[February 22, 2005]

Nuasis Offers VoIP Contact Center Summit at ITEXPO

By David Sims, TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

Today at 2:00 p.m. on the IP Contact Center Summit track at the Internet Telephony conference, Kevin McPartlan, vice president, business development, Nuasis will present a session on “Choose Wisely: Migrate Your Contact Center to IP.”

Companies are increasingly moving to the IP contact center, taking advantage of the IP network and VoIP to reduce operating costs, to improve customer service, and realize infrastructure cost savings, McPartlan (as well as most higher life forms on earth) knows.

But when migrating to an IP contact center system, many companies fail to formulate a plan over a period of time that maps to the operational needs of the contact centers. Such a plan is crucial, and it must take into account the age of existing systems and assess which sites or functional groups will benefit most by moving to an IP solution.

In McPartlan’s session you can learn the business reasons for moving to an IP contact center system, the distinctions between a Pure IP contact center system versus an IP-enabled system, and how to formulate a migration plan that best matches the particular needs of your company.

Then from 4:00 to 5:45 p.m. Joe McFadden, vice president, corporate marketing and product management, Nuasis will join Cisco, Nortel and Witness Systems in a debate-style discussion about the relative merits of their IP Contact Center solutions and the overall state of the IP Contact Center industry.

Loosely based on Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO's successful long-running IP PBX Shootout, itself loosely based on pro wrestling, this double session promises to be a look at what the industry leaders have to say about their products and their competition. This opportunity gives you a chance to get live information directly from the horses' mouths – no offense – as you’ll be given an opportunity to ask the panel your own questions.

Then on Wednesday McPartlan’s back in the saddle leading the “IP and Offshoring: Options & Opportunities.” One advantage of VoIP is that it enables workers to be distributed anywhere in the world, much like the way the Internet enables this reporter to live on the Mediterranean coast instead of lovely crime-free Norwalk, Connecticut. VoIP is also a technology that lowers costs, making it possible to keep contact centers here in the States should you choose to do so.

So which is it, McPartlan asks? “Is IP going to save the contact center industry or will it hasten its demise?”

Offshoring isn’t the no-brainer the Philippine Office Of Attracting Jobs Paying People To Bother Americans At Dinner And Take Their Crap When The Widget Doesn’t Work would have you think. Many companies who choose to offshore call centers to control costs may end up spending more to manage offshore installations, McPartlan cautions, while failing to win customer satisfaction.

In this session you can think about these questions, and hear why, if controlling costs is the goal, then not every company needs to offshore their call centers since “deploying IP may in fact be more cost effective than offshoring for some.”

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.