S(L)IPping IP Into The Contact Center

Internet telephony (IP) is gradually becoming the new norm in contact center communications. The new switching solutions that are being deployed, say observers, are either all-IP or are hybrid IP-TDM that leverages existing investments; very few are now TDM-only.

While the economic downturn has held up many planned IP projects because of budget constraints, there are now signs that some of these may be going ahead. Eric LeBow, Vice President of Business Transformation, Spanlink Communications, has been seeing since late February a stronger uptake in proposals from primarily existing clients for IP in bricks-and-mortar centers and increasingly to support home-based agents. One recent project will have Spanlink put in one to enable 100 new home agents in Utah.

"Companies are looking at their capital budgets and are asking themselves ‘what investments are we going to make in 2009 and 2010,’" explains LeBow. "Many are figuring out that going to IP will enable them to achieve a substantial ROI both short-and long-term."

IP Drivers
The drivers behind the move to IP continue to be cost savings along with greater flexibility. Don Greco, director of contact center field marketing and sales, Siemens Enterprise Communications points to Forrester and IDC estimates of 15 percent or more compared with TDM. Siemens makes the IP-based OpenScape Unified Communications (UC) Server that includes enterprise grade voice with carrier grade scalability and reliability, IP least cost routing, video conferencing, and UC applications.

IP achieves these results by eliminating separate voice networks including switches and cabling, and management. There are also reduced network management fees and lowered carrier fees.

Verizon Business has made IP deployment even more economical. The latest release of its Hosted IP Centrex solution offers Burstable Enterprise Shared Trunks (BEST). BEST, previously only available with Verizon’s IP Trunking allows clients to use idle VoIP capacity in one location to accommodate an increase in traffic from another.

IP solutions, especially those are hosted, makes meshing contact centers acquired in a merger/acquisition much easier and less expensive; there are no legacy switches to rip/replace. The applications can be connected directly to desktops or indirectly via gateways to existing TDM hardware.

IP makes working with multiple channels: e-mail, chat, web form, and social networking more effective as all of these applications can be blended into a single stream. This gives improved interaction consistency and better service. It delivers presence/UC to sales staff and subject matter experts, and enables informal agents such as in bank branches, much more seamlessly because the channels are in the same pipe.

These benefits are coming together in home agent deployment, which is growing in popularity. The cost savings, channel integration, and presence/UC connectivity to offices, teams, and supervisors make home working more feasible. Home-based contact centers provide net gains of $10,000 to $20,000 per agent/year according to The Telework Coalition through shrinking facilities costs and obtaining higher productivity by recruiting and retaining higher quality staff. IP also meshes with another emerging trend: voice architecture centralization with minimal redundancy just as there is with data. Instead of ACDs: TDM or IP in each of 10 contact centers networked together there are 1 or 2 IP ACD servers. One server would carry most of the load with the other as a backup for spikes and redundancy, or handle satellite offices or home agents: which is how data is architected. The benefits are lowered capital and operating costs and improved customer service by being able to optimize the network better through more easily supporting virtualized queues across different sites.

"The location-independent nature of IP is much more technically suited for this centralized architecture than TDM," explains Drew Kraus, Research Vice President, Gartner, who is seeing his clients move in this direction.

SIP: The ROI-powered IP engine
If costs and flexibility are driving contact centers to IP then session initiation protocol (SIP) is the engine. SIP is an open standards-based TCP/IP application signaling protocol. It is gradually displacing H.323, which is an older protocol used to deliver voice over an IP network.

SIP has several advantages over H.323, including scalability, ease of integration, and ease of management; Spanlink’s LeBow points out. This leads to lower overall total cost of ownership.

SIP has also helped lower product costs because it has made the components more interoperable through the common standard. Tom Fisher, Director of Systems Engineering for Interactive Intelligence points to an IP endpoint written to H.323 in 2001 that sold for $900, which has been superseded by one done in SIP in 2008 for $120.

"There is now a hard dollar ROI model for IP thanks in part to SIP that is at the least cost-neutral but more likely cost-beneficial for IT departments to take to their business decisionmakers," says Fisher. "While there has always been an ROI before the widespread use of SIP, the amount was not as great and the investments were more difficult to justify because the purchase and installation costs were higher. With SIP today we now have a perfect confluence of both cost-savings and productivity gains."

