contact center buyer’s guidehosteddocs.toolbox.com/zd_bg-contact-center_041812.pdf · voip value...

April 2012

Contact Center Buyer’s Guide

Ziff Davis Research © All Rights Reserved 2012

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Contact Center Buyer’s Guide Ziff Davis Research © All Rights Reserved 2012 2

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 3

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 4

VoIP Contact Centers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 7

Market Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 9

Contact Center Risks and Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 12

Basic Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 16

Advanced Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 18

VoIP Contact Center Checklist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 20

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 22

Table of Contents®

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Executive Summary

While nobody looks forward to calling a toll-free number and deal with an

anonymous customer service agent, contact centers are a fact of life in today’s

world. Historically, businesses have viewed them as a necessary evil, and even the

most profit-minded executive would concede that unhappy customers are a bad

idea.

As the modern business environment has become more globalized, every sector

has become more competitive, and customers have never been more valuable.

Competition just doesn’t mean lower prices; it means having more choices. With

most businesses either serving or aspiring to serve a global base of customers,

customers cannot be taken for granted any more. Loyalty has become a fluid

concept with customers, and many will switch to a competitor simply because they

can and without concern for repercussions.

This may lead businesses to conclude that customers hold all the cards, but they

do have some points of leverage to build lasting relationships and maximize the

lifetime value for each and every customer. Arguably, there is no more important

lever than the contact center for doing this, especially when so many purchases

are not made in person. Any customer-centric business will tell you that the key to

their success is earning their customer’s business – not just at point of sale, but at

every subsequent point of contact.

Businesses that embrace that model understand the value of the contact center.

Rather than viewing it as a necessary evil for placating complaining or misinformed

customers, they see the contact center as the front door to their company. This

is where their brand’s reputation is tested and entrusted to the agents on the

front lines, and if they don’t have the right tools, there’s much more at stake than

making an already unhappy customer even more unhappy.

In this context, this Buyer’s Guide has been prepared to articulate the value that

VoIP brings to the contact center. VoIP has dramatically transformed the business

of telecom, and the same impact is being felt now in the contact center. On a

basic level, VoIP reduces operational costs, but our Buyer’s Guide explores a wider

range of benefits that directly impact customer satisfaction. Communications

technologies are evolving at a rapid pace, and today’s contact center experience

goes well beyond what legacy telecom services could provide. After reviewing this

Buyer’s Guide, you will come away with a more complete understanding of the

VoIP value proposition, as well as what you need to consider when making the

decision to adopt VoIP in your contact center.

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Contact Center OverviewA lot has changed in this space since our last Buyer’s Guide in 2009. At that time,

“call center” was the nomenclature, and VoIP was just beginning to be adopted. Since

then, VoIP has become far more established, along with the broader spectrum of IP

networks and SIP-based communications. All told, this has transformed the customer

service function beyond the telecom-centric world of call centers to the multi-channel

world of contact centers where voice is just one mode of communication with

customers.

As such the “call center” does not do justice to how customers can be served today.

Agents can contact customers in many ways, sometimes concurrently, with the end

result being a richer, more productive experience. Having said that, voice remains the

dominant and most intimate mode with customers, and VoIP has a major role to play

for anyone upgrading, expanding or even establishing a contact center.

On a basic level, VoIP replicates conventional telephony in the contact center, but at

lower cost and often with more features. The end user experience is basically same,

and the process of making and taking calls does not change. Reliability and quality

have always been hallmarks of legacy telephony, but this comes with a high cost and

limited flexibility. Early on, VoIP was not considered business class, but that is no

longer the case. VoIP may not be 100% on par with TDM, but the compromises are

minimal when its superior economics and flexibility are considered.

