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A Smart Call Center: DecisionOne Goes Multimedia
May 3, 1999

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By Kelly Jackson Higgins It's the new-age call center. A help-desk technician fields a call from a client over the Web, and via that same IP connection, talks and troubleshoots the problem using a "visual" knowledge database running on a Gigabit Ethernet backbone. That's how computer maintenance and technology support firm DecisionOne Corp. is equipping its call centers. DecisionOne's knowledge database, which is based on ServiceWare's Knowledge-Pak software, lets DecisionOne support technicians pull up solutions to various network problems. Call-center technicians also can contribute to the knowledge database, which eventually will be a multimedia resource. "The knowledge database can incorporate video, screen shots and audio," says Scott Stellmon, manager of call-center technologies for DecisionOne in Frazer, Pa.

DecisionOne also plans to add training videos that help-desk technicians can run while working on a call. That way, when a PC user from one of DecisionOne's client sites calls to report that his or her PC won't boot up, the technician can query the knowledge database for a solution and, at the same time, run a video clip of a solution and "push" that clip to the client's workstation over the Internet.

With the multimedia information, as well as the high-speed backbone network at the call centers, Stellmon expects call times to decrease by about 30 percent, if not more. "That's an enormous gain when you're fielding 4,000 to 6,000 calls each day," he notes.

One major hurdle for the knowledge database is ensuring that it's stocked with reliable and accurate information. That can be tricky--it's up to the technicians to volunteer their own solutions to system and network problems that they can't find in the database. "We will have a knowledge coordinator who makes sure all the cases are cleaned up, not duplicated, and up-to-date," Stellmon says. "Otherwise, our technicians could give inconsistent or inaccurate answers."

DecisionOne chose the Gigabit Ethernet backbone for the call-center LANs, which are located in Minneapolis, Frazer and Tulsa, Okla., even though the company doesn't need all that bandwidth just yet. Gigabit Ethernet costs about 40 percent less than ATM, Stellmon says, and the goal is to add the VoIP (voice over IP) traffic to eliminate the company's now-separate voice network service.

But Stellmon says that even with the upcoming VoIP and video traffic on the network, DecisionOne still will have plenty of headroom in its gigabit network. "It was overkill when we installed it last year," Stellmon says. "But if we hadn't put it in, we couldn't have developed any of these multimedia tools. We were thinking about the future."

The only catch would be if the streaming video traffic were especially heavy. For now, DecisionOne will use the 802.1Q prioritization feature in its 3Com Gigabit Ethernet switches, which lets them throttle back the video to make sure voice always gets dibs on the pipe.

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