In tandem, SIP trunking can cut costs and improve integration between multiple contact centers, and connectivity to satellite offices, informal contact centers, and home-based agents by treating voice as data. With SIP trunking inbound calls are routed to the nearest IP point of presence. Those that are TDM such as PSTN or cellular are converted to IP at network-owned gateways; those that are IP originated such over cable, DSL, or wireless satellite broadband are flowed through.

CosmoCom, which makes IP-SIP/based contact center platforms, has considerable experience with SIP trunking through its sales engineering and support for its enterprise client base. It recently launched CosmoCall Universe 6, which has an array of new features including connectivity to mobile staff, informal agents, and off-ACD business users, and virtual outbound dialing.

"SIP trunking has become much more of a mainstream product," explains Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president, CosmoCom. "The benefits come from keeping communications in the IP domain. If you bring in SIP trunks, then you are bringing IP right into your IP network. You can use your own IP network for transport, or you can extend the reach via the public Internet. Since it comes in as IP and moves around as IP, you maximize the cost benefits of using IP as the transport layer, and you eliminate the costs associated with media gateways."

IP-based solutions combined with SIP trunking connecting into contact centers can pay off especially for small/midsized firms. Payworks Payroll Services deployed Objectworld’s SIP-based UC server in December 2008 to connect 100 employees across three locations, and the solution is well underway to save it up to $52,000 per year.

Here’s where the dollars add up. Payworks estimates that Objectworld’s solution will enable it to cut $36,000/year in contact center expenses by doing away with having to support another vendors’ application; the contact center is included in the Objectworld product. Going to Objectworld will save it $16,000/year on long distance charges by calls going over SIP trunking.

Aspect, which makes SIP-based contact handling solutions, is beginning to see these benefits internally. It has successfully rolled out Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 for voice and voicemail, audio and web conferencing, IM, and presence at its Chelmsford, Mass. headquarters and is expanding the deployment companywide.

"The best part is the cost benefits we’ll be able to see as a result of the implementation, including saving $75,000 per month on conference calling in the first year alone," says Jamie Ryan, Aspect’s senior vice president, Information Technology and CIO. "Both local and long distance costs will drop significantly as a result of our use of SIP trunking and will result in additional savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars as we complete our deployment. With these types of savings, our ROI will be extremely aggressive."

S(IP) Challenges, and Solutions
While SIP has become widely adopted there are still some challenges in making SIP/IP functional on the same scale as TDM. One of them is that interoperability is from universal.

"If SIP was a universal language for all those phones out there we would talk directly to that extension and tell it what to do," adds Ernie Wallerstein, President, Americas, Zeacom. "But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t tell it to go off-hook without talking to the PBX, and that language and dialect is different for every manufacturer SIP or H.323-based."

As a newer protocol, SIP is less mature, which can require more light to medium integration work between different manufacturers’ SIP-based products, explains Spanlink’s LeBow. Many manufacturers he says have their own SIP versions; many solutions require SIP and proprietary H.323 hybrid integrations.

To enable connectivity, most manufacturers support multiple protocols, including both SIP and H.323. Some manufacturers, like Cisco, publish their SIP standards and allow third parties, like Spanlink, to develop applications and perform integrations.

"The interoperability issues are not insurmountable and while the integration is not as hard as it used to be, SIP is still not plug-and-play," says LeBow."

There are still lingering concerns over quality of service (QoS): latency, jitter, and dropped calls with S(IP). Yet these are gradually becoming rectified through higher quality solutions, more bandwidth, network management, and SIP trunking; unlike long-established TDM, the young SIP/IP technology is still not ‘install and forget’ like the latter.

Firms can control QoS through packet prioritization and by limiting extraneous bandwidth-eating applications on the network. For example Aspect prohibits users from having non-work-related web-based applications that frequently access information, such as RSS feeds.

The QoS concerns are still the most acute at the home agent level. Their offices usually lie beyond the SIP trunking carriers’ points of presence and management, on connections that could be DSL or cable or in some cases wireless. Carriers can therefore not guarantee total end to end QoS.

