Call centers tackle IP telephony

Converged voice/data WAN projects and applications are helping customer call centers of all sizes lower costs and become more efficient. Benefits include savings on long-distance and local phone charges, and improved performance of customer call agents because of better-integrated voice and data technology.

At Household Financial, convergence is helping the financial services company turn its 1,500 branch offices around the country into small, localized call centers that can serve customers over the phone or face to face.

The Prospects Heights, Ill., firm recently built a converged voice and data network with products from Vertical Networks and an IP-enabled nationwide T-1 backbone from AT&T. In each office, a Vertical InstantOffice 3500 was installed, which acts as a small-office PBX, a LAN switch and a platform for computer telephony applications.

Household branch offices provide loan application and other financial services to regional customers. The branches were once connected to a centralized database via dedicated 56K bit/sec data circuits, while each office had anywhere from five to 15 outside telephone lines for customer support.

By combining the branch offices' voice and data onto single T-1 lines from AT&T, the total telecom savings among the branches is expected to be about $4.5 million per year, says Ken Harvey, CIO for Household. In addition, with the new converged network, branches get nearly three times the WAN bandwidth as before.

But that's not the biggest plus, he says.

"What the converged network has allowed us to do is to make every branch office its own call center," he says. Along with converged WAN traffic, the InstantOffice PBX/server is used as a platform for customer interaction applications normally found in larger call center systems. For example, the box integrates caller ID with Household's custom-built CRM system, letting customer records, such as loan processing updates, pop up on an agents' screen before he says "hello."

The InstantOffice server, integrated with Household's back-end systems, lets agents pull up customer documents over the WAN from a centralized database housed in Chicago. Documents also can be faxed from Household branches to customers through an application interface on the desktop.

The market for converged voice platform next year - which includes IP PBXs and IP-enabled PBXs, or phone systems connected via data lines - will reach $231 million, up from just $7 million four years ago, according to IDC. This comes as larger companies have ramped up customer service efforts among businesses. A recent IDC study found 28% more businesses created IT budgets specifically for call centers in 2001 vs. 2000.

The traditional, or circuit-switched, call center market is led by Nortel, Avaya, Siemens and Aspect, which sell automatic call distributors (ACD), or beefed-up PBXs that can handle the large call volume.

Companies including Alcatel, Cisco, 3Com and smaller players such as Vertical Networks and Altigen have added call center capabilities to their IP PBXs, while the traditional players have gotten into the act with IP-enabling add-on software for their ACDs and pure IP call center software that can run on top of server-based IP PBX products.

Integrated apps create efficiency

Integrated IP/telephony applications also are making enterprise call centers more efficient at reaching customers.

If you get a call from Bass & Associates, an Atlanta law firm that provides outsourced bankruptcy and collection call services for credit card, cell phone and consumer loan companies, you probably don't care that the company uses an integrated voice/data system to streamline its calling process.

But the Conversations 4.0 predictive dialing software from Divine lets the firm's agents make 70% more calls daily, according to Jack Stephens, senior account executive with Bass, who oversaw the installation of the Conversations server. The Conversations server has let the Bass law firm double the money it collected for its clients each month, he adds.

The Conversations application runs on an IBM RS6000 server, which connects to the firm's IBM AS/400 and a Lucent G3 PBX. The Conversations server places the call for the agent, and a desktop application screen brings up the customer's data from the AS/400 for the agent to read.

Because Conversations runs over IP, Stephens has extended the server over the company's VPN to a second call center in Tucson, Ariz., that conducts collection calls during West Coast business hours.

"Running the [Conversations] application over the network let us add more agents in the Tucson office," Stephens says, which has helped ramp up collections on the West Coast.

Some call centers still circuit switch

While IP telephony and voice over IP have been deployed in a few large call centers, the base telephony gear in the largest call centers will remain circuit-switched for the time being, some users say.

"The reality is that we've got a huge investment in PBXs that work," says Tom McCormick, senior technical analyst with Carnival Cruises in Miami. "We are a call center for the most part; that's where all of our customer service is."

IP voice gear such as IP phones and PC-based softphones might promise improved features and more closely integrated voice/data applications, McCormick says, but he does not think the technology is ready for prime time on the scale of Carnival's contact centers.

"[IP PBXs] are not meant to be complementary or compatible with existing PBXs, generally," McCormick says. "From the ground up they're great, but we're not ready to risk that technology in our call center."

Carnival runs two call centers based on Avaya G3 PBX systems - in Colorado Springs and Miramar, Fla., to cover both sides of the U.S. The Colorado and Florida centers have 250 and 700 agents working in them, respectively, and the cruise company is building a third call center in Miami that will house another 700 agents.

"For any other department that's not our breadwinner, [IP voice] is great," he says.

"Take my IT department, where it doesn't really matter how good the quality of a call is. We're not losing money there if a phone isn't working. There's no reason to buy a non-IP phones for non-reservation-related departments," McCormick says.

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