VoIP: So What?
What customer service executives need to know about voice over IP technology

by Ken Landoline

While new technologies come and go, seasoned IT professionals know little gets implemented without strong economic and/or tactical reasons to justify a major shift in corporate planning and investment. Although the VoIP driven convergence of enterprise voice and data systems, for many IT professionals, has crossed the chasm from “Should I do it?” to “When will I do it?” it may take more than a decade for this enterprise-wide transition to really occur because of equipment lifecycle timing and some very pragmatic depreciation and accounting issues. However, within the enterprise multi-channel contact center space, the sense of economic and tactical urgency for this VoIP killer application is upon us.

VoIP In The ContactCenter – Is It For Me?
VoIP solves some of the fundamental challenges facing call centers today. First, companies are struggling to consolidate customer voice, e-mail, and web contacts on a common communications platform operating on a single, distributed network infrastructure. The call center is morphing into what many now call the multi-media customer contact center which interacts with each customer over the media channel of his/her choice. In addition, there is the need to deliver those contacts to the best customer service representative regardless of location – centralized enterprise call center, branch office, or to the home “teleworker”.

Perhaps the most appealing benefit for IT professionals is that VoIP enables us to move away from the notion of a call center as a proprietary telephony-based system to that of a standards-based, software application that deploys easily on existing IT infrastructure. It is this possibility that holds the most promise for IT professionals as they look for tactical and economic returns on investments for the deployment of VoIP technology in the contact center.

What Does The Business Manager Need to Know About VoIP?
In order to gain a full appreciation for the inherent benefits of the VoIP-based multi-channel enterprise contact center distributed over multiple geographic sites, one must begin to view the call center as an application not unlike other software applications with unique business requirements, and not just as another voice-centric, telephony-based infrastructure. This allows IT executives, as well as traditional voice telephony infrastructure managers, to better recognize the value of VoIP contact center implementations. The table below summarizes and compares a few of the high level attributes of a traditional call center to those of a VoIP-based contact center and depicts the incremental user benefits of the VoIP-based solution.

In a traditional call center, a major difficulty is the maintenance of a functional link and relationship between the incoming call and the information about the call throughout the business transaction. This often leads to problems that make quality customer service incomplete or difficult, at best. With the use of IP technology, however, the telephone call and the call information are permanently linked. This linkage makes call handling and customer service a simpler task and is one of the underlying technical reasons for the advantage of packet switching in the contact center marketplace.

In general, the potential benefits of the VoIP multi-channel contact center fall across several major areas that can be grouped into the following categories:

1) VoIP will reduce IT deployment costs and call center operating costs. With general business applications such as the IP PBX, system deployments are justified on savings from reduced telephony service charges between sites and reduced administration costs. Likewise, with the IP contact center system additional cost savings apply that can help payback the cost of a system within a relatively brief period.

• The telephony charges between sites can be eliminated for call center systems. For example: if a company operates three sites with three T1 lines at approximately $1500 per T1, they can save the cost of 9 T1 lines or $13,500 per month or $162,000 per year.
• Centralized management of a distributed set of multiple centers from anywhere on the corporate network eliminates the requirements for, and the costs of duplicate, localized administration resources.
• IP call center systems can be deployed on standard IT network infrastructure reducing platform costs and deployment costs. The call routing application can now be deployed as a software-only application running on standard servers.
• In a networked IP environment, companies route contacts anywhere on the corporate network. Therefore, the same volume of phone, email, and web contacts may be handled by fewer customer service agents, reducing the single largest cost line item for the call center -- labor costs.
• The cost and complexity of deploying Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) applications such as screen pop and data directed call routing can be dramatically reduced. While CTI applications can improve agent productivity while improving customer service, it is estimated that fewer than thirty percent of companies in the US have deployed these applications because of their complexity and cost.

2) Calls can be easily routed to the best available agent anywhere on the network. An IP-based contact center can be deployed in a distributed fashion on a distributed data network. This configuration supports the routing of contacts to the best agent wherever the agent may be located – at a contact center facility, a branch office, or at home. The networked approach reduces the number of agents required to handle the same volume of contacts and improves first call resolution by matching the best agent to handle the call from a larger pool of available agents.

3) Multi-channel customer contacts can be routed using a common set of business rules. Phone calls, e-mail, chat and web sessions can all be routed, handled, and tracked using a single platform. That platform can include a single consistent workflow design tool for IT professionals, a single unified desktop for customer service agents, and a single administrative tool for reporting on all types of customer contacts and all agents regardless of physical location.

