabled terminal which connects to the video processor, which supports two-way video calling.

The above is just a simple setup. This can be easily expanded to:

• Support all video calls protocols, 3G mobile phones as well as an IP client, using gateways to connect to IP and 3G networks.
• Use not just for customer service centers, but for various cases where video calls are desired between individuals and a center “office” (polling organization and people being polled, salesmen and their employer, a driver calling his insurance company to show an accident that occurred and having the situation recorded on the spot, etc.).
• Support not necessarily two-way calls – an agent can play a video to a customer but not receive a video feed from him (if he uses a PC but not a web cam, for instance) or a customer can show something to an agent without seeing the agent (in case some damage has been caused to a certain product, for instance).

So the next time you are talking to a contact center, using audio only and wondering why you can’t use video, don’t think it’s because of some technology barrier. A way already exists, even for those legacy call centers. We are all using call centers on a regular basis – it’s about time the “call” in “call center” means a video call.