IP-based systems allow companies to route calls to home workers and satellite offices.
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.
Keys to IP contact center success
Outsourcers turn to IP contact centers
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.
Today, many of the large installations – those exceeding 200 seats – are hybrid solutions, some sites are TDM, some are IP. Companies use IP trunking between sites and IP to some desktops, for example, at new sites or sites where the switch has been upgraded. The traditional PBX can serve as a gateway, converting between TDM and IP.
Customers with multiple locations are turning autonomous sites into satellite sites, significantly reducing the numbers of servers, applications and licenses required for functions such as routing, reporting, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), quality monitoring and workforce management.
Another trend is higher adoption rates in Europe/Middle East/Africa and Asia Pacific. North America is generally slower to adopt IP contact center technologies because of more conservative and risk-averse decision-makers, and more large installed systems. However, of Cisco’s 1,500 installations worldwide, approximately half are in North America.
Another trend is for companies to adopt VoIP in the enterprise first and then in the contact center. Gartner analyst Bern Elliot says IP system sales already have overtaken TDM system sales for corporations, but “IP adoption in the call center will lag.”Elliot predicts that traditional TDM-based call centers will remain the dominant architecture for new system sales in North American until mid-2006. IP-based call center systems comprise approximately 10% of new system sales today.
Lessons from the early adopters
Customers leery of IP contact centers typically express concerns about security, quality, reliability and scalability. Early implementers say they faced challenges, primarily with quality of service, but they used assessment, configuration, testing and monitoring to successfully address those issues. As Lee Bostrom, CIO of Glenview State Bank, says, “If you’ve done what you need to do for your network for other applications, running phones on IP is not a leap of faith.”
Many early implementers say voice is more secure and more reliable over IP than it was in a TDM world, and the enhancements to their networks for voice also have benefited their data applications.
Early implementers have been risk takers to a degree, but those who succeed are also prudent. For example, when Glenview State Bank implemented an Interactive Intelligence IP-based solution in 2002, it clearly saw the potential benefits for growth, flexibility and disaster recovery.
When the bank had to trigger its disaster-recovery plan because of a basement flood, it added seats at the branches and reroute calls quickly, with no effect on service. The enterprise solution has 200 to 240 positions, with eight to 12 seats in the call center serving Chicago suburbs. All branch offices are IP, and the center resides in one of the branches.
Glenview focused on finding a partner it could trust and ensured that the network foundation was solid. The bank implemented a virtual LAN and used standards for their servers (Windows NT) and routers (Cisco). It continues to follow the rigorous security processes applied to all other applications for its voice and call center applications.
Software vendor Attachmate, which has three distributed sites for technical support, spent about two years evaluating products and realized that TDM was too expensive for what it wanted to do. A pure IP solution from Nuasis offered the company lower total cost of ownership – estimated at 30% lower than TDM initially, with additional savings over time by avoiding proprietary hardware. Attachmate also saw benefits from virtual operations across sites and CTI in hours instead of months.
For Vegas.com, the official Las Vegas travel site, moving to IP made sense given its tremendous growth. The company tried a hybrid approach first, adding IP cards to its existing Nortel Option 11C.
When Vegas.com moved in late 2003, it migrated to pure VoIP, leveraging much of its existing Nortel investment for 125 call center agents and 50 corporate users. The company saves on wiring, moves, adds and changes, and networking of retail locations, while buying flexibility for the future.
Like many companies, it plans to add multimedia and CTI.
“I felt no risk. We used the same applications we had in the TDM world and just changed transport; the applications don’t care,” says Brian Hayashi, engineering director for Vegas.com. “However, you have to be an active participant in the system implementation and support. You can’t rely solely on the vendor.”
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Finish Line, one of the nation’s leading athletic specialty retailers in Indianapolis, Ind., replaced a 10-year-old corporate switch to support growth in the direct-to-consumer business. Contrary to the popular approach to implement IP in the enterprise first and call center last, it started with the call center. Finish Line put approximately 50 seats on its I3 IP-based system with Session Initiation Protocol phones in July 2003 and added the 300 enterprise seats in October.
The company has seen benefits in lower IT costs as Finish Line grows – adding new positions, making routing changes and moving positions readily. It also has gotten richer applications, with enhanced reporting already in place and multimedia planned.
“Our keys to success were a thorough evaluation process and extra due diligence to understand the systems and find the right partner,” says Robert Gray, director of telecommunications.
Vendor variations
Vendors differ on the definitions of IP solutions and the benefits of “pure” IP vs. hybrid solutions. As you would expect, each vendor promotes the solution and migration approach that its platform enables.
Traditional voice switch vendors such as Avaya, Aspect, EADS Telecom, NEC, Nortel, Rockwell and Siemens offer TDM or IP-based solutions, and migration paths between them. These vendors offer “transport neutral” applications. The call center server applications work equally well with an IP or TDM (or hybrid) platform, letting customers choose their transport preference and migrate without changing applications.
Call center application suites such as Genesys and Interactive Intelligence work with TDM or IP switching on a variety of platforms.
IP-centric vendors, such as Cisco and Nuasis, offer IP solutions only. They say anything short of a pure IP approach compromises the application opportunities and corresponding benefits that IP enables, while also offering a migration path for those with TDM sites today.
Interactive Intelligence and Nuasis also offer a suite of bundled applications that bring the benefits of simpler implementation of CTI and multimedia capabilities, for example.
Hosted solutions are another option promoted by companies such as CosmoCom and Telephony@Work.
Looking ahead
The breakthrough in adoption of IP in the contact center will occur as more companies share evidence that it is low risk, it works and there are quantifiable business benefits.
Gary Ketron, director of worldwide technical support for Attachmate, summarizes what many companies are experiencing with IP adoption: “When we started our pilot, our fear was that VoIP was not a technology whose time has come. After the pilot, our belief is that this is a technology that’s right for us, and from which we’ll benefit tremendously.”