4) CTI-like applications can be more widely and more simply deployed. With an IP contact center on a unified network architecture, the need for costly and complex CTI projects is eliminated. There are no costs for separate CTI middleware and hardware. The time for deployment can also be reduced from months or weeks to hours. This shift in deployment paradigms is having a major impact on the number of CTI implementations, which in turn, improves service agent productivity.

5) Integration between call center application and other enterprise applications is simplified. As vendors move to standards-based software architectures versus proprietary telephony platforms, standards such as SIP, VXML, SOAP, and others will improve the IT organization’s ability to support the call center application and quickly deploy capabilities. Extending the call center application further into the enterprise by integrating with other core enterprise applications beyond CRM will become easier and less costly.

While we believe that each contact center should see the conversion to VoIP as an ultimate goal to be accomplished as rapidly as feasible because of the technology’s inherent advantages, we certainly realize that in all cases it may not be practical to make this conversation to a “Pure IP” environment immediately. Therefore, each organization must consider its contact center’s readiness to transition, as well as the practicality of doing so immediately.

What Are My Transition Path Options?
An enterprise has available to it several methods of implementing an IP contact center initiative. A common method is through the upgrade to a hybrid IP/legacy call center configuration while keeping embedded legacy equipment in place. Alternately, the enterprise could do an immediate cutover to an IP contact center, by simply removing the legacy equipment and implementing a new and pure IP-based platform immediately. Yet another approach to Pure IP is to implement an IP contact center “trial” in a new corporate location (such as a branch office) in a so-called “ greenfield” environment. Of course, the maximum benefit effect of VoIP in the contact will only be fully realized by use of the latter two choices in which the “Pure IP” solution is implemented immediately.

The selection of the most appropriate method will depend on several company-specific factors. The first is the existence of a legacy system and its potential technical and financial readiness for upgrade. However, the IP telephony benefits are so compelling for the contact center, in terms of efficiency, economics, customer service improvements, ease of deployment and integration, and simplicity of workforce deployment, that an immediate switch to a pure IP contact center platform can often be justified. In any event, the goal should be for every enterprise to get to a Pure IP environment as quickly as possible in order to reap the full benefits of IP telephony.

Ultimately, with a single and unified IP contact center platform purchase, the IT executive can implement a leading-edge center and eliminate the need to install a wide variety of expensive, proprietary, and difficult-to-implement systems. The IP-enabled contact center can act as the automatic call distributor (ACD), PBX, interactive voice response (IVR) system, voice and fax servers, and computer-telephony integration (CTI) and Internet gateways. In addition, the IPcontact center will easily interface with digital call recording and logging, predictive dialing, supervisory applications, and report generation systems.

What Next?
The decision to move to a VoIP contact center environment can be initiated and driven by several enterprise considerations. Typically, the timing is right when an enterprise is considering an application migration strategy in order to better automate a specific line of business, move a functional group that requires continuity across locations, or change a functional group, such as a help desk operation. In addition, the VoIP move can be coordinated with a general technology migration such as a PBX/ACD replacement, implementation of ascreen-pop application (CTI) at a specific site, or the upgrade and replacement of inter-location trunking with VoIP.

Any of these transitions can be the impetus for the changeover. However, the inherent benefits of an IP solution can add a good deal to the business case that ultimately drives the changeover. IT executives considering a major contact center transition should begin building the business case for an IP contact center environment based on the improvements in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an IP telephony environment, the delivery of a consistent customer experience across sites, the ease of enterprise application integration, and the simplification of the system interface for agents and administrators.

The business and technical issues are complex and non-trivial. You'll need to evaluate the potential impact of introducing VoIP not only to your existing corporate data networks, but also to your operations. You can learn more about what's required for this essential step by from Intervox Group's data sheet, downloadable at VoIP Readiness Assessment.

Conclusion
In summary, the IP-based contact center is a product to be included and considered in virtually every new call center/contact center or system upgrade product evaluation and decision process. The Pure IP telephony-based architecture and connectivity provide unique advantages in the multi-channel contact center environment that cannot be matched by traditional proprietary call center solutions that typically come with higher equipment price tags. Ultimately, all call center contact routing systems will move to the Pure IP, software approach. Therefore, IT executives should be seriously assessing the tactical and economic readiness of their contact centers for the conversation to VoIP and begin the move to the Pure IP telephony solution as quickly as feasible.

Ken Landoline is Principal Analyst at Saddletree Research and an Intervox Group Affiliate.

(c) Intervox Group 2006

Download data sheet: VoIP Readiness Assessment

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