Four users share how voice-enabling enterprise apps has increased productivity and enhanced customer service.
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Voice over IP was once marketed purely as a money saver. But increasingly, companies are choosing to build a VoIP infrastructure as much for the applications it will enable as the long-term dollars it could save.
“It is kind of a ‘tastes great, less filling’ argument, in terms of applications vs. cost savings,” says Brian Strachman, an analyst with In-stat/MDR.
While many corporate users still look for ROI from long-term savings in areas such as administration and long-distance charges, Strachman stresses that VoIP-enabled applications are where the real opportunities lie. “The industry can’t base its whole future on saving a few bucks. The long-term future of voice over IP is going to be in the applications area,” he says.
VoIP vendors are starting to focus on that future. They are pushing to establish application development programs and partnerships for IP telephony, and shifting marketing focus from cost savings to productivity applications. The goal is to make voice an integrated software component in messaging and other enterprise applications. Some vendors promise integration of IP PBXs with back-end business systems, while others are adding functions to IP phones aimed at turning the devices into Java- and XML-based network terminals.
And a handful of enterprise users have started taking advantage of VoIP-enabled applications to increase productivity, enhance customer service or otherwise improve their businesses. Here’s a look at how four companies are VoIP-enabling business applications.
A unified salesforce
Prudential Northwest Properties, a real-estate firm with 20 locations in the Pacific Northwest, says it hopes a VoIP-enabled unified messaging application will make its always-on-the-go real-estate agents more assessable and productive. “Unified messaging is very important to us,” says Sean McRae, CIO for the Portland, Ore., company. “Our agents are always out in the field, so we had to find technology to help break the chains to the desktop.”
For its VoIP infrastructure, Prudential Northwest Properties uses 3Com’s NBX IP PBXs, IP phones, CommWorks VoIP Gateway and its carrier-class CommWorks Softswitch with Unified Communications software. The CommWorks Softswitch, which runs on redundant Sun Solaris servers, is located at a central site, while the NBXs, VoIP gateways and IP phones operate in the larger branch offices. NBXs in the branches tie into the centralized CommWorks Softswitch, via the gateways, as a single phone system with one database for management, administration and system configuration. Smaller offices, those with five to 10 agents, get the 3Com phones and CommWorks VoIP Gateways, but not the NBXs. The central CommWorks Softswitch provides the call control, features and public network connectivity for those offices.
The Unified software, which supports the IETF’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for real-time communications, ties together voice mail, fax and e-mail systems. From Microsoft Outlook e-mail clients, Prudential Northwest Properties’ 700 agents can get voice and fax messages. Or the agents can get e-mail while on the road by calling into the system. A text-to-speech server application reads the messages to them. While all offices are not yet on the IP telephony system, every agent has access to the Unified applications.
“The [Unified] software gives our agents the ability to sit down in a Starbucks [with Wi-Fi hot spot service] and wirelessly, from a single application, pull up all the paperwork for any transaction – all the e-mails, forms and faxes are right there,” McRae says.
He adds that coffee shops have become a favorite place among Prudential Northwest Properties agents for conducting business. The payoff has been huge, McRae says. “We did an analysis and found that our Unified Communications users were saving about 20 minutes a day by more efficiently handling their messages. Having 700 agents doing their job more efficiently every day, 52 weeks a year – that’s the value proposition right there,” he says.
Bill Copple, director for a massive VoIP project at Dow Chemical in Midland, Mich., agrees about the value proposition of VoIP-enabling unified messaging. Dow is deploying unified messaging to more than 50,000 employees as part of the company’s DowNET project, launched in 2001 with the help of Electronic Data Systems. The goal of DowNET, which is due to be completed by year-end, is to get every Dow employee on a unified voice, messaging and video system based on Cisco’s Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data equipment. (See “IP video: The other VoIP” for Dow’s approach to IP video.)
Dow is deploying hundreds of Cisco CallManager IP PBXs and thousands of Cisco IP phones at facilities in 35 countries, with the whole system connected across Dow’s global private IP WAN. Cisco Unity unified messaging servers provide voice, fax and e-mail access via one Microsoft Outlook in-box.
