Castel unveils latest version of DirectQuest.

Castel Inc. has announced its new approach to outbound calling with its DirectQuest call management solution. Castel believes that DirectQuest is a fundamentally different outbound calling solution that allows businesses to make and take more customer calls without the hindrance of dead air, abandoned calls or "unknown" caller IDs. The company believes that what distinguishes DirectQuest from today's predictive dialing systems is its patent-pending technology which communicates directly with the public switched telephone network at the command and control layer. This approach to dialing can guarantee answer detection that is 100 percent accurate, 100 percent of the time. When a signal pattern meets the criteria set by the manufacturer for an answered call, such as the presence of noise energy followed by two seconds of silence, the call attempt is considered a connect and is routed to an agent. Castel has engineered a different approach for answer detection and call management by designing DirectQuest to receive and send telephone network messages. When a telephone is answered, an off-hook message is sent back to the originating Central Office Switch. This message, the same message telephone companies use to initiate billing, is also received by DirectQuest, which responds by routing the connected call and its appropriate data screen to an available agent. The amount of time it takes to receive this connect message and route the call to an agent is in the tenths of a second range. By the time the called party says "Hello," an agent is already there to return the greeting. Other features include: dynamic caller ID on a campaign-by-campaign basis, outbound/inbound call blending, seamless integration with existing customer contact applications, an array of calling activity monitors and reports, centralized call center management and distributed dialing, and reduced total cost of ownership. The DirectQuest solution is a modular software application that works in conjunction with Castel's CTI interface and a digital softswitch, the Castel Enterprise Softswitch Platforms (ESP). The server-based DirectQuest application is capable of centrally managing the calling operations of a network of distributed ESP softswitch dialers. www.castel.com