Contact centers are expensive to run, and the savings that come with VoIP make

it a natural fit. As such, it should come as no surprise to VoIP being so widely used

here today. Aside from the above-stated advantages, VoIP offers another layer of

benefits that simply are not possible with legacy telecom. Being based on IP –

Internet Protocol – VoIP runs over a data network – the same broadband network that

powers everything else we use – Internet access, email, chat, IM, etc. This means that

VoIP can now be integrated with other communications modes for a more engaging

customer experience, not just over the phone, but via the desktop or even mobile

devices. Furthermore, VoIP can be tied to corporate databases and platforms such as

CRM – Customer Relationship Management – to give agents a more complete picture

of the customer, and enabling them to provide better service.

When considering VoIP in the contact center, you need to do so on at least two

basic levels. First, you must weigh the merits for using VoIP to either complement or

altogether displace TDM. In cases where reducing operational cost is the overriding

driver, this may the only factor, and everything else is just an afterthought.

Introduction

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However, you may just as likely be taking a more strategic approach VoIP where

everything is on the table, and your core objective is to rethink the contact center. In

this case you want to do more than just lower cost, and are willing to look at all the

advantages that IP-based communications has to offer.

A Few Rules of ThumbVoIP and TDM both allow us to talk on the phone, but the underlying technologies

are very different. In conventional contact centers, TDM runs over a dedicated

voice network and its performance is not impacted by the corporate data network.

Maintaining parallel networks is costly, and is a key reason why VoIP is gaining

adoption in enterprises, especially in their contact centers.

In short, VoIP converts voice signals into packets which run over data networks. By

packetizing calls, voice becomes another data application, and just like email has

virtually no transport costs. This goes a long way to explain VoIP’s popularity, but to

successfully deploy it in your contact center a few rules of thumb need to be followed.

1. Get a proper network assessment. Before committing to any VoIP solution or

offering, your network must first be IP-ready. The lifeblood of VoIP is bandwidth,

which it must share with all the other data applications over the corporate network.

Unlike TDM, where a dedicated circuit is established for every call, VoIP must

always compete for bandwidth. While one VoIP call consumes very little bandwidth,

running hundreds or thousands of simultaneous calls in your contact center places

major demands on network resources. This is particularly important for VoIP, which

is a real-time mode, and you can’t have customer calls compromised whenever

someone in Marketing decides to download a large file. The keys for a network

assessment are to ensure there is sufficient bandwidth for expected call volumes,

along with having the right tools and controls to prioritize VoIP sessions over other

applications requiring bandwidth.

2. Ensure agents have the right types of phones. There are three basic modes

for using VoIP in the contact center. The most common will be to use your existing

analog or digital handsets. These may be part of a PBX system or standalone desk

phones for each agent. In either case, these phones will need to be IP-enabled,

typically using an ATA – Analog Telephone Adapter. This scenario is part of what

is known as a hybrid solution, where the business still wants to use their phones,

but also start using VoIP. A second mode would be using a fully IP-enabled phone,

which usually supports SIP – Session Initiation Protocol – the defacto protocol for

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VoIP. The third option is less common, but growing in popularity, especially among

home-based agents – the softphone. This supports PC-based VoIP, where the full

PBX experience is extended through a Web interface.

3. Plan for security. Existing solutions such as firewalls are effective for most

data applications, but the real time nature of VoIP poses distinct challenges.

Furthermore, VoIP calls often traverse the public Internet, exposing the corporate

network to new vulnerabilities. Most businesses do a poor job of maintaining

passwords for their IP phone systems, making them easy targets for hackers.

Security is like insurance in that bad things may not happen often, but when they

do you will be thankful the right precautions were taken. This is a complex space

– well beyond the scope of this guide – and just because you don’t hear about

security breaches often doesn’t mean the threats aren’t real. Furthermore, contact

center agents have no vested interest in the security of your network, and you

cannot rely on them to be the front line of defense.

