Strategy : IP contact centers signal end of a legacy

 

These advantages mean that IP contact centers are being rolled out right across the industry. According to research from analysts, Ventana Research, over one-third of companies it questioned are deploying IP contact centers. Its survey looked at contact centers of all sizes operated by nearly 400 companies and they found that 37% of respondents had implemented a VoIP-based contact center system, up from 30% in 2006.

 

A key advantage of IP is that it treats voice as another data application. This is crucial in a multichannel world where many customers are more comfortable using email or SMS than speaking on the phone. Unified queuing allows contact centers to deal effectively with all of their incoming communications channels and more easily handle increased contact load. Contact centers are already using multiple channels, says Ventana Research, with 26% using instant messaging and 12% video to communicate with customers.  Many more are planning outbound campaigns using SMS (22%), voice mail (19%) and automatic response to email (45%).

 

The flexibility of IP contact centers means that advanced functionality can be introduced wherever it is needed in the organization. This is useful in second or third level support, where an expert might have a number of roles outside of customer support, but where their expertise is essential.

 

Concerns over voice quality were historically the main barrier to adoption of IP in contact centers, but these issues have now been resolved and most IP calls are now indistinguishable from traditional circuit-switched voice. “We use IP sniffers in our network to look at the IP voice traffic and deliver voice service level agreements (SLA),” explains Miloud Bensaada, Professional Services, Convergence Team Leader, at Orange Business Services. “We use metrics such as PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality) and MOS (mean opinion scores), that are specifically designed to measure voice quality.”

 

 

IP is not just about improved functionality for contact centers; it also plays a key strategic role. Twenty years ago, most businesses had a contact center with dedicated infrastructure in each country it operated. This costly model duplicated infrastructure and resources and made it nearly impossible to have global standards. It was replaced by massive multilingual call centers, which were based in countries including Ireland and the Netherlands. These eventually became too expensive to operate and were displaced by the offshore revolution of the early part of this decade.

 

Now the trend is for companies to mix and match contact centers worldwide to get the best combination of skills and cost. IP enables companies to integrate contact centers seamlessly, with the routing centralized in the network cloud. Through using IP communications, companies gain the ability to trunk voice calls over international IP data links.  This is essential for most businesses’ offshore contact center strategy because it provides an immediate advanced communications infrastructure in developing countries that may not have the telephony infrastructure or regulation to support business-critical communications.

 

Virtual contact centers can be made up of agents from contact centers in any country and who can even work from their homes. Ventana Research found that 21% of contact centers route calls to employees in locations outside the contact center and an additional 10% route calls directly to agents’ home addresses.

 

Analysts Datamonitor expects significant growth in home-based, outsourced contact centre agents. Between 2007 and 2012 it expects the number of agent positions worldwide to grow at a rate of 35%. “The increase in use of the at-home agent model is impressive, and does not appear to be slowing,” says Peter Ryan, Datamonitor senior analyst for contact center outsourcing and offshoring. “Based on the heavy levels of investment that enterprises are making in this way of doing business, it is clear home agents are no longer a passing fancy, and are rapidly becoming mainstream.”

 

 

IP contact centers allow companies to reduce their overall communications costs. By using IP transport and a global communications service provider, telephony is no longer burdened by costly international termination charges. Instead companies need to have the right amount of available bandwidth. This can be accurately sized using metrics such as maximum and average call volumes and an understanding of the call seasonality. Because IP is a shared resource, companies are able to optimize their bandwidth to carry all of their global calls.

 

To gain many of the advantages of IP, such as IP trunking of international calls, companies don’t even have to replace their legacy infrastructure. “Companies can get many of the benefits of IP using their existing equipment,” says Bensaada. “Many of the solutions we deploy are hybrid and integrate IP and traditional equipment. The intelligence is in the network which allows calls to be delivered to any platform.”

 

In the long run, the majority of businesses will replace their legacy voice public branch exchange (PBX) and automatic call distributors (ACD) as they reach the end of their life. But in the meantime, companies can enjoy many of the advantages in IP contact centers while maintaining their current investment in voice equipment.