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A Look at VoIP Technologies in the Contact Center
Workforce Optimization Featured Article

A Look at VoIP Technologies in the Contact Center

 
September 26, 2007

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By Stefania Viscusi, Assignment Desk Editor
 

The contact center has evolved to become an important part of a businesses success.
 
Helping the contact center to deliver on their goals and meet today's changing needs, are IP technologies like VoIP.

 
As the technology has made its way into the mainstream, contact centers are increasingly turning to VoIP for its ability to lower total cost of ownership, simplify management and cut costs in the contact center.
 
With VoIP in the contact center, it is possible to maximize the customer experience while also keeping costs and complexity in control.
 
IP technologies in the contact center create a new scope of possibilities. To discuss this further, I asked Brian Spraetz (News - Alert), Product Marketing Manager NICE Systems Inc., some questions on the topic.
 
 
What are some of the benefits VoIP has brought and will bring to the contact center?
 
Broadly speaking, VoIP is enabling a cost effective, centralized and consolidated organization. For the contact center, specifically - VoIP flattens the infrastructure, removing expensive network charges. An IP-based contact center allows ubiquitous access to applications and communication channels while simultaneously reducing the total number of servers across the enterprise.
 
Is the focus on VoIP increasing even more so than in the past in your opinion? 
 
Indeed the focus on VoIP is increasing. And it is the availability of new technologies that is driving growth in demand.
 
One example is SIP (Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert)). SIP, which is used for establishing sessions in an IP network, is generic and interoperable among different vendors. This means that enterprises have freedom of choice of vendors when purchasing their IP phones, gateways, and PBXs. Since its availability NICE has supported SIP. In fact, NICE has developed a recording protocol based on SIP for active VoIP recording, and this is now being adopted by leading telephony vendors.
 
Can you describe some of the challenges surrounding call recording in an IP environment migration?
 
In spite of the benefits afforded by VoIP, contact center and IT supervisors are still concerned about the move from traditional circuit-switched to packet-switched network technology. Contact center managers are still weary of the impact on the quality and reliability of their mission-critical applications. 
 
A number of exciting advancements have been made to ensure that the VoIP recording environment meets the five 9’s reliability of traditional circuit-switched networks. The critical considerations for mission-critical reliability include the following:
 
--The VoIP recording solution should have a unified architecture that utilizes the same infrastructure and applications across all TDM and IP environments, this spells into better integration with existing business continuity plans
 
-- It should also be a software only solution that does not require special telephony boards; this reduces the number of hardware components required, and spells into greater reliability by improving the mean time before failure and helps meet specific IT service level agreements (SLAs)
 
--It should also offer high-end redundancy and the ability to mirror audio stream, this means a high level of fault tolerance and reliability through increased system survivability and the elimination of a single point of failure
 
What issues were attendees most interested in during the ITEXPO (News - Alert) session?
 
What was most interesting is that attendees are no longer asking whether IP telephony is ready for large scale deployments. Instead the questions are more implementation and strategic in nature. Things such as “How do we handle encrypted data streams?” “Should we use a centralized or a decentralized recording configuration?” This represents the true move of the technology into the mainstream.
 
Can you talk a little about the VoIP Recording Gateway (News - Alert) and how it helps VoIP contact centers to leverage the benefits of IP?
 
VoIP systems are very appealing to organizations, offering a telephony solution with no additional equipment other than phones and network equipment. They enable easy management while dramatically lowering maintenance costs. Where recording needs are considered, centralized recording at the data center is preferred to distributed recording. As access to the carrier is often distributed, however, centralized passive sniffing solutions are, in most cases, not feasible. NICE’s VRG (VoIP Recording Gateway) is an active VoIP recording solution that transforms any IP telephony environment into an active recording solution, and which is fully integrated with and supports all of the major IP telephony vendors.
 
NICE’s VRG enables centralized recording capabilities in distributed environments. The solution can reside in the data center and record calls that take place in the organization’s branches. By eliminating the need for set-up, administration and management at branches or remote sites, the VRG helps flatten the organization, enables simple yet efficient handling of remote employees and employees working from home. Deploying the VRG in remote branches enables organizations to capture local VoIP traffic, and send it to the VoIP loggers which reside in the organization’s main datacenter.
 
With its high reliability and scalability, the VRG provides unprecedented capabilities for centralized recording.
 
 
Stefania Viscusi is an established writer and avid reader. To see more of her articles, please visit Stefania Viscusi’s columnist page.
 

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