4. Ensure business continuity. This is another important reality that comes with

VoIP. Being tied to the data network, you risk having a disabled contact center if

your network goes down. Legacy telephony never had that problem with its five 9s

reliability. As such, VoIP is only as reliable as your data network. To mitigate this,

you need to understand what backup provisions are in place with your VoIP service

provider as well as the capabilities of your IP phones. Regarding the VoIP provider,

they should redundancy in their network – such as multiple data centers – so that if

one has an outage, another one ensures connectivity to keep your network running.

In terms of IP phones, most have PSTN failover capability, so if your network does

go down, calls are automatically routed over the PSTN, and your agents can stay

on the job. On a more practical level, contact centers can also ensure business

continuity with onsite backup power in the event of an electrical outage.

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How They WorkThe VoIP part here is pretty straightforward. For both agents and customers, VoIP is

transparent at face value. The experience is no different than a TDM call, and in most

cases, customers have no idea they’re on a VoIP call. There are exceptions however –

on both sides of the quality coin. If the corporate network is not properly engineered

to support VoIP, quality can suffer, especially during spikes or times of peak bandwidth

usage. In these cases, callers will experience the symptoms of a poor VoIP call – jitter,

echo, delay, even dropped calls. On the other hand, in a highly optimized network

setting – especially one with SIP trunking – VoIP call quality can be superior to TDM.

Often referred to as HD voice – High Definition – customers notice right away, and

can be used as a real differentiator in the contact center.

VoIP of course does not exist in a vacuum in the contact center. As with TDM, voice

calls need to be closely monitored, not just to manage agent performance, but also

customer satisfaction. Contact centers live and die by an extensive regime of metrics

– first call resolution, average hold time, call length, answer time, etc. – and VoIP must

map into the reporting tools. There also must be integration with management tools

and applications that keep the overall operation running smoothly. Examples include

least cost call routing, skills based routing, call recording, speech recognition, CRM,

etc.

Perhaps the biggest implication for how VoIP works in the contact center is the

potential for virtualization. In the legacy world, contact centers are generally tied to

the telco’s physical network, meaning that agents would work from a central location.

Furthermore, for economic efficiency, contact centers would often share the same

network infrastructure as Head Office, meaning they would be located nearby.

The advent of IP - and by extension VoIP – has unbundled all of this and opened up

new possibilities for contact centers. VoIP takes geography out of the equation, as

there is no need to be tethered to a physical network. Access to broadband is the only

requirement, and today both fixed and wireless options are viable. This means that

contact centers can be located anywhere, and are less costly to build and staff. As

such, companies are now putting contact centers closer to core groups of customers,

especially globally where language and culture are key considerations for doing

business.

VoIP Contact Centers

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Contact centers can be dispersed across multiple locations, with all of them using

VoIP, but still centrally managed using various software applications designed to

support voice running over IP networks. This allows contact center management to

operate on a virtual basis, where multiple locations all serve the same customer base,

but are not tied together with any physical network infrastructure.

The same benefit extends to home-based agents, who can now work anywhere,

anytime thanks to VoIP. This capability makes the virtual contact center concept even

more powerful, as companies can now create an extensive network of agents with

minimal need to invest in physical operations to house them. Aside from lowering

the cost of running a contact center operation, this allows the company to draw

from a wider talent pool, and build up a roster with more diverse skill sets. With

VoIP, companies can now have an on-demand resource tailor-made to support their

customers, whether it is specific product knowledge, deep technical skills, regionalized

expertise, local language, etc.

Another operational aspect of VoIP is its flexibility. With legacy telephony, the capacity

to handle calls is determined by the number of physical trunks connected to the

contact center. To handle peak volumes, they typically have enough capacity on hand,

but when call flows drop during slow time, the same number of trunks is in place, but

some are now sitting idle.

Many businesses have peaks and valleys during the year, and VoIP provides a distinct

advantage here. Capacity is determined simply by the amount of broadband used,

which can easily be scaled up or down. There is no need to call the telco in to install

more trunks. VoIP can be used as on-demand resource, making it more efficient for

matching both broadband and agent staffing levels to current call flow conditions.

