November 2004

IP: Customer Service Anytime, Anywhere, Via Any Media

By Tracey Schelmetic, Editorial Director
Customer Interaction Solutions® magazine

In this continuing editorial series, we’re examining the benefits of IP contact center technology to today’s call centers. Throughout the timeline of contact center technologies, one fact has always held true: the most innovative technologies, when first debuted, were only in the reach of the largest companies’ call centers (think IVR, speech technologies, workforce management, call recording, etc.). All of these technologies were initially out of reach of the mid-market and small companies.

Perhaps the most poetic result of IP contact center technology is that for the first time, the smaller and mid-sized companies are in the bull’s eye of the market, and with these technologies, smaller companies are able to gain functionality they never dreamed possible.

Multimedia Customer Communications
While the land-line phone will never go away (at least not in the next decade, anyway), it will continue to be accompanied by a growing list of communications media for which there will be a need to provide top-quality customer service.
Today, customers contact the companies they deal with via a variety of means, sometimes simultaneously. Nothing puts customers off quicker than a lack of synchronicity between the different channels they use to interact with a company. IP telephony has been a gold-plated gift to companies attempting to integrate their customer contact channels seamlessly throughout their organizations.

Though 360-degree customer visibility has been within the reach of the largest companies for years now, this type of channel-integrated, intimate customer service has long been out of reach of small and medium-sized businesses. In addition to the cost savings IP telephony provides in relation to traditional telephony, many smaller players are now finding that IP contact center solutions allow them to integrate the different technical needs of their contact centers, including their legacy technologies, into one easily managed platform. Many of today’s IP contact center solutions allow companies to manage their IVR, CTI, ACD, e-mail, dialing equipment, call recording and monitoring and other specific tools on a single platform, and integration is done only once, centrally, rather than piecemeal for all of a company’s locations, helping reduce administration costs dramatically.

The result? Because of cost savings realized from the IP transport of voice and data added to the built-in, centrally managed, advanced contact center features that can only be offered by IP contact center products, the smaller players can offer customer service that meets or exceeds that of the largest companies, at costs they can easily afford.

Mobility
Welcome to the unwired world. If you’re reading this magazine, chances are you’ve been part of it for many years. (Those persons who work in telecom or IT yet refuse to carry cell phones have become something of an oddity; they’re like members of a strange religious sect.) Aside from these telecommunications Luddites, the rest of us realize that mobile communications devices are as necessary to our work as a PC.

In the olden days, we kept our cell phone numbers private to everyone except our friends. Who wants to be contacted by a colleague on a Sunday afternoon, or allow Bob from accounting to ring our cell phone during dinner with a late-night question?

Things have changed as the concept of unified communications returns to the fore. Increasingly, many of today’s “cell phones” are actually consolidated mobile computer/phones that support GSM, GPRS and Wi-Fi network access. With the addition of standards-based VoIP-enabled applications, the cell phone is no longer an isolated branch on the communications tree. Features like “find-me, follow-me,” plus Wi-Fi network access, allow remote workers to essentially travel light, but with the same functionality as having their office PC and every phone number they possess consolidated into one device. The remote workers can then configure these devices to deliver what communications they want and when they want them.

The earliest adopters of these technologies were companies that had service or delivery workers on the road. Now companies with external sales teams are discovering the benefits of having sales personnel and traveling workers fully in touch throughout the day. Think of how many times in the past you have shouted into your cell phone, “I’ll get that information to you when I get back to the office.” Today, that’s not good enough for most companies.

Overcoming Perceptions Of Quality Of Service Issues
In the earliest days of consumer-based VoIP services (Net2Phone, for example), those of us with broadband connections at that time experienced Voice over Internet Protocol by making some outbound calls from our PCs. Unfortunately, the experience has stuck in our heads. The quality was poor, the latency evident. “This is the future?” we wondered.

Luckily, it wasn’t the future.

The difference between voice and data carried over the open Internet and the same voice and data being carried over a private corporate data network is vast. Your own corporate data network can be configured to offer the kind of quality needed for voice transmissions; the Internet cannot guarantee such quality. Today, most enterprises already have a managed corporate data network in place, complete with quality of service controls.

The excuses are disappearing for companies still resisting the pull of IP. The bad news: your competitors are there already. The good news: the nature of this technology makes it fast and easy to catch up.

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