News of advanced, integrated internet/call centers keeps coming fast and furious—but the real news is not that traditional call centers are adding internet capabilities. It’s that some of the fast-growing e-commerce companies that have staked out space on the internet are now adding more traditional call center tools to their customer contact offerings.

Take Uniglobe.com. This online travel shopping website just announced that it is implementing its first fully integrated customer contact center at its operations center in Seattle.

Uniglobe.com will use Lucent’s CentreVu Internet Solutions to let customers communicate with reps in real time, using the text chat function on the Uniglobe.com website, as well as integrate customer e-mail, voice mail, telephone and fax messages.

The point, of course, is to integrate all the various forms of customer contact into one happy bundle. This is something that appears to come a lot more naturally (in concept) to internet companies than it does to traditional retailers.

Their new Lucent system will make sure that customer communications are routed quickly to the appropriate travel rep based on expertise as well as on the communication method that the customer has chosen.

“By integrating our customer contact center with the Lucent solution, we expect to decrease our customer contact cycle time from 24 hours to an almost instant response for many requests,” said Michael Dauberman, Uniglobe’s operations senior VP.

“We know many consumers still want personal contact when considering or making travel transactions online,” said Dauberman.

The Uniglobe.com contact center will go live in the third quarter of 1999. Some of the technology that’s going to be part of it:

A Definity ProLogix Communications Server for telephony;
CentreVu Internet Solutions—the internet call center;
CentreVu Elite call routing software;
Computer telephony integration functionality for incoming customers and their background information;
An Intuity Audix Multimedia Messaging system—the system which cues and routes voice mail, e-mail and fax messages.

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