Click-to-call comes of age

Almost half of R&R Rapid Resale Ltd.'s business comes through the Web, and recently the Collingwood, Ont., company has found a way to turn more of the visitors to its Web-site into customers – click-to-call. Rapid Resale connects people who want to buy and sell timeshare properties. Until about four months ago, interested Web-site visitors could fill out an online form and wait for a response. But "we may not be able to reach them for days," says Shawn Smith, vice-president at Rapid Resale, "or sometimes ever." Now the Web-site presents another option - just click a button and be connected to a Rapid Resale agent by phone right away. Smith says the button, enabled by BoldChat click-to-call technology from Bravestorm LLC, "just gives us a whole new vehicle or channel for (customers) to get in contact with us." And he claims that getting click-to-call running at Rapid Resale only took about an hour. Web sales driving adoption Today, click-to-call capabilities are most common on Web-sites, especially those with something to sell. It makes sense – if you want to do business with people who visit your site, you want to make it easy for them to contact you. "It's used by Web-site owners or those responsible for Web-site operations – primarily as a sales tool," says Ross Haskell, director of marketing at Bravestorm. Haskell says live chat – requiring a computer equipped with speakers and microphone or a headset – was used first for customer service, but as that has evolved to true click-to-call using ordinary telephones, sales have become more popular. Chris Canning, regional manager for the eStara brand at ATG Canada in Oakville, says eStara – which e-commerce tools supplier Art Technology Group Inc. (ATG) acquired in 2006 – pioneered click-to-call because of a need to break down boundaries between different sales channels. "What enterprises are starting to recognize is that the silos cannot be left as stand-alone," he says. Increasing online sales is the number-one objective of click-to-call on the Web, Canning says, and second is reducing the number of visitors who abandon the site. Part of click-to-call's appeal, Haskell says, is that Web-site visitors hope it will spare them long waits on hold to talk to call-centre agents. Whether it meets that expectation depends on how it is implemented. With BoldChat, for instance, company representatives register their availability to take calls. If nobody is available, the click-to-call option can be greyed out or disappear from the Web-site. When a customer does click on the option, the system dials a company representative first and gets him or her on the line before ringing the customer's phone. Canning says the eStara system puts click-to-call callers directly into the contact centre queue. What treatment they get from there depends on configuration. ATG advises its customers to give priority to click-to-call calls, he says, because they already have a lot of information about the caller, so the call has a better-than-average chance of leading to a sale. That's certainly Rapid Resale's experience – "every one of them we've closed on the spot," Smith says. Think before you enable Success with click-to-call also depends on how and when you present it. It is possible to choose which customers see a click-to-call button and at what times the button is visible. Smith says Rapid Resale only shows the button on its Web-site when a company employee is logged in and available to answer calls. Canning notes that an online retailer might want to show the button when a customer has $200 in his or her shopping cart, but not when the amount is only $20. Or the button might appear when a customer appears to be hesitating on a page where customers frequently abandon purchases. There are different ways of doing click-to-call. BoldChat is a hosted service based on IP telephony technology from Mountain View, Calif.-based Jajah Inc. It connects to company agents over an IP link, then dials the end customer's telephone. Some services complete the call entirely on the public switched telephone network, using a server connected to the PSTN to dial both numbers and conference them together. The eStara system works like BoldChat, except that it dials the end customer's phone first, then plays a digitized audio greeting while routing the call over an IP connection and then out to the PSTN so that the call comes into the contact centre like any other phone call. Canning says the idea is to give the customer an instant response. Developers continue refining the concept. For instance Bravestorm recently added an option to BoldChat that allows Web-site visitors to request a call at a specified later time rather than right away. Routing calls to mobile phones is another promising innovation. Highly mobile workers such as real estate agents can use this, Haskell says – "they're very rarely in front of their computer, but they're certainly interested in taking phone calls from interested people." Click to conference is a variation that allows more than two participants to connect. This is less focused on online selling and more of a convenient way to set up teleconferences. And Richard Tworek, general manager of service-oriented architecture and next-generation platforms at Nortel Networks Corp. in Dallas, says click-to-call could be integrated with IP television, allowing viewers to click during advertisements for more information or to order. You might click to make a reservation for a show, for instance; Nortel has demonstrated such a system and "we have folks that are interested in that." Some say the next logical step after click-to-call is click to video. Marc Seeman, solutions executive for integrated communication services at IBM Canada Ltd. in Markham, Ont., says IBM is working with videoconferencing vendors such as Tandberg ASA , Avistar Communications Corp. and Polycom, Inc., on plans to integrate video connections with its Sametime collaboration software. Some major internet players have shown interest in the concept. For instance online auction site eBay bought Skype, provider of phone calls over the internet, in late 2005. Part of the intent was to use Skype's technology to provide eBay users with online voice communications, says Ronald Gruia, an analyst with research firm Frost & Sullivan Canada in Toronto. The big players wet their ears A number of software and telecommunications vendors are working – often in partnership – to provide click-to-call options. Nortel is one example. Its activities include co-operation with IBM to help add click-to-call to IBM applications like Lotus Sametime. Nortel's Tworek says click-to-call is moving from being limited to one vendor's phone system to supporting a range of hardware, and is becoming easier to implement thanks to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. Developers no longer need to write a separate click-to-call interface for every application, Tworek