IP in the Contact Center: The Time is Now

By: Erik Linask (News - Alert)

The migration to VoIP platforms, despite current economic conditions, is still strong. In fact, depending on which vendor you ask, quite a few say they are benefitting from the economic downturn, as more and more focus is placed on reducing operational costs in the enterprise. Cost savings has always been the hallmark of IP-based communications, and when CIO’s and other key decision makers evaluate the associated business process enhancements that come with IP platforms, it becomes almost a no-brainer, especially with some of the creative financing offers for on-premise systems and low-cost hosted alternatives available today.

That same trend is extending from the enterprise into the contact center, with more and more contact centers looking to consolidate their systems into a single location from which they can serve their main centers and at-home agents. Given the trend towards IP and the lack of new TDM switches being deployed, that hardly comes as a surprise.

What is, perhaps, surprising, according to CyberTech’s marketing manager Ed Kawecki, is that the migration process in contact center environments has been so smooth.

“The advantage, of course, is being able to consolidate multiple sites into a single location to give you a lot more flexibility,” he said. “It’s gone better than expected.”

Carol Kline, CIO at TeleTech, which handles some 3.5 million customer transactions each day on its global IP platform, goes a step further: “The concerns people had seven years ago aren’t there anymore. Yet, there are still a lot of companies that haven’t made the migration, and it’s kind of surprising.”

The Geography of IP

That notwithstanding, the migration from TDM to IP infrastructures overall has been remarkable, and is a testament to the stability of IP networks and the innovation that has gone into developing new applications to enrich the contact center agents’ capabilities – including the deployment of at-home agents, which has the secondary effect of increasing the net income, since agents’ commuting costs are cut to nothing.

“In major cities, the average commute is 18 to 25 miles each way, costing agents several hundred dollars a month to go to work, so there’s a different kind of ROI, which helps keep agents highly motivated,” suggests Greg Sherry, senior director of marketing and business development at Verint (News - Alert).

But, the true benefit comes from the ability to leverage VoIP and IP technology to deliver better applications and services quickly and more reliably and, as in the pure enterprise space, it’s the ability to deliver those applications over the network that is helping drive interest in the contact center, and it matters little whether it’s a pure hosted service, a SaaS (News - Alert) model, or an on-premises solution. The benefits of IP are equally applicable.

“It’s broadband that’s enabling our model and the applications, with call center being one of the applications being delivered over broadband, is enabled by the fact that broadband is good enough now to do telephony,” explained Mansour Salame (News - Alert), CEO and co-founder of Contactual. “In some cases telephony over broadband is actually better quality that over the PSTN. And home agents, that wasn’t even an idea when you were talking about the legacy environment.”

In addition to pure cost savings, by leveraging IP communications, contact centers are able to overcome some of the challenges with traditional call center models. First, they are no longer limited by geography. Agents can be located in the same site, another center across the Atlantic, at a small remote facility, or at home, but they can still have access to the same systems and the same customer data as all other agents. In addition, they have the ability to adapt quickly to customer needs and technological innovations because applications can be quickly and easily upgraded and added in an IP infrastructure – just like businesses and home users alike can quickly upgrade to a new version of MS Office.

“Before IP, the economics were not possible in a traditional telephony network,” said Salame. “This is why people used to buy their own call centers. Now, we’re able to deliver their functionality right out of the network without any CAPEX or any upfront project implementation budget. IP telephony enables you to leverage the Internet as a delivery mechanism to end users, and once you have that network between the data centers, whether it’s the big Internet or a guaranteed QoS private network, you can really deliver on the promise of on-demand computing.”

As for the viability of an IP-enabled contact center, Kline says TeleTech runs about two billion minutes of VoIP annually on its platform. The company made the transition over the past five years, having invested about $250 million into virtualizing and centralizing its infrastructure to be able to support its delivery channel around the globe.

