Cellular phones, pagers, faxes and e-mail all are tools that help us function in today’s fast-paced society. But how many times have you answered the phone, only to find yourself in the middle of a conversation that you really don’t have time for?
The need to create a balance between always being accessible with the need to prioritize the information constantly coming at you is a concept that Call Sciences, a 4-year-old call management software company, has addressed with its Personal Assistant product.
The idea behind Personal Assistant is to allow people to always be accessible, while giving them control over what messages, calls and faxes they want to receive. Using Personal Assistant, calls are answered by a computer-generated voice asking the caller for their name and the nature of the call. The information is then relayed to the end user, who can determine whether to take the call or forward it to voice mail.
If the call is declined, the caller is told the party they are trying to reach is unavailable and prompted to leave a voice message.
“It’s what we call social ambiguity,” said Warren Gifford, Call Science’s vice president of research and architecture. The subscriber is able to decline a call without offending the caller, he said.
The Personal Assistant provides convenience on the other end as well. Subscribers program the system to deliver calls, faxes and messages to their home phone, cellular phone or office phone depending on their typical daily routine.
Users also can return calls directly from the voice-mail system with the touch of a button. When that call is complete, Personal Assistant returns the user back to voice mail for further messages.
Call Sciences markets the product to carriers, which then offer the service as an enhancement to their service packages. The company said carriers are attracted to the product because it increases traffic and minutes of use by making the subscriber more available.
Call Sciences also offers another valuable tool to carriers who use the Personal Assistant service. It gathers statistics on every call-including how long the call lasted and whether or not the caller left a message. The company then creates a profile and can help carriers market certain features that a particular subscriber isn’t using to help increase that subscriber’s usage.
Call Sciences started out by focusing on what people wanted, said Gifford.
“We gave half a dozen BellCore executives MicroTac (phones) and routed all their calls to them. Inside a week we had them all back, because nobody wanted to receive all their calls,” he said.
“So we started interviewing them about what they would like, and they wanted something to answer all their calls courteously and promptly, day and night. They wanted somebody that found out who was calling and what it was about and then decided whether it was important or not,” continued Gifford. “If it was important it should find them wherever they were, and if it wasn’t important it would take a message.”
The concept has paid off, and Call Sciences now has introduced a new enhanced services platform that allows carriers to provide prepaid calling, calling card calling and other enhanced features.
The company recently signed an agreement with Oracle Corp. to combine its Personal Assistant product with a unified messaging solution based on Oracle’s Database Messaging product, Oracle InterOffice. The combination creates a unified call management solution that allows service providers and corporations to deliver fully integrated, Web-based call and message management services to their customers and employees.
“What we found in talking with them is that we have tremendous synergies both in our very consistent vision as well as the way we chose to implement our systems,” said Gifford. “Our two products really mesh extremely well.”