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The following is a brief summary of the major vendors serving the VoIP contact center

market:

Alcatel-Lucent: Commonly known as ALU, this is one of the world’s largest telecom

vendors, and the company is especially strong in Europe and Asia. Their core contact

center offering is OmniTouch, which serves enterprise-scale operations. This solution

is primarily voice-centric, and is often integrated with their OmniPCX Communication

Server. In this mode, OmniTouch ties the PBX with other modes such as PC-based

calling for a richer, multichannel customer experience.

Aspect Software: A pioneer in the ACD space, Aspect has built on that to become

one of the most complete software-based contact center offerings in the market.

Taking a customer-centric approach to providing service, Aspect has gone beyond

voice to incorporate all elements of unified communications with their Unified IP

platform.

Avaya: Contact center is a cornerstone of Avaya’s business, where they remain,

arguably as the industry leader. This position was reinforced by their 2011 acquisition

of Nortel’s contact center portfolio. They have moved on from a legacy-based

telecom model to their Distributed Contact Center platform, which includes the

ability to support agents across all modes, either onsite at a company location, or in a

home-based setting.

Cincom Systems: This highly diversified software company has long been serving

contact centers with its Synchrony platform. They can address both hosted and

premise-based needs with a complete set of multi-channel capabilities for enterprises,

and their Express edition provides a scaled-down solution for SMBs.

Cisco: Their Unified Contact Center Enterprise platform provides a full suite of

multimedia, CTI-based applications to support any level of IP integration. While

relatively new to this market, their strong positions with both IP phones and network

routers have allowed them to become established as a major player. Furthermore, they

are poised for continued success as video becomes part of the multimedia toolkit that

agents rely on to address real time customer needs.

CosmoCom: Falling under the broad banner of CosmoCall Universe, their Unified

Customer Communications platform – UCC – embodies a complete solution,

including ACD, IVR, UC, predictive dialer and Web-based applications. Using a multi-

tenant architecture, they can easily support virtualization as well as more traditional

Market Overview

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centralized contact center operations. In March 2011, the company was acquired by

Enghouse, a Canadian enterprise software provider.

Exony: VoIP is a key enabler of virtualized contact centers, and with that come new

challenges to remotely monitor and manage these operations. Exony is a leading

software provider focused on this problem set. In addition to providing advanced

analytics for virtual operations, their VIM platform extends across all modes to monitor

agent activity in a multi-channel environment.

Five9: The company is a leading pure-play focused on the SMB market, which

typically cannot afford their own contact center facilities. Five9 offers a turnkey

hosted solution, with full IVR, ACD and predictive dialer capabilities. Their offering also

integrates with WFM – workforce management – to help SMBs staff up with the right

number of agents at all times.

Genesys: Acquired in 1999 by Alcatel Lucent, Genesys is one of the leading

contact center vendors, especially for integrating voice with CRM, and the broader

sphere of CTI – computer telephony integration. Within the ALU family, Genesys Suite

comprises a range of advanced contact center capabilities, such as virtualization,

unified communications and contextually-based call routing. In October 2011, ALU

announced a deal to divest Genesys to private equity firm Permira.

Interactive Intelligence: A leading innovator in this space, the company has one of

the most advanced and flexible platforms to serve both premise-based and virtualized

environments. Their CaaS solution – communications as a service – leverages the

cloud to extend UC-enabled contact center operations to any size of business. For

businesses wishing to take full advantage of tools like call recording and agent

monitoring, their solution can add a business process automation layer – BPA – that

helps companies streamline operations that are based primarily on manual functions.

Nuance: IVR is a major contact center component, and Nuance has long been a

pioneer here. Nuance does not provide a full contact center solution, but their speech

recognition capabilities impact all aspects of IVR, along with elements of ACD and

predictive dialing. Examples include speech-enabled call routing, voice authentication,

and personalized outbound notifications to high value customers.