TeleTech uses it for its own contact center, and for its hosted customers, which include some of the biggest names in telecom, including AT&T, Verizon (News - Alert), Comcast, Time Warner, O2, Orange, Vodafone, and Telstra, among others. In fact, when calls flow in for the 2010 U.S. census, they will come across the TeleTech platform to agents. Those agents will be from TeleTech and other companies, but they will all be on TeleTech’s system, running on a Cisco (News - Alert) IP platform (TeleTech uses primarily Avaya and Cisco for its IP technology).
“We have four ‘giga-pops’ around the globe, primarily placed where we aggregate our traffic, and we have an at-home offering where we can take it to your house using the same infrastructure that we use to send calls to the Philippines, to South Africa, to Argentina, or to somebody’s house here in the U.S.,” said Kline.

Whether a pure hosted contact center or and enterprise center, IP technology frees users from being tied to on-premises hardware in a traditional outsourced call center or distributed organization. Now, by flattening the network and consolidating hardware in a single site, agents can be deployed anywhere, using a softphone or a hard IP phone. In, fact, all agents need is an RJ-45 jack to connect to the network, and they are able to offer any contact center services available in a central office.

The Agent Desktop

Certainly, there are many IP phones that are more than adequate for a contact center environment, but many centers are tending towards softphones – software-based telephony interfaces the reside on the agent’s PC desktop. A softphone is less cumbersome, doesn’t require any additional cabling or power, and agents need to access information on their PC desktops in order to effectively service customers, so it makes sense – not to mention the reduced CAPEX by not having to buy hundreds or thousands of hardphones, which would only be connected via an automatic lifter to the PC anyway.

“The communication flows go through the computer anyway, so if you can have it all centrally located on the PC desktop it’s a much better overall experience for the user because you can tie various systems together,” said Todd Carothers, vice president of product management at CounterPath (News - Alert). “We’re starting to see that trend more and more and a large portion of our leads are call center-based.”

The desktop model also make the agent much more accessible via the different communications methods enabled by IP networks and Web 2.0 technology, like click to chat, click to call, email, and even video calling, which is still an significant outlier, though TeleTech does have a product that could be used as a video agent.

“At the end of the day, it’s a lot easier to do things graphically and take advantage of the larger screen size,” noted Carothers.“We see people taking advantage of the real estate on the screen, and other SIP-based applications that can feed into our client that support the call center environment.”

Adoption of video communication in the enterprise and consumer space is still, at best, slow, outside of video conferencing to help mitigate the cost of travel, interest is growing, thanks to collaboration technology like telepresence. PC’s certainly are powerful enough to handle video, the cost of broadband is steadily decreasing, and the applications are already being developed and can be integrated into contact center software easily, so it is presumably only a matter of time before video become a part of the contact center in some way.

The most likely wide-scale implementation is to accommodate the hearing impaired, who will be able to leverage live video agents in a two-way video call to use sign language to communicate with the agents. The video contact center could well be a key differentiator for wireless providers, who will then be able to market cell phones to the hearing impaired community by offering them more than text messaging capabilities.

The Multi-Vendor Contact Center

Of course, with all the new applications being developed for the contact center – it’s widely acknowledged that we are living in a best of breed world, where most businesses have adopted a multi-vendor approach to their technology, including call center applications.
Of course, that’s where the work comes in for the softphone developers, like CounterPath, which puts considerable time and effort into ensuring interoperability with various applications.

“A diverse server strategy offers a variety of functions that roll up into our client,” said Carothers. “With our softphone, customers can have a multi-vendor offering on the server side, and we bring it all together under the client hood.”

For the user, what this interoperability work really accomplishes is working out any bugs before actual deployment, limiting the need for troubleshooting and simplifying management, and also speeding deployment time.

A multi-vendor strategy becomes more prevalent as the size of an enterprise or contact center increases, which means integration and interoperability become paramount to ensuring overall operational efficiency. For call flows and voice quality, ensuring that all applications and hardware are optimized requires and end-to-end analysis of the network, from the caller to the contact center desktop.

As new technologies and new applications, including VoIP, are added to networks, the task of service quality assurance requires addressing interoperability between applications, and making sure new technology that is introduced as discrete pieces of the network are all optimized to allow voice calls to get through to the agent, to the IVR, to the CTI (News - Alert) platform, and to the CRM system.

“Even though VoIP and the SIP protocol have been around for almost a decade, the fact is that the major players implement them a little differently, so contact centers that have multivendor implementations have a risk of running into interoperability problems,” explained Joe Dumont, manager of the Advanced Solution Group at Empirix (News - Alert). “That’s exactly where we’re positioned, to be able to handle testing scenarios around multi-vendor implementations.”

