Automatic Number Identification (ANI) is a service provided by North American telephone companies to digitally identify the telephone number of the incoming caller. Similar services as Calling Line Identification (CLI) and Caller Line Identification (CLID) are available in the U.K. and Europe. These services are different from consumer oriented telephone services like caller ID that display the name of the incoming caller. The benefit of services like ANI to a call center is the that ANI service can be used to cross reference the telephone number of the incoming caller against the company’s existing database in order to pull up the customer details and history and display it to the agent even before they answer the phone – saving the agent valuable time. This process is also known as a “screen pop” based on the fact that the screen is pre-populated with the customer data (based on either ANI, IVR, or other means of identification).
However, ANI lookup is not successful 100% of the time. In fact, in many industries the success rate of the ANI lookup is quite low – typically only 20% - 40% depending on the industry (ANI lookup rates do tend to be slightly higher in B2B scenarios than in B2C scenarios). The relatively low success rate of ANI, particularly in consumer scenarios, is due to a number of factors including the proliferation of mobile devices and IP telephony services like Skype and Google Voice. Additionally, people change jobs and move their residences more frequently than in the past. The net result is that quite often the customer may be calling from a different telephone number than the number maintained by the company in the customer’s record. Of course, one option is to update the customer record each time a customer calls from a new telephone number. However, this is a very reactive strategy.
A more proactive strategy for increasing automated caller identification (and thus eliminating the need for agents to conduct a time-intensive manual customer search) is to utilize call-attached data (CAD) collected from an IVR or voice response system. In the SAP CRM Interaction Center it is possible to identify a customer by extracting the customer’s account ID from the call attached data (CAD).
This can be configured in the IMG activity Define Account Identification Profiles (transaction CRMC_IC_BPPROF). Select your Account Identification Profile and click the Details icon. Scroll down and locate section labeled Contact-Attached Data Extraction.
- In the CAD Application ID field, enter the value that appears in the application ID tag that appears in the XML code of the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that collects the customer’s account number (e.g., “Genesys-CAD” if using Genesys for CTI).
- In the XSLT file field, enter the name of the XSLT program that is responsible for extracting the account ID from the contact attached data. You are responsible for creating this XSLT file. However, SAP delivers a sample XSLT file that you can reference, named CRM_IC_BPIDENT_EXT_IAD_TO_ABAP. SAP also provides a sample program showing how to extract CAD data from, for example, Genesys named CRM_IC_BPIDENT_EXT_IAD_GENESYS. See SAP note 707104 for additional information.
Bluesky