Rolling out VoIP-enabled applications can be challenging, especially when it comes to as sizable a deployment as Dow’s. The company has encountered problems ranging from end-user training to technology migration at sites around the globe, Copple says.
With all the new features brought by IP telephony and unified messaging, the technology comes with a learning curve, he notes. “Employees had to relearn new commands and phone capabilities. While we had a good training program, it was not initially hands-on early enough in the process; this has been corrected,” he says.
Dow’s IT staff also has evolved with DowNET. “Another challenge was the level of variability in the network and messaging infrastructure across Dow sites globally,” Copple says. “We underestimated how important this was from one site to the next. One of Dow’s IT principles is to implement standard solutions across the enterprise. Our initial approach was to uplift all the technology within a site and then go to the next site. While this implementation approach has been successful in the past . . . we found that with DowNET we needed a more layered strategy.”
Over the past year, Dow has changed its strategy by upgrading LAN and WAN infrastructures for supporting voice, followed by unified messaging, with IP telephony being the last stage of a site deployment.
VoIP-based room service
While Dow grapples with VoIP-enabled unified messaging, a new Boston hotel is counting on VoIP to help it provide top-rate customer service. The Hotel Commonwealth in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood offers its guests a laundry list of high-end amenities, including down-filled pillows and comforters, 70 cable TV channels and in-room DVD players – not to mention SIP-based, Java-enabled IP phones that offer a guest portal.
To provide premier service, the month-old hotel uses an integrated system of customer relationship, ordering and billing software on the back end, with Pingtel IP screen phones as guest portals in the hotel rooms. The phones run on a converged voice and data network built with Alcatel’s SIP-based OmniPCX Enterprise IP PBX at the core. A guest can order a meal, rent complementary DVD movies from a nearby Blockbuster or browse a list of other hotel services from the phone’s PDA-sized touch screen.
“The screen phones are a less-intrusive way of letting guests know what services the hotel has to offer,” says Stewart Randall, principal consultant at Communicates Design Associates, an IT services firm that helped design and install the VoIP infrastructure. Randall says the hotel wanted to avoid standard guest information systems, such as TV channels that come up when the TV is turned on and continually broadcast hotel services. “Our system is like sending instant messages to guests without bothering them,” he says.
For hotel personnel, the phones act as Java-based clients for an internal Web-based directory server used to push out content. The hotel staff keeps offerings fresh using simple tools for creating and formatting content for the phones.
Of course, guests can talk on the phones, too. Randall says the voice quality on the network is as good as any hotel phone system and that many telephony features such as voice mail, multiple lines and speakerphones are available to guests. For frequent visitors or long-term guests, the system can remember and save individual phone numbers so people keep the same number even if they move from room to room. The value of the phones lies in their versatility, Randall adds.
Billable hours with VoIP
For Manhattan law firm Hahn & Hessen LLP, a VoIP-enabled billing application has more than proven its worth, says Nicholas Lucenko, IT manager at the firm.
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“Our whole business is based on billable time with clients, and a lot of that time is spent on the phone,” Lucenko points out. In the past, the firm maintained separate phone and accounting systems, with client billing handled the old-fashioned way – in paper diaries. “Billing was kind of a tedious chore for the attorneys,” he says. And at the end of the month, when attorneys had to enter their diaries into the accounting system, “utilization on our systems went through the roof,” he says.
But when Hahn & Hessen moved its offices out of the Empire State Building to a more low-profile and high-tech facility on Madison Avenue last year, the firm ditched its old NEC PBX and voice mail system for Cisco’s CallManager IP PBX, Unity messaging servers and phones, operating on a Fast and Gigabit Ethernet LAN from the vendor.
Now the firm tracks call usage and bills daily through CallManager. It can pull call records to determine exactly how long a billable client/attorney session lasted by matching the attorney’s network ID to the phone number called and the amount of time spent on the call. An automated back-end application – which IT integration firm Greenwich Technology Partners helped develop and integrate – imports this data into the billing system.
“This is the type of architecture that sold us on VoIP,” Lucenko says. “It’s the kind of system that we can build upon with applications that streamline our operations, and give cost-recovery opportunities.”