Oracle: As a major CRM player (via parent company Siebel), the contact center is a

key market, which they serve with their Contact Center Anywhere predictive dialer

offering. A key focus is using a multi-tenant architecture to extend real time capability

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across a distributed network of remote agents. This allows contact centers to leverage

IP to support virtualized operations globally and serve customers regardless of their

geography.

Telax: A long-time hosted pure-play, their Hosted Call Center solution provides full

featured applications that are both easy to use for agents, and easy to monitor for

supervisors. Aside from the productivity and cost saving benefits, the company also

focuses on their disaster recovery capabilities to ensure 24/7 uptime even under

adverse conditions.

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When considering both the upside and downside for deploying VoIP in your contact

center – or even building one for the first time, there are many facets to consider.

Most deployments will have elements of both, but even in the context of this brief

Buyers Guide, you’ll see that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Key BenefitsHard dollar savings: There are numerous ways to get an immediate ROI with VoIP in

your contact center. Depending on where your customers are, you can reduce or even

eliminate long distance charges, and the same goes for calls between branch offices

if you have them. You’ll also get more features than with TDM, so you can probably

cut out some costs for a-la-carte calling options. If you extend VoIP to customers for

inbound calls, you can do away with some or all toll-free services. On the trunking

side, you may be able to pare back on expensive T1s and replace them with more

bandwidth, which will be less costly.

Streamlined corporate network: By converging voice and data on to a common

infrastructure, there are natural cost and operational savings that come with

consolidation. Aside from the economic benefits, the network environment becomes

easier to manage in terms of having less equipment to look after, and fewer IT

obligations for things like maintenance, upgrading or troubleshooting.

Flexible deployment across all telephony environments: VoIP can be used with

your existing telephony system, so there’s no need to replace what you have. For

businesses with older systems that still have plenty of life, phones can be IP-enabled

with an inexpensive adapter. You can also mix-and-match, where some phones already

support VoIP, but others need an adapter.

Self-provisioning: This is a great benefit for IT, as end users can provision and

customize some elements of VoIP on their own. Another advantage is that IT can

control how VoIP is deployed across the network, without the need to pay the phone

company to come onsite. A well known example would be MACs – moves, adds and

changes – meaning that IT can add new extensions or change the location of an

existing extension anywhere on the network. Contact centers require MACs all the

time, especially during peak periods during the business cycle.

Richer communications: On one level, VoIP provides this in terms of the feature

set, which is often more extensive than what agents have with TDM. There’s also

Contact Center Risks and Benefits

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a higher level for contact centers that deploy VoIP as part of a broader Unified

Communications solution. In this environment, VoIP is integrated with other modes

such as chat, IM and email, giving agents a richer set of options to communicate with

customers.

More responsive agents: This is a byproduct of the prior benefit, but has distinct

value on its own. Responsiveness is a KPI – key performance indicator – for several

metrics, such as answer time, hold time, first call resolution, etc. Aside from having the

ability to interact using multiple modes, advanced VoIP deployments integrate with

CRM data, providing agents with the customer’s history while on the call. This greatly

improves their chances of addressing inquiries quickly and efficiently, and ultimately

increasing their productivity in terms of handling more inquiries per shift.

Improved call monitoring: With voice running over IP in the data network, call

monitoring software can provide real time visibility for contact center supervisors. This

allows them to be more responsive and proactive, especially for situations that need

to be escalated to more suitable agents, or to coach a shaky agent via chat during the

session.

On-demand scalability: This is a very attractive benefit for contact centers, especially

those with highly variable call flows, both throughout the day as well as over the

course of a year. With VoIP running over broadband, capacity can be adjusted on the

fly, so even unexpected situations can be addressed. Not only can IT manage this on

their own, but the cost implications are nominal compared to scaling up or down with

TDM.

