SD-WAN Can Solve Constraints on Contact Center Networks

Once upon a time, the term “call center” implied a geographical location: a “bull pen” or “boiler room” full of agents with headsets on telephones. In 2016, the term has morphed to “contact center,” and the geographic boundaries have begun to disappear. As customers’ needs change, so too does the contact center. Today, the term might mean a network of linked agents in disparate locations all over the globe able to keep in synch through collaborative communications and cloud-based contact center solutions.

At the same time, contact centers need to keep an eye on quality, so not all virtual contact center solutions may be right for all companies. Contact centers using voice over IP (VoIP) technology have historically used MPLS in the WAN, very often dual MPLS networks in order to maintain reliability and call quality, according to a recent NetworkWorld article by Andy Gottlieb, co-founder of Talari Networks (News - Alert). Traditionally, contact center WANs have a mixture of voice and other real-time traffic together with interactive and more bulk traffic.

At the same time, the solutions used by distributed contact centers need to be cost-effective and affordable, but also support the increasing proliferation of communications and social media channels. Call centers worry about the customer experience, but often skip over the quality of their wide area networks.

“This confluence of needs is straining the WAN, but the right SD-WAN solution can simultaneously deliver better customer experience, greater reliability, and the ability to offer different service levels, all while reducing network costs,” wrote Gottlieb. “The fact that multi-location contact center operators already have multiple WAN links at each location make them particularly fertile ground for SD-WAN deployments.”

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology applied to WAN connections may be the answer for distributed contact centers with complex needs. SD-WAN technology can help ensure quality in real-time communications channels, such as VoIP and video conferencing, by choosing network paths with the least packet loss and lowest jitter, and switching sub-second to a better path in the face of high loss or jitter, according to Gottlieb. The technology can also scale well to the contact center’s various locations.

“Where sufficient bandwidth is available, some SD-WAN implementations can provide still greater application reliability by replicating real-time traffic flows along a second path, suppressing duplicates at the receiving end, and so delivering essentially "perfect" sound and voice quality even in the face of failures or congestion on one of the WAN connections,” he wrote. “Some SD-WAN solutions are even intelligent enough that they can be set to do such flow replication only when sufficient WAN bandwidth is available.”

The end result is higher reliability and greater WAN utilization from existing MPLS links, enabling contact centers to offer stellar quality to customers, high availability and flexibility, all while keeping costs in check.