ABSTRACT
The most recent development to affect call centres is the use of Internet Protocol (IP) as the sole transport medium within the contact centre. Historically, in order to support voice, and email, web chat and web collaboration, contact centres have used a mixture of conventional telephony, and conventional Internet technology. This has meant that there needed to be two networks in the contact centre, and an integration process to allow the delivery of voice or data to an agent to be coordinated across the two systems. Often this required a complex integration allowing the Internet components to use the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) interface of the automatic call distributor (ACD) to control the allocation of agents. It also meant that essentially a number of stand-alone technologies, ACD, email, web chat/collaboration were being bolted together. Within the contact centre there are all the usual components required to manage calls, contacts and queues, but each is based on IP rather than voice.
