What were some of the challenges Minnesota Life faced in moving to a computer telephony integration solution?
Any advice for CIOs considering similar projects? Delaney Nelson: Technology integration was not difficult. However, the cultural issues of moving from a traditional call center to a CTI call center were major. The same people who effectively deal with a phone conversation may not be able to effectively deal with the phone ringing, interactive conversations via live text messaging and e-mails coming at them from the same workstation. You need to evaluate staff and match people’s skills to the requirements of the job and perhaps redeploy people to other areas. We also learned that it is very important to involve call center employees in the design and implementation of a CTI project. Another issue that you have to address is availability. CTI is a new technology and requires a complex infrastructure that connects a number of services, such as SQL databases, e-mail servers, recording servers, backup servers and the like. CTI does not have the same level of reliability as a traditional ph