Many of these issues have been ameliorated though with increasing bandwidth, by technology improvements, and by setting ‘last mile’ standards for home agents. For example Convergys requires its home agent applicants to have minimum speeds of 500 kbps up and 1.5 mbps down. It does not allow satellite or wireless broadband access. It also asks candidate agents to test their VoIP quality through their PCs.

There are also tools to manage QoS at the home level by prioritizing incoming and outgoing traffic to support IP. Cisco’s sophisticated Cisco Virtual Office offering provides a comprehensive IP-based multichannel communications solution for branch and home workers. It packages routing, switching, security, wireless, IP telephony, and policy control technology into a centrally managed office-caliber solution that provides highly secure video, voice, data and wireless service. Cisco’s solutions can throttle data packet and permit quality voice.

"For just having home agents them plug their IP phones into modems or routers supplied by their providers is probably not enough for high-reliability high-security, voice interactions," explains Ross Daniels, Cisco Director, UC Solutions Marketing.

Perhaps the most important challenge in today’s climate is available and limited resources. While the business case is there for IP/SIP, contact center expenditures must stand in line nonetheless with other corporate needs. IP deployments require for example having the infrastructure move to it. For those reasons many contact centers that have TDM installations that are still effectively carrying out functions such as routing calls to agents’ desktops have or are considering hybrid solutions that enable them to phase into IP.

"For companies had figured out what the costs are and had this in spending in pipeline they are continuing with that evolutionary transition," says Datamonitor’s Jacobs. "For companies have done the piloting and that is the great thing you can do with IP is that you can pilot with branch offices or remote agents, they will keep those hybrid deployments live without transitioning the whole infrastructure to IP."

Avaya’s new Aura SIP-based platform integration architecture enables signaling interconnect with the TDM PBXes through having its SIP gateway next to them. Calls come into the PBX and Aura takes them to agents’ desktops and out to multiple site including to satellite offices and home agents.

More importantly Aura integrates well with the new channels for customer service and loyalty. Using this functionality, enterprises can securely incorporate social media such as Facebook and Twitter, text messaging, and peer-to-peer communications. For example, a communications session could be augmented with a social network profile on the participants. This feature would provide more context than is available with Caller ID and presence and could therefore boost the outcome and value of these engagements. Similarly, widgets to social network home pages can be added to facilitate realtime communications and enrich interactions with customers.

Another seemingly more radical option is hosted IP platforms. There are a growing array of firms, such as LiveOps and Transera that provide IP-based call/contact routing and outbound calling, reports Ian Jacobs, senior analyst, Datamonitor.

The benefits of this choice are no new infrastructure to install and integrate and immense flexibility to add seats, such as home agents, and sites, like retail informal centers. The downsides are increased customization for more sophisticated environments.

"It makes sense to go hosted in this economic environment," says Jacobs. "If you have to build contact center from scratch, greatly expand, rationalize multiple sites into one, which has been happening, the hosted model makes a lot of sense."

He is seeing demand increase for hosted IP platforms not only for the above reasons but also because there is greater organizational acceptance of and more importantly support for hosting as an alternative delivery model i.e. opex instead of capex.

"Salesforce.com has been evangelizing at corporate level for the hosted model, that you don’t have to own the solution," says Jacobs. "They see the benefit of on-demand in one part of the enterprise and are wondering why they cannot have the same benefits in other parts, such as the contact center. Then you will see hosted voice spiral out into the enterprise application world and eventually become the norm."

The following companies participated in the preparation of this article:

Aspect
www.aspect.com

Avaya
www.avaya.com

Cisco (News - Alert)
www.cisco.com

Convergys
www.convergys.com

CosmoCom (News - Alert)
www.cosmocom.com

Interactive Intelligence
www.inin.com

LiveOps (News - Alert)
www.liveops.com

Objectworld
www.objectworld.com

Siemens (News - Alert) Enterprise Communications
www.enterprise-communications.siemens.com

Spanlink (News - Alert)
www.spanlink.com

Transera
www.transera.com

Verizon Business
www.verizonbusiness.com

Zeacom (News - Alert)
www.zeacom.com

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