As new and increasingly complex applications are added to contact center platforms, issues like application sequencing become an ongoing issue. Centers must be confident their incoming calls will be directed to the appropriate applications in order for the entire operation to function properly. Imagine is a call that is supposed to go into a self-service IVR system goes into a live agent queue, and vice versa.

“The concern about voice quality in the IP world is a huge one and it’s what vendors tend to be worrying about most,” noted Tim Moynihan (News - Alert), vice president of marketing at Empirix. “How do I assure this call is going to go through at great quality and if voice becomes
just another application on a media platform, how do all the applications sequence and interrelate and interoperate as expected?”

To help solve these sequencing and interoperability issues quickly, especially in today’s challenging economic environment, Empirix, which is known for its Hammer line of load test equipment, has introduced a new model that is basically a blend of its existing Hammer products, delivered as a service through a combination of products and people. It is designed to provide a cost effective and efficient test solution for very complex contact center environments, like utility companies, which are required to comply with local and state regulations for handling call loads in emergency situations.

The model is one that marries nicely with evolving contact center environments because it provides not only the appropriate equipment, but also expert staff on site to work with test engineers, combined with Empirix’ managed service for a complete test solution. It also provides flexibility in invoicing, because it focuses on working within contact centers’ operational budgets, as opposed to requiring high up-front capital investment.

This new testing as a service model from Empirix follows the growing trend towards providing services while minimizing capital expense. It also incorporates new features, including two-way voice call testing, interoperability and testing of new applications,
and multimedia testing – all of which are critical to next generation contact centers, both inbound and outbound.

“In these economic times in particular, we feel this is a better way to get testing done,” said Moynihan,

The Big Picture

When all the technology and applications and business models have been sifted through, it all boils down to the one constant in the contact center world: a need to provide a first-class experience for the customer on which any business is dependent upon for its livelihood. That’s what IP-based contact centers are designed to provide – increased operational efficiencies that allow agents, regardless of where they are physically located, to all leverage the same technology to provide efficient customer service.

“Right now, it’s starting at the desktop,” said Carothers, though he sees growing interest in extending the same capabilities into the mobile environment, especially in cases where customers require the expertise of a specific agent to handle technical issues or for consistency of the relationship.

Furthermore, the beauty of IP is that it delivers the same benefits to the smallest contact centers as it does the largest – both in terms of cost and an ability to increase service quality. Naturally, every business is much more cost conscious today than it was five years ago, and there are a number of skeptics who are reluctant to transition to IP. But, in a downturn, there is always an opportunity.

The biggest driver right now, according to Sherry, is that while businesses may not be able to add customers very easily, and they may not be actively engaged with expensive marketing firms, but they will focus on existing customer retention.

“The prevalent thinking is, ‘I want to keep those customers and I want to keep them satisfied,’” he said. “That doesn’t go away and companies will still make investments if you can show them that.”

But, because cost is such a major factor today, and because IP networks have become highly resilient and reliable, the hosted model has a tremendous upside. There is no expensive, specialized hardware required, there are no more special power supply requirements – there’s just the application.

“Once you have everything on IP, it doesn’t matter if it’s running your office or in our network,” notes Salame. “Actually, our network is more resilient than what most companies can provide, especially when you go to home agents and the like.”

“It’s working out really well,” said Kawecki. “The only thing holding it back is some people saying, ‘What I have works, and I’m just not going to change it until it reaches its end of life.’”

But, the maintenance on those companies’ existing TDM switches can be exorbitant, which is likely to drive even them to all-IP environments sooner, rather than later, particularly if they consider how cost effective an IP contact center can be, even in deployment. Salame believes, with the Contactual (News - Alert) model, he could maintain the 7.5 million or so existing contact center seats for something near $5 billion annually, compared to the $25-30 billion is costs now.

The IP contact center has a proven ROI, and if you consider a hosted model, where deployment can be accomplished in hours as opposed to days, weeks, or months, customers can actually begin using their new systems before they even pay their first bill. It’s like getting a return without investment. IT

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