Baxter Credit Union took a bold approach to upgrading its call center. In late 2002 it merged voice and data on a single network and deployed an IP-based contact center platform from Interactive Intelligence.

The new system has delivered on its promise to help the company grow its business and expand its call centers easily and cost effectively. BCU has about 60 people in the main call center in the Chicago area, and rolling out the new system to 15 remote service centers has been smooth - each new site is treated as an add-on to the existing IP network.

BCU adds the remote staff to call center queues when needed and can retain key employees by letting them work from home. BCU uses one application to manage all media for routing and reporting across agent locations.

The Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) is taking a more phased approach. TASB recently purchased a Siemens platform that is "IP-ready"- it can migrate to VoIP as needed. Under TASB's long-term plan, remote and mobile users will be on IP in 2005, and they expect to IP-enable the product and service center that supports educators, administrators, school boards and the public by 2006.

TASB opted not to implement pure VoIP initially because there was no compelling business reason to switch and because there were too many hurdles, including preparing the network with switch and router upgrades, replacing all the desktop phones and upgrading its adjunct systems such as voice mail.

But TASB is now in a good position because it will be ready to deliver business applications on the new platform when necessary.

The great migration to the IP contact center is underway. While there are many approaches, vendors and users agree that the decision is not driven by the technology, but rather by business applications that the technology enables. BCU and TASB are taking very different paths to VoIP, but each made the right decision for their current and future business needs.

In general, however, the migration is happening very slowly. Art Schoeller, an analyst at The Yankee Group, says, "The move to IP in the contact center is inevitable but not imminent. The transition from TDM to IP, catalyzed by Cisco, is much like the transition from analog to digital systems, which was catalyzed by Rolm. Like that transition over 20 years ago, this transition will take time. And this one is more complex."

And the small shall lead

Most IP contact center installations have occurred in small to midsize businesses (SMB). Many of these SMBs use home agents and remote offices. SMBs tend to be more willing than larger companies to take risks, many are growing, and they are reaping the benefits of flexibility and agility.

There are fewer large installations in place, and they are generally multisite, often with overseas positions (including outsourcers). The major vendors such as Avaya, Cisco and Nortel all say they have pure IP installations of 2,000 seats or more.

"The industries making radical changes are the ones who are suffering the most pain from economic and market forces, such as teleservices [outsourcers], airlines, telecom and high-tech companies," says Lawrence Byrd, a convergence strategist at Avaya. "These companies are seeking substantial cost savings from infrastructure consolidation, for example reducing 30 separate [automatic call distributors] to one or two, moving away from the complex and expensive network routing architectures of the 1990s, and intelligently routing the right customer to the right agent, wherever they are.

"These companies understand that they must make more significant investments in network optimization, as well as changes to their business processes and how they manage their people. But they are willing to do so for the payback offered. IP telephony in the contact center is the technology enabler for such transformation," he says.