Enables home and remote working: VoIP can be used from any broadband

connection, making it much easier for contact centers to support home-based agents

or extend calls to remote locations such as hotels or conferences when key personnel

are traveling. This helps contact centers keep costs down and broaden the pool of

agents they can work with.

Makes contact center more viable for smaller businesses: With legacy telephony,

contact centers are too costly for smaller businesses to justify having. VoIP changes

the equation, as contact centers are not nearly as capital-intensive to set up, both in

terms of telecom service and phone systems. Furthermore, VoIP makes hosted options

more viable, which will appeal to businesses that cannot afford any form of onsite

contact center operation.

Higher customer satisfaction: This is the ultimate payoff for your contact center,

and many of the above benefits contribute to that result. In short, VoIP is a better

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technology to ensure that calls are routed to the most suitable agents, and allows

them to respond both quickly and effectively. When these things happen, customer

satisfaction invariably increases.

Key RisksVariable voice quality: VoIP as a technology is not inferior to TDM. In fact, under

optimal conditions, VoIP quality is superior to TDM. With voice quality being of

paramount importance in contact centers, there cannot be any compromise here.

VoIP voice quality is almost completely manageable with a well provisioned network,

especially when connectivity is over a private network rather than the public Internet.

As such, this is only a risk if you don’t take these factors into account.

Uptime reliability: The issue here is similar to voice quality. Network uptime is also

critical for contact centers, and the best way to ensure that is by using a private

network provider, or going with a hosted solution. Also note there are two reliability

risks with VoIP. First is keeping your own network running, which may require you to

have a backup power system in place. Second comes from your service provider, over

which you have no control. By choosing one running over the public Internet, you may

save money, but regardless of how reliable your network is, if their network goes down,

so does your contact center.

Network security: This could be your biggest risk if ignored. Many VoIP services run

over the public Internet, making them vulnerable to threats like customer data theft,

running up big phone bills at your expense, and DOS attacks – denial of service. Few

newcomers to VoIP, these risks are not well understood, and existing firewalls or

security policies will not do the job. Security needs to be a key consideration for any

form of network assessment to determine IP-readiness.

May not support 911 emergency services: This has been a long-standing issue

with VoIP, mainly for residential services, but more recently for businesses. There may

be limited applicability for your onsite contact center, but things get more complicated

with home-based agents. Over time, E911 compliance for VoIP is expected to become

required, so when considering VoIP vendors, you need to know their current capability

as well as future roadmap here.

Not universally compatible with all telephony vendors and systems: Being

relatively new, VoIP lacks universal standards, even for the most widely-used protocol

that defines its usage – SIP – session initiation protocol. As a result, the quality of

experience can vary among the various telephone vendors, as well as with the service

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providers for your connectivity. This is another factor in your network assessment,

as you’ll need to know how interoperable a VoIP vendor will be with your existing

environment, along with the VoIP service provider you intend to use.

VoIP numbers not usually included in white pages or directory assistance services: Most people don’t think about this when signing up for VoIP, but it has an

unintended consequence for contact centers. As more residential subscribers switch

from TDM to VoIP, more numbers disappear from telephone directories. For contact

centers doing a lot of outbound dialing, this shrinks the pool of prospects they can

readily reach.

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Basic Features

ERP Readiness Means More than Readiness for ERPAll contact centers require a core set of capabilities to efficiently handle inquiries and

allow supervisors to manage their resources – human, capital and technology. Since

VoIP allows contact centers to operate on a higher level than TDM, the basic features

become that much more important. Here are five core features to keep in mind when

considering VoIP.

