Call centers are traditionally staffed with a labor force that requires training and performance monitoring. They often use interactive voice response, automatic call distributors and legacy PBXs. As business grows and call volume increases, these legacy call centers are changing with the times, evolving into IP contact centers to satisfy the need for rapid and efficient responses to a broader range of customer contact methods. IP contact centers that leverage voice over IP (VoIP) technologies can manage and integrate all manner of customer contact methods, whether via phone call, fax, e-mail, instant message or other data transmission. Today’s IP contact centers integrate functions that provide workforce management, improved training, performance management and interaction optimization applications to yield tremendous potential savings for businesses that deploy or lease contact services.

IP contact or call centers are ideal applications for SIP trunking. The hardware, maintenance and IT personnel costs associated with VoIP gateways used by contact centers is expensive, but SIP trunking eliminates these costs. The need for VoIP gateways is diminishing as gear is shipped SIP-capable from manufacturers. SIP trunking, paired with the diminishing need for VoIP gateways, makes the cost benefits of IP contact centers even more dramatic.

Dramatic cost savings, however, is not the only benefit of adding SIP trunking. Imagine a call center that suddenly has the opportunity to bring on a large new client that will require the ordering of a block of phone lines, but there is no guarantee that the client will sign the contract. Can the telecom or IT director be convinced to approve that kind of expenditure with no guaranteed ROI? With Broadvox GO! SIP Trunking, the number of phone lines is not an issue. Our offering will allow for as many simultaneous calls as the contact center broadband can support, or virtually unlimited concurrent call sessions, and it takes minutes to configure. There is never a charge for unused SIP trunking capacity.

Establishing communication with the right resource requires redirecting or using pre-contact routing. Redirecting is accomplished through tie lines or “take back and transfer” capabilities, both of which incur significant expense when dealing with a high volume of contacts and distributed remote sites. With SIP trunking, SIP contacts come directly from a telecom service provider and are load balanced across all sites or put into a voice portal or other contact classification system so they can be referred to the appropriate resource, a contact center or an agent. The communication can be directed or redirected any number of times without incurring “take back and transfer”costs.

Why not focus on deploying the preferred best-of-breed applications that leverage IP and SIP instead of locking into high cost, inflexible proprietary technologies? Contact center products selected for need and function should offer the assurance they will work together seamlessly. SIP interoperability makes this possible. Service providers accept and comply with the SIP standard, making it easier to expand business operations to geographic locations and efficiently route communications through multiple contact centers, thus dynamically balancing the call load while providing business continuity in the event of a disaster or major outage. SIP offers developers an open protocol standard so they can use a wide range of products that share common interfaces, easing implementation.

Call load balancing prevents traffic on one line from becoming so heavy that bottlenecks develop. Contact volume fluctuates depending on the contact method, type of business, locations and seasonal factors. A retail business with contact centers on both coasts experiences various peak loads from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm depending on the location. Call volume also increases seasonally, such as calls to travel agents during holidays, customer orders for Christmas and, the biggest of all, the hotline for cooking turkeys on Thanksgiving. Either way, the call traffic must be distributed and rerouted if necessary so the calls reach their destination and are quickly serviced.

Adding traditional TDM PBX equipment is expensive and disruptive. Growth and change should be positive indicators for business, but interruptions from equipment additions negatively impact companies. Implementing an IP contact center with SIP technology can take place in stages and at a lower cost while business continues uninterrupted because most new devices are SIP-capable.
GO!Domestic is the Broadvox SIP Trunking product developed for contact or call centers. It will work with either an IP or TDM contact center. GO!Domestic provides all of the aforementioned capabilities and much more. Contact Broadvox at 866-770-9960 or visit us at www.broadvox.com.

Handling Spikes In Call Volume
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions

If the behavior of consumers could be predicted, business would be strictly a science. It’s not. It’s an art of sorts. Business is cyclical. Some cycles can be predicted: the holiday shopping season, the summer season, a big promotion. Even an event like a recall usually allows a company a day to prepare extra resources.

But the expensive spikes in customer contacts are the ones you don’t see coming: an outage. A natural disaster. A political event. A misprint on a brochure. A competitor’s actions. Whether companies are equipped to handle events like these what can make or break a business. You may have the best trained call center agents in the business, but if they and your customers are not properly connecting, or your customers are waiting a half an hour to speak with your wonderful agents, your efforts have been wasted.

Many call center-heavy companies would like to take advantage of the benefits of IP contact centers, but are unwilling to risk much in the way of resources, or are headed by a conservative management layer that will approve no technology changes without very fast ROI. The message that today’s SIP-enabled IP contact center solution companies can give is that given the risk-free nature of these technologies, and understanding the kinds of events they are capable of preventing, call centers that wish to retain control of their customer contact volume cannot afford NOT to go all-IP.