OnState’s business presence virtual call center and virtual PBX

OnState is a cloud-based Business Communications Service (BCS) that delivers business presence™ virtual call center and virtual PBX capabilities. It optimizes real-time customer communications and improves worker productivity by connecting customers to the right employee at the right time.

OnState achieves high scale at low cost by implementing a true SaaS architecture that separates call control and transport functionality. Conventional hosted PBX and call center solutions rely on traditional telephone switches that both control and transport voice traffic. Each and every call in the conventional model passes through the operator’s switching infrastructure, forcing operators to add expensive switching equipment in order to increase capacity or deliver high availability (redundancy). They pass their costs along to you the customer in the form of higher rates.

OnState is not a hosted phone system or a managed voice service. OnState is cloud-based application that initiates and controls sessions (voice, video, text chat) across a variety of networks (PSTN, VoIP/SIP, Internet). Unlike traditional hosted solutions, OnState is not actively involved in the media path. By employing a signaling-only architecture, we achieve higher scale at lower cost than typical hosted solutions. Further, because of our unique capabilities for network control, we are the solution of choice to add value to existing systems. We focus on delivering business value through improved customer service, increased efficiency, and greater customer satisfaction, and letting you leverage your preferred network service provider for affordable transport.

Figure 1. By employing a signaling-only architecture, OnState delivers high scale at lower cost

By delivering a signaling-only SaaS solution, OnState achieves:

• Network independence – we work with the PSTN, VoIP/SIP, Skype, Google, and others
• Media independence – we can control voice, text chat, and video sessions
• Device independence – you can use softphones, mobile phones, IP phones, or POTS phones with OnState
• Switch independence – we work with legacy PBXs or IP PBXs, but do not require an office phone system at all
• Scalability – we leverage the Internet and the PSTN for transport, and aren’t involved in the media path
• Availability – redundancy is built into our cloud-based service
• Extensibility – we provide a single point of integration for other SaaS applications including Salesforce and Google Apps
• Simplicity and convenience – we don’t require customer premises equipment; with OnState you turn up users and applications on-demand
• Affordability – we don’t rely on expensive telephone switching equipment so our internal operating costs are lower than those of traditional hosted voice service providers. We pass the savings along to you in the form of lower rates. With OnState you can deliver “big company” call center features to everyday business functions and ordinary employees who aren’t typically associated with a call center

OnState Operational Overview

Here is how OnState works in a nutshell:

• OnState provides local, national and toll-free numbers for your company, or we can utlize your current carrier network.
• We use business presence to track employee availability and activity – independent of device (softphone, PBX phone, mobile phone etc), network (PSTN, VoIP/SIP, Skype, etc) or location (office, home, road).
• When a customer calls your company, the public telephone network signals OnState via SIP.
• OnState uses your administratively-defined business rules and business presence information to determine the employee who is best-suited to serve the customer (irrespective of employee device, network or location)
• OnState signals the phone network to set up a call directly between the customer and the employee.
• OnState maintains state information and call control for the duration of the call.

Business Presence

OnState uses administratively-defined business rules and real-time presence information to intelligently connect an inbound request to the employee who can serve them best at a particular moment in time.

System administrators configure users and attributes (user roles, skills, capabilities) through a secure browser-based interface. Attributes might pertain to a user’s skills, spoken language, functional organization, media capabilities (i.e. text chat only) or any other characteristics that might influence call handling.

Employees manage their calls using a secure browser-based interface or a Windows-based client. They set their availability in the same way you might set your presence state with an Instant Messaging client. OnState automatically tracks a user’s activity state (on phone, idle, chatting) and uses the combination of user-defined and system-detected state information along with administratively-defined attributes to determine how to steer a call.

Figure 2.OnState Uses Business Presence to Track Employee Capabilities, Availability, and Activity

In Figure 2, employees are assigned roles (service or sales) and languages (English or Spanish), and exhibit various user-defined states (on break, ready) and system-detected states (on phone). OnState uses this business presence information to connect an English-speaking service call to Sally (the only available, English speaking service agent) and a Spanish-speaking sales inquiry to Bob (the only available Spanish-speaking sales agent).

A Closer Look

Let’s take a closer look at a call flow. The virtual enterprise includes office-bound workers served by PBXs, as well as nomadic employees and teleworkers who use mobile phones, Skype, GoogleTalk, SIP clients, etc.

