Memo from NT
To: The CEO & Senior Management
Background:
The contact center industry has been blessed with tremendous growth. In
fact, if you lost count, this magazine was founded in 1982 to cover this
burgeoning space. What is most amazing about the last two decades is the
advances we have seen in technology. We literally saw agents using index
cards in those early days. Later we saw predictive dialers and ACDs.
Technology evolves continually and now contact centers can take advantage
of one of the most important technologies of all, VoIP or Voice over
Internet Protocol.
VoIP is here to stay. It allows you to deploy agents or banks of agents
anywhere in the world with ease. It allows agents to work at home, on the
road or at any computer connected to the Internet with ease. Super
competitive global outsourcing and global competition dictate that ALL
call centers, small and large, MUST explore IP-based contact centers.
TMC Is The Worldwide Leader In IP Telephony
We publish Internet Telephony' magazine, the industry's No. 1
publication providing credible and authoritative information on the IP
Telephony industry since 1988. At that time, most every technical
publication denounced this technology as never becoming a serious business
tool. Now everyone realizes that it is an essential tool for every
business, regardless of size. We also have a related conference & expo
by the same name and in fact own the registered trademark for the term Internet Telephony'.
Time To Converge
From our vantage point, we feel that now is the time for IP Telephony and
contact center technology to converge because there is NO other choice if
you want to compete profitably!
Some Benefits: Marriage Made In Heaven
Call centers are by far the biggest users of telecom. The Top 100
teleservices agencies alone use in excess of 30 billion billable minutes.
Considering that teleservices represent only a small fraction of worldwide
in-house CRM, contact center and customer interaction centers, then the
world-wide consumption can be roughly estimated to be about 3 trillion
minutes. As such, savvy call center management MUST plan to adopt the new
Internet Telephony technology.
Huge Cost Savings
A recent article in BusinessWeek estimated that from 70 to 90 percent cost
savings can be realized from adopting IP Telephony, to say nothing about
other unparalleled advantages.
Today, IP Telephony is being implemented in a variety of industries and
for both cost savings and revenue-generating objectives.
Our industry-specific research has led us to an extraordinary white
paper on the subject by eLoyalty
Corporation (optimizing customer interactions'). Here are some
excerpts from the above white paper:
- Why Consider an IP Contact Center?
- IP in the Contact Center ' What Is It?
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a means for dividing up a
conversation (an analog signal) into IP packets. The standard IP protocol
is used to route a voice communication over an IP packet-based network.
Whereas legacy PBX systems use proprietary, non-interoperable signaling on
proprietary hardware platforms, IP Telephony uses standard signaling
protocols enabled over open standard, high bandwidth Ethernet local and
wide area networks.
Beyond enabling voice communications over an IP network, the next
requirement is to provide sophisticated call control capabilities. IP
Contact Center solutions include specialized call processing capabilities
to set up a call, handle conversations between telephone numbers and IP
data network addresses, enable sophisticated call routing business rules
to be applied, and track and manage call progress.
Having met the requirement for sophisticated call control capabilities,
we can consider the flexibility a converged IP voice and data network
provides. The IP network can be location independent and service provider
independent. Devices can be plugged into the IP network at any point in
the LAN/WAN architecture and be visible to the entire enterprise. Network
and device management can be accomplished from any point on the IP
network, and can include every component of the voice architecture. This
leads to inherent benefits in scalability, interoperability between voice
and data systems, and ease of administration.
IP Contact Centers are no longer a 'next year' phenomenon. Many
organizations in banking, insurance, retail, manufacturing, and even
government have implemented Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions
for call handling. And, they are beginning to realize the value of
leveraging their prior investments in a solid IP Data Network foundation.
IP Contact Centers can result in cost savings, easier administration,
vendor independence, elimination of redundant networks, and scalability
benefits. Further, 'Quality of Service' (QoS) works well now for
converged voice and data, bandwidth is available, and successful
deployment examples exist in many industries.
The purpose of this white paper is to establish that real value is
being achieved from Voice over IP Contact Centers, and that the time has
come to evaluate IP Contact Center solutions for your organization.
Executives should evaluate IP-based Contact Center applications and
architecture solutions now. Many different success stories now exist. The
applications of Converged IP in these stories include:
- Linking hundreds of remote sites into a virtual multimedia converged
IP network, resulting in an improved customer experience and $4.5
million of annualized telecom savings
- Replacing outdated telephony technology to avoid the cost of
upgrades to a proprietary platform and to reduce telecom costs through
toll bypass
- Enabling remote site overflow to international destinations and
outsourcers, providing lower cost skills and significant savings on
international telecom trunking
- Enabling 'work-at-home' call handling to reduce overhead and
increase job satisfaction.
The tangible financial benefits are there ' and interim managed
services alternatives exist to help you pilot the capability and verify
the necessary QoS and savings.
Whether for distributed environments, or simply as an alternative to
upgrading your traditional, proprietary voice architecture, now is the
time to evaluate migrating your traditional architecture to an IP-based
Contact Center.
As always, I welcome your comments. Please e-mail them to me at [email protected].
Acknowledgements
I would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank eLoyalty Corporation and
specifically Mr. Tony Compton, marketing director, for assistance and the
excerpts from their informative white paper (www.eloyalty.com). His phone number is
877-471-7500.
Sincerely yours,
Nadji Tehrani
Executive Group Publisher
Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]
[ Return
To April 2004 Table Of Contents ] |
SUBSCRIPTIONS
TMCnet LOGIN
WEBINARS
