After 19 years, Rockwell International Inc, El Segundo, California has launched a successor to its venerable Digital Equipment Corp PDP-11-based Galaxy automatic call distribution system. The new Spectrum system, which uses a Motorola Inc 68030 at its heart, and also uses 68000 and 68010 microprocessors and 68HC05 and 68HC011 microcontrollers in a distributed architecture, with 24-port speech boards using the Texas Instruments Inc TMS370 signal processors, comes at a time when Rockwell has turned its attention to developing oversees markets. The Galaxy was never the easiest of machines to configure for oversees sales – its network interfaces and signalling capabilities were firmly tied to US standards and it was introduced into the UK only late last year. However Rockwell says that the Spectrum was designed from the beginning with both the international market and ISDN in mind. As well as oversees sales, the company has decided to try to sell the thing to smaller companies. Whereas it has previously concentrated on the big airlines and customer support applications it now says that Spectrum is suitable for businesses with about 25 to 50 ‘agents’ (telemarketeers, support people and so forth). Moreover it says that at UKP1,800 to UKP2,500 per agent position, it undercuts the old Galaxy systems and offers significantly better voice processing, PABX and outbound call management functions than its predecessor. Among the new call distribution features are multiple agent assignments so that an incoming call can be routed to a particular agent, and if (s)he is busy pass it on to the next best qualified person. The supervisor now gets a real-time schedule manager that will automatically highlight any worker that has failed to come back from lunch even when they are only 30 seconds late. On the voice processing side, incoming callers get intelligent queueing announcements that inform them how long it will be before a human appears on the line. Those users who that sick of waiting can leave a voicemail message. But perhaps the most alarming function for those unused to the automatic call distribution world is the ability for each agent to record up to three different personal greetings in their own voice, which are played before the human takes over (no more tiresome having to say hello). Existing Galaxy users, of which there are only four in the UK, will be offered a migration strategy to the new system. The two systems can interoperate in a network – only on a lowest common denominator basis.