Figure 3. A Closer Look

• 1. A customer calls the support hotline @ 215-555-1010.
  2. The PSTN notifies OnState of the incoming call (via a SIP invite, for example).
  3. OnState consults its business presence database to find an available support specialist.
  4. OnState determines that Sally is an available support specialist who happens to be at her office phone (DID 215-555-1012). Alternatively, Sally could also use a SIP end-point device, a cell phone, Skype or Google, in which case OnState returns the network address associated with those devices.
  5. OnState sends a re-invite to the PSTN instructing the network to connect to Sally at 215-555-1012.
  6. The call is established.
  7. OnState maintains state information for the duration of the call and collects call statistics for reporting and analysis purposes. It re-signals the network as necessary to add/drop parties, barge-in, transfer, conference or record the call, etc.

Interfacing with OnState

A flexible service, OnState is easily integrated into just about any environment. We support incumbent TDM and IP PBXs; PSTN trunking and SIP trunking; plus stand-alone SIP endpoints, Skype clients and GoogleTalk clients for teleworkers and nomadic users and for offices without PBXs.

Office with PBX

OnState protects and extends incumbent phone system investments. We interface with your installed PBX via a conventional PSTN trunk, a SIP trunk, or using SIP directly if your PBX is SIP-enabled. Your employees continue to use their existing PBX phones and extension numbers.

Office without PBX

OnState can be deployed as an alternative to a conventional PBX. You can use OnState to decommission older phone systems and eliminate costly ongoing PBX maintenance fees. You can also use OnState instead of a PBX when rolling out services to new sites. We support a wide variety of endpoint options so you can choose the handsets and softphone clients that best meet your functional and pricing needs. We offer integral support for SIP endpoints (hard phones such as Polycom and Grandstream, softphone clients such as Counterpath), as well as Skype and GoogleTalk clients.

Nomadic Users and Teleworkers

With OnState you can leverage the Internet to extend business communications services to teleworkers and nomadic users so you can improve worker productivity or implement disaster recovery, business continuity, or work-from-home plans. Remote users can use SIP endpoints (SIP hard phones or softphone clients) or Skype or GoogleTalk clients. We can also deliver calls over the PSTN to mobile phones or POTS phones.

Adding Interactive Communications to Web Sites

With OnState you can seamlessly add voice and text chat to Web pages to improve customer service and reduce Web site abandonment. Adding click-to-chat and click-for-callback buttons is fast and simple. You can customize button appearance, placement and behavior quickly and easily. You can enable text chat only, allow text chats to “escalate” to voice calls when necessary, or support both voice and text chats.

We provide sample HTML and Javascript code which you can easily modify to meet your specific needs. By making simple code sample edits you can customize button properties including supported media (text chat, voice callback, Skype callback); call treatment (assign a skill group or priority to a request); and collected data (customer name, Web page name/URL, user-entered text, etc). You can forward collected data to employees or external applications to improve customer service or further influence call routing.

OnState handles Web-initiated requests identically to other inbound requests – using real-time presence information and your administratively-defined business rules to intelligently connect Web visitors to the employee who can serve them best at a particular moment in time.

Text Chat

Text chat provides a convenient way for customers to interact with your company. It also improves productivity by allowing your employees to serve multiple customers at the same time. OnState text chat is designed to be customer-friendly. On the customer side of the conversation we don’t employ heavy-weight persistent client software which might be cumbersome to install and activate. Instead, visitors are presented with a platform-independent, auto-loading, Ajax-based chat window. On the company side of the conversation, your employees can use the text chat client of their choice – Skype, Google Apps, etc.

Voice Callback

Voice callback allows a Web visitor to request a return voice call. The visitor can enter a traditional (PSTN) telephone number for callback or request to be contacted using their supported device of choice, including Skype and Google. OnState treats voice callback requests similarly to other inbound requests, and uses business-presence information and administratively-defined business rules to determine the employee who can best serve the visitor. OnState then establishes an outbound call to the customer using Skype, Google, or the customer-entered phone number.

With Skype and Google callbacks, you can take advantage of other supported features – file transfer, screen share, chat, etc – to enhance the user experience and better support your customers.

Want to learn more about OnState Communications? Call us at +1.617.934.0381 or email us at sales@on-state.com.