Does CTI Pay?

How do you determine if the computer telephony integration (CTI) project you're considering is cost-effective? The first step is to determine your current call setup time. Here's how we did that calculation from one recent customer.

First we timed how long it took the customer's operators to recite a canned greeting. Typically, that greeting took 7 to 10 seconds to say -- plenty of time for even a slow network to query a host system and return the proper screen. We then tested the host system's response time and determined that the first data screen to come up during a peak incoming calling hour was an average of four seconds. Not bad, considering this was a call center of about 400 operators, and the host systems were in another state.

Using this example, it would take 24 seconds to set up the call: 8 seconds to greet the customer, 12 seconds to gather the customer's home phone number, and 4 seconds to query the host system for the first data screen. This 24 seconds was the actual setup time of the incoming call and the time that a CTI application must reduce to achieve any return on investment.

Using this information, we estimated that by capturing the customer's automatic number identification (ANI), and prompting the host system for information during the time the operator is greeting the customer, we could reduce the setup time of each call by 16 seconds. We calculated that our customer could take approximately 164 more calls per day before adding more staff (based on the fact that the average call was 7 minutes long and each operator took an average of 55 calls a day).