Automatic Call Distributor (ACD): Arguably the most important feature for

managing inbound calls. Using a predefined set of rules, ACD routes calls to the first

available agent, as well as to those with the best skill set for the inquiry. A key enabler

is CTI – computer telephony integration – which brings VoIP into a common interface

with computer-based applications. Increasingly, this means using the desktop screen

as the host from which agents can interact with customers while also having access

to their buying history with the company. This also allows contact center supervisors to

control the flow of calls among agents, and ensure that ACD is doing its job.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Another important inbound feature, but mainly for

the benefit of callers. IVR helps automate the process by allowing customers to route

their inquiry to the right person by responding to verbal prompts and using touchtone

signals to navigate various options. Advanced IVR systems use speech recognition for

a more intuitive experience, but in both cases, the benefit comes from only speaking

to a live agent once the inquiry has been clearly defined earlier during the call. IVR is

particularly effective for routine inquiries that can be fully addressed in a self-service

mode. This improves contact center efficiency by maximizing the use of live agents for

calls that truly need their attention.

Predictive Dialer: This is an outbound feature, and one that can benefit considerably

from VoIP. Working from databases targeting a specific audience, the predictive dialer

application automatically calls the numbers provided, and hands off answered calls

to live agents. Again, this maximizes agent productivity, and saves time by automating

the process of making thousands of outbound calls. Making these calls over VoIP also

saves cost in terms of long distance charges that would be incurred with TDM when

calls either hit an answering machine or reach a live person.

Call Recording: Contact centers are increasingly recording all calls as a quality

assurance measure, and in some sectors, recording is mandatory for regulatory

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compliance purposes (health care and financial services in particular). By recording

calls, contact centers can document their position to resolve disputes or support their

agents when dealing with abusive customers. VoIP can easily be recorded, and with

advanced systems, speech-to-text can quickly generate transcripts for more granular

analysis. Aside from providing a verbatim record of a single call, the text version can be

searched across a wider database to identify trends or groupings for specific problems

that would not be apparent otherwise.

Quality Monitoring: There is an ever-growing body of QA tools and analytics

that supervisors need to do their jobs. Not only do they need to monitor individual

agent performance, but this must be rolled up to reflect operational performance.

This becomes increasingly challenging as VoIP allows contact centers to support

home-based agents as well as run a multi-site operation, often on a global basis. To

ensure consistency across all agents in how they deal with customers, supervisors

need tools that give them real-time, system-wide visibility into how all calls are

managed from start to finish. Without these tools, costs will spiral out of control and it

will become impossible to effectively manage agent performance.

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Advanced Features

Business continuity: This may not come to mind right away, since legacy-based

contact centers pretty much have 100% uptime. Broadband, however, is more

susceptible to power outages or down times for routine maintenance or upgrades. As

such, this factor must be considered with VoIP. Backup power has been noted earlier

as a solution for keeping your internal network running if the power goes down, but

for your VoIP services provider, you no such fallback. With that said, once you adopt

VoIP in the contact center, you need to know what assurances your carrier can provide

from their end. To address this, VoIP carriers will talk about business continuity – and

in some cases, disaster recovery – as key elements of their service. Essentially this

means that if their primary data center has an outage or service disruption, they have

a redundant architecture that routes traffic away from this location to another data

center in their network. This ensures you have continuous connectivity even under

adverse conditions. There are many variations around this value proposition, but the

main idea is to make this a key criterion when evaluating VoIP offerings.

Virtual contact center: This has been mentioned earlier, and refers to the ability

of VoIP to support contact center operations that require little or no physical

infrastructure. The spectrum defining virtual contact centers is quite broad, but

these options only make senses for certain scenarios. Virtualization generally works

best with contact centers that are comfortable with VoIP and looking to maximize

the leverage they can get from broadband-based applications. There certainly are

attractive cost savings here, but the tradeoff requires a willingness to outsource your

front lines of customer contact to relatively new technology and agents you have little

direct control over.

