The impact of Convergence
The Convergence has a major impact on modern call center. The overlapping of traditional telecommunication services with computer technology has resulted in a new range of telematic services that can be fruitfully utilised in a Call Center environment. The convergence allows a call center equipment to interact with the customer to elicit necessary information and process it before it is routed to one of the specialised agent. For example, a call center with an AVR facility can ascertain the identity of the caller and his status, interact with the customer to find his requirements and retrieve the records of his earlier interactions before directing the call to the concerned agent with a desired priority. With this technology, several decisions are taken and relevant data is fetched from the databases even before answering the call, thereby enhancing the agents' efficiency.

The Call Center and the Semantic Web
A recent development in the web technology is likely to bring out a fundamental change in the call center. The information used to service a customer is spread across several online sources, for example, corporate databases, service or product manuals and history records. We need a human agent to interpret them, discover the relevant portion, and pass on the information to the customer. Machine interpretation of data can reduce the burden of the human agent. For example, consider that a customer wants to find out the interest rate if he wants to take a loan from the bank. The interest information is definitely available somewhere in the bank's corporate database. The problem is to relate the users interest in "interest" with some entry in the database with the label like INTEREST_RATE. Besides, the interest rates could be different for different contexts. The machine should know that fact, elicit the required context information from the client and produce the relevant information. The Semantic Web movement envisions labeling of every piece of data in every computer with a tag that can be processed by a machine. The specific domain knowledge (e.g. the knowledge about the interest rates) also needs to be captured in a machine-readable form. A family of languages, namely XML, RDF, OIL and DAML, have of-late been designed for that purpose. It is envisioned that intelligent pieces of software agents will move around a corporate network to interpret the stored data and to satisfy user queries without human intervention. These software agents have the potential to replace the human agents in a Call Center and cut down the operating costs drastically.

The state-of-the-art at Tata Infotech
Tata Infotech Research Group, is conducting an extensive research on Automated Call Center technology in consultation with IIT, Delhi faculty. The research project aims at development of a suitable language for knowledge representation for Call Center application and a diagnostic reasoning algorithm around it, so that natural language queries can be automatically interpreted and answered. A few students from IIT Delhi are also working with Tata Infotech engineers in this project. While more research is being carried out, we have got encouraging results with a prototype that can answer queries relating to common printer maintenance problems.

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