says. "If you're a Web developer and understand a little bit of Java, you can make this work." In fact, he claims, Nortel has demonstrated how a click-to-call button can be added to an existing application in 10 minutes. And in late 2005 Microsoft Corp. launched MSN Mobile Search, which allows users of browser-equipped mobile phones to search for local businesses and, in many cases, dial their numbers with the touch of a button. The mobile platform has significant potential for click-to-call. With more people browsing the Web or watching video on mobile phones, there's an obvious opportunity. And since a mobile phone is first and foremost a phone, it's easier to make the technology seamless in the mobile world than on the PC. Microsoft hopes to charge businesses for advertising using a pay-per-call model similar to the pay-per-click way search advertising is already billed. The company isn't talking about timing yet, says Surendra Nawbatt, product manager for mobile. Google Inc. has also experimented with click-to-call for a couple of years. The company tested a feature that lets Web searchers select a business they find through a Google search, supply a phone number and be connected to that business. But Google ended its latest test of this idea – which wasn't the first – last December. The company would not agree to an interview, but a spokesperson said in an e-mail that "the click-to-call ad test was one of many features that we had developed experimentally .... We are still processing the data from this test, and will use our evaluations and learnings to inform future tests and features intended to provide solutions for phone-based advertisers." Desktop and CRM come calling As big players grapple with how to profit from mobile click-to-call, though, the technology is moving into desktop and enterprise applications. Basic click-to-call isn't new to the PC. Hardware-and-software combinations that could do it existed as early as the 1980s, and Microsoft Outlook has long been among the software packages able to use a PC's internal modem to dial a call. But now voice over IP and unified communications offerings are carrying the idea farther. With the launch of Office Communications Server 2007 last year, Microsoft introduced click-to-call capabilities that work with a range of its own applications, plus application programming interfaces (APIs) to help developers extend the functions to commercial and in-house software. For instance, says Bryan Rusche, unified communications and collaboration product manager for Microsoft Canada Co. in Mississauga, Ont., a customer relationship management (CRM) system could use presence detection to determine if people working on a particular account are available and call them if so. Customers can also use the APIs to add click-to-call capabilities to Web-sites, Rusche says. CRM is an excellent example of where click-to-call could be useful, Seeman says, because the processes include a lot of human involvement. Allowing people to contact the appropriate person with a single click could reduce what is sometimes called "human latency," he suggests. That could mean calling a customer, but it could also mean contacting the right person within the organization to deal with a problem. That could work in a number of applications, providing easy access to colleagues at the appropriate stage in a process. "The key to success here is not just to have click-to-call on its own," says Seeman, "but to have click-to-call pop up in a meaningful way ... where in the business process you need access to a certain individual." For example, a screen in an enterprise application dealing with a tax issue might include a button to talk to a company tax accountant if an employee is unsure how to proceed. Dialing a number by clicking it on-screen is convenient, but are the benefits significant? "Click-to-call by itself isn't all that exciting, other than being convenient," Rusche admits. "What's more exciting is the integration that click-to-call has in a variety of other areas. So you need to think about click-to-call in the context of unified communications as a whole." Click-to-call in the enterprise is part of a vision of allowing people to change communication modes easily, Rusche says. One person might leave a voice message for a colleague, who responds with an e-mail, to which the first person replies by instant message, which leads to a phone conversation. "Meanwhile," says Rusche, "all the history is still within that same window ... I can see the instant message thread while I'm having this telephone conversation." Being able to make a phone call with a mouse click is just part of what it takes to make that vision work. "My thinking has been that click-to-call is part of the real-time collaboration tools that help people work more effectively together," Seeman says. "The way we're going to accelerate business processes in general is not by reaching people only," says Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technologies at Nortel in Ottawa. "It's by reaching them in the right context." That means using presence to determine where people are and the best way of reaching them, and taking the appropriate action based on the caller's needs. And then the network However widespread click-to-call becomes in the enterprise, its network implications look manageable – but not necessarily non-existent. Some forms of click-to-call connect through ordinary phone lines, with minimal impact on data networks. But it's possible to use voice over IP connections, which raise the usual VOIP quality-of-service issues. This will mean making sure PCs are equipped with the necessary speakers and microphones or with headsets, Gruia says, and guaranteeing sufficient sound quality. The main point is that all voice applications are sensitive to network delays, so the network must have adequate bandwidth and the ability to prioritize voice traffic. But that much is becoming table stakes for enterprise networks today anyway. "So with more click-to-call," Seeman says, "there's going to be a requirement to upgrade the quality of the networks, ensure that there's the right class of service available, and that will mean agreements with our carriers." The need will grow as click to video calls become more common, he says – “click to audio calls seem to be manageable by most good networks.” Video requires more bandwidth than audio, he notes, and as a result some organizations are discouraging its use because of its impact on the network. That doesn't entirely stop its use in many organizations, though. There is one other issue: The more important click-to-call capabilities become to a business, Rybcyznski warns, the more dependent the enterprise is on the network that supports it. "Therefore, you just keep ratcheting up the reliability you need, the security you need."

Click-to-call comes of age

News | 08/29/2008 2:29 pm EDT

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