Is Everything In
The
Contact
Center
Going To Be VoIP?
I sat in on an
interesting road show seminar sponsored by Nuasis,
a provider of IP-based distributed call center technology. It featured a
well-known call center expert, Vanguards Lori Bocklund, co-author of
Call
Center
Technology Demystified, who
made the case for enterprise contact centers to move to IP networks and
application servers.
What was particularly
interesting is that Nuasis is reaching out beyond the traditional telecom
staff to include IT data network managers, who will start sharing
responsibility for supporting contact center operations that are based on
converged, IP networks for telephone services. About half of the audience
indicated that they were IT data network managers, rather than telecom or
contact center managers.
As Nuasis stressed in
their presentation, VoIP is not the same as Voice over the Internet.
The latter involves using undedicated and uncontrolled resources of the
public Internet data network, while enterprise IP telephony applications
will require the bandwidth management of enterprise-controlled VoIP
networks (or Intranets) to support the Quality of Service (QoS) that voice
communications require.
VOIP
HAS CROSSED THE CHASM NOW!
Bocklund echoed the
observations of many industry analysts that the maturation of the VoIP
network infrastructure, coupled with IP telephony application servers, has
now reached the point where all enterprise market segments have started
making serious plans to replace legacy TDM voice technology with IP
infrastructure. The operational functions affected by the use of VoIP
infrastructure for the contact center application include:
- Inbound call queuing and
routing;
- Inbound text message
analysis, queuing, routing and automated response;
- Click to talk and click to
chat for Web callers;
- Speech and multimodal
self-service applications (IVR);
- Screen pops contextual
information display about the customer;
- Unified customer contact activity,
data collection and reporting;
- Call transfer and
conferencing;
- Outbound contact management
and outdialing;
- Customer chat,
internal instant messaging and presence/availability management;
- Quality call and message
monitoring, recording and coaching playback; and
- Performance management
feedback for contact center and supervisory personnel.
IP infrastructure
enables these functions to be centralized and consolidated for any size of
distributed enterprise. In addition to making these functions easier and
less costly to integrate, implement, and manage, a big argument for VoIP
remains the reduction of costs for voice transport and intra-enterprise
toll bypass.
In addition, the fact
that the leading traditional telecommunications vendors are no longer
developing traditional and more costly TDM-based products, the cold, hard
facts of life will eventual push both existing and greenfield
enterprise customers into the VoIP fold.
THE CHICKEN AND
THE EGG - WHERE'S THE PBX?
Bocklund presented Vanguards perspective of the need to begin
implementation planning for the IP Contact Center. Even though there
are significant payoffs and ROI to the enterprise from contact center
activities, Vanguard doesn't believe that an enterprise formal contact center
operation can remain a standalone operation and may only be a starting
point for planning enterprise VoIP and IP telephony convergence. In their
view of the virtual enterprise contact center, the implementation
planning considerations must be enterprise-wide and should now include the
following elements:
- Formal call center
operations (centralized, distributed, and home agents);
- The informal contact
center for all customer-facing personnel, including mobile field
sales and service staff; and
- Contact center of one
facilities for all enterprise personnel, which support personalized
(desktop and wireless mobile) unified, multi-modal contact management
for individual users. This has been the domain of traditional PBXs,
voice mail systems, and wired station telephones, but is changing with
the migration to VoIP, IP telephony, and SIP standards. In the world
of converged communications, it must now include presence and
availability management, along with new modalities of person-to-person
contact, such as instant voice (push-to-talk) and text messaging
and multi-party conferencing.
Just as the modern,
scalable digital PBX/ACDs cost effectively competed against standalone
ACDs, so too will scalable and reliable enterprise communications servers
(e.g., IP-PBXs) become an important element for integrating IP contact
center applications. Contact center staff, whether dedicated agents,
supervisors, or informal customer-facing personnel, must all be
considered as part of the enterprise-wide virtual contact center
operation, since all customer contact activities must be collected and
centralized for effective CRM purposes. This capability will be
particularly important for future versions of the legacy desktop screen
pop. In addition, however, all enterprise personnel must also be
treated as individual end users who also communicate individually with
non-customers.
Many of the IP-based
contact center providers entered the market without trying to displace the
heavy investments in enterprise PBXs and key systems.
SO,
WHAT'S THE FIRST STEP?
The Nuasis presentations highlighted the many benefits of
building the next generation of contact center operations on a VoIP
infrastructure. The question for every enterprise now remains one of
choosing the next step. Clearly, it has to be the operational analysis and
design of the VoIP network infrastructure upon which the component
communication applications will rest, including those that are
unique to contact center activities. Bocklund highlighted the fact that
most organizations dont have the experience or the expertise to
properly plan their migration to VoIP-based contact center operations,
especially when the technology is still evolving. So they need to invest in learning, use
of outside resources and take the time to do it right.
Although the pioneers of the data IP networking have moved into
voice communication applications, notably Cisco, experienced voice
technology providers like Avaya, Nortel and Siemens have also moved
aggressively into VoIP infrastructure technology. Then there are the newer
communication servers for customer interaction management that
combine pre-integrated communication applications, which are particularly
appropriate for new greenfield installations, and will
integrate with legacy PBXs and other contact center platforms (e.g.,
CosmoCom, Interactive Intelligence, Nuasis, Telephony@Work). However,
given that cost-effective migration to VoIP and IP telephony depends on
very selective and graceful implementation planning, a practical
enterprise consideration will realistically start with protecting existing
technology investments that still work and looking at product migrations
offered by current providers.
Another practical alternative is to think about service
providers who can offer a pilot operation that gives the enterprise
some hands-on experience with new responsibilities and capabilities of
IP-based centralized/distributed converged communications. It is only then
that price comes into the picture for finalizing implementation decisions.
MORE QUESTIONS - WHAT DO YOU THINK?
What do you think should be the first implementation step for
enterprise contact center migration to VoIP infrastructure? What new
functional benefits will VoIP-based voice mail bring to both formal
and informal contact center operations? Will SIP presence and
availability management simplify call and message assignment and routing
for both formal and informal contact center activities? How
will SIP work for enterprise applications that need to make contact with a
customer? How will IVR applications benefit from multimodal interfaces?
Who in the enterprise will be responsible for making technology decisions
for contact center functions?
Let us know your thoughts by sending them
to [email protected].
You can also participate in our forums.
Art Rosenberg and David Zimmer are veterans of the
computer and communications industry and formed The Unified-View to
provide strategic consulting to technology and service providers, as well
as to enterprise organizations, in migrating towards converged wired and
wireless unified communications. They focus on practical user
requirements, implementation issues, and new benefits of multi-modal
communication technologies for individual end users, both as consumers and
as members of enterprise working groups. The latter includes identifying
new responsibilities for enterprise communications management to support
changing operational usage needs most cost-effectively.
Considered
to be objective industry thought leaders, Art Rosenberg and David Zimmer
have been publishing their highly-acclaimed syndicated column on unified
messaging and unified communications for over four years to a worldwide
audience of consultancies, technology providers, service providers, and
enterprise technology managers. Both principals are popular speakers at
leading technology conferences and organized the first programs in the
industry focused on the subject of unified messaging/communications. The
Unified-View's website (www.unified-view.com)
is also considered to be a leading source for information on the evolution
of unified communications.
Copyright 2004 The
Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
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