The Intelligent Customer Advocate System – ICAS is a trouble receipt and trouble resolution expert system for the telecommunications industry. Utilizing the latest in expert systems technology, ICAS handles more customer troubles, more completely and in a shorter timeframe than conventional customer support systems.

ICAS provides the Customer Service Representative with an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface, step-by-step instructions and transparent access to backend systems. ICAS also provides significant training savings.

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ICAS is designed to provide high availability. CyberObject has engineered a very complex fail over, fault tolerance and queuing process into both the ICAS server and in the client. Even if everything else fails, the Customer Service Representative is still able to continue to use ICAS for trouble receipt and resolution. These trouble cases are queued and held until the systems are back online at which point ICAS automatically sends them to the back-end systems.

ICAS is designed to be a single-point-of-contact system for trouble administration. It can handle cases of trouble reported for:

• Consumer/Residential Plain Old Telephone Service - POTS
• Business POTS
• Centrex
• ISDN
• PBX
• Specials

Each Customer Service Representative is using the same rules in the same way. The rules are based on the knowledge and expertise of your best people so, in fact, capture your “best practices”. Nothing is left to chance, the operator simply asks the customer a set of predefined questions and moves through the application depending on answers. ICAS enables every Customer Service Representative to be a “star” performer!

It’s easy to integrate new business processes/procedures into ICAS because of its knowledge-based architecture. In most cases, it is simply a matter of modifying the ICAS rules, which does not require making coding changes, nor does it require someone with programming experience to make the changes.

You can quickly add support for new product offerings and/or new product packaging by upgrading the ICAS knowledge base with trouble supporting process / knowledge. In most cases, it is simply a matter of modifying the ICAS rules, which does not require making coding changes, nor does it require someone with programming experience to make the changes.

On line help or on line tutorial about supporting new product offering could be made available to all ICAS CSR, too.

One of the advantages of a knowledge-based system is that it retains and protects your company’s intellectual property. Your business “know how” is captured in the ICAS knowledge base. Since minimal training is required for new users, operators who retire or otherwise leave the company will have minimal impact on overall performance.

ICAS intelligently determines what information is needed, where to get it and then retrieves it, transparent to the CSR. With ICAS, the CSR no longer deals directly with multiple applications or needs multiple login Ids / passwords.

With its built-in multi-level security mechanism and standards based, open architecture, ICAS is securely accessible to anyone via the following means:

• Internet
• Dedicated link
• Dial-up link
• ICAS also provides an API for app-to-app access.

Beyond that, you can have a separate ICAS rule set for CLEC / external users and block access to confidential or proprietary data.

ICAS provides five (5) levels of security:

Network access

• SSL session (authentication/authorization via digital certificate)
• Data encryption via private/public key
• Works with various firewall implementation

ICAS client access control

• Access authorization

ICAS server access control

• Each transaction is authenticated/authorize

Record access authorization

• If a user tries to access a record that does not belong to him/her, his/her request will be rejected and no data will be transported to the requester.

Access pattern access control

• ICAS server logs all the access information

The first hand information involved in the trouble diagnosis and resolution process is stored in the ICAS database. The information can potentially be used by a technician for trouble correlation and statistical analysis.

Additional Information

• ICAS Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ (PDF Format)
• Intelligent Customer Advocate System - ICAS (PDF Format)
• ICAS - Single Point of Contact Diagram (PDF Format)
• ICAS for eCust "Moving Customer Access Into the Future" (PDF Format)