A Multimedia Call Centre on the Internet

The proliferation of the Internet and the web has changed the way people interact and conduct business. Video and audio communications have become prevalent. It is expected that the advance in technology will revolutionise the way call centres are set up and run. Multimedia call centres will gradually replace the traditional help-desks ones based on telephony to provide better customer service and to cater to the emerging e-commerce market. This paper proposes a system architecture to support multimedia call centre. The architecture is able to support video, audio and collaborative tools such as whiteboard, chat, file sharing, co-filling of forms and cobrowsing of web sites. The architecture is browser-based and no installation of any specific software or hardware is required on the client machines. Organisations can easily customise the system to suit the needs of the services to be provided by the call centres.