Unified communications: As businesses become more comfortable with VoIP, it

is used less in isolation and increasingly bundled as a component of a broader UC

solution. This has certainly been the case in the telephony sphere where VoIP is part

of the office communications landscape. More recently, this value proposition is finding

its way into the contact center, where multi-modal communications is becoming

common. In this environment, VoIP has a specific set of benefits where it is used in

tandem with other modes such as chat, IM and email for a richer form of interaction

with customers. UC represents a step up for contact centers looking to do more than

just reduce costs by using VoIP.

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Mobile integration: For contact centers willing to go beyond UC, this is an essential

feature. With the rapid take up of smart phones and tablets – made possible by

affordable mobile broadband plans – these are quickly becoming the communications

devices of choice for consumers. This is where contact centers need to be to provide

the best service, and VoIP is the starting point for doing so. An entire ecosystem of

developers and applications is rapidly developing to support mobile customer service,

and the sooner contact centers get on this path, the sooner their move to VoIP will pay

off. With that said, this is an emerging space, and technical challenges still exist, so

you need to research options thoroughly.

Video applications: This is becoming a key component of UC offerings, and many

feel video will be as important as VoIP for everyday communications. There is limited

utility for video in the contact center today, but that will change as its adoption grows.

VoIP is a great entry point to the world of IP communications, but there are richer

possibilities, and as expectations for a more interactive customer service experience

grow higher, contact centers will see this as a way to gain competitive advantage. If

you’re thinking more than two years out when looking into VoIP solutions, the video

roadmap should be part of the discussion with vendors.

Social media analytics: Even further along the leading edge comes the popularity

of social media and the various pathways it’s taking into the contact center. Being

Web-driven, social media is a pure byproduct of the broadband world, and with

VoIP becoming integrated with many of these platforms, there are both threats and

opportunities for contact centers to consider. Social media can be disruptive by

creating a new channel for customer contact that current monitoring tools cannot

manage. Conversely, with proper analytics, contact centers can leverage social media

for better understand customer needs as well as maximizing the impact of delivering a

great service experience.

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VoIP Contact Center Checklist

10 things to ask before you buy .Technology never stops evolving, and when it comes to looking after customers, you

cannot afford to cut corners. This doesn’t mean you have to buy the most expensive

solutions or deploy the most bleeding edge technologies. However, you do need to

understand the current trends and possibly rethink how they can add value to your

operations.

You’ll never have complete information, but advance planning will absolutely lead to

better business decisions for deploying VoIP in your contact center rather than looking

the other way and maintaining the status quo. To get started with your planning for

VoIP, here is a checklist of 10 key questions to ask vendors and solutions providers.

1. How important is it to have your operations fully onsite? There are a range of

scenarios for outsourcing some or all of your contact center teams – on-shoring,

near-shoring, far-shoring – or a mix of these. Many factors go into this decision,

and some will do it gradually, and others all at once. Long-term, this will be your

most important decision in terms of how you deploy VoIP.

2. What is your recent trend in call volumes, and what does the forecast hold? Your volumes and projected rates of growth will be the key metrics in determining

the economic benefits of deploying VoIP, as well as the rate at which it displaces

TDM-based calls.

3. What is the trend in your staffing requirements? This is largely a function of

call volumes, but you must also factor in the productivity gains that come with VoIP.

Depending on current levels of productivity, VoIP may allow you to handle today’s

volumes with fewer agents - and possibly less costly agents if outsourcing. These

productivity benefits may also mean you can take on higher call volumes but with

adding fewer agents than you would have using legacy telephony.

4. How quickly are your needs growing? Call volume increases can come from

many sources, such as organic growth, entering new markets or serving new

customers via an acquisition. Regardless, if rapid growth is on the horizon, these

should fast-track your move to VoIP, since ramp-up time is much faster and easier

than with TDM.

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5. Can your IT resources and expertise properly support the contact center? IT

is under constant pressure to do more with less, and as technology keeps changing

and adding complexity, outsourcing is becoming a more attractive option. If IT is not

comfortable with VoIP and the broader palette of UC, outsourcing is probably the

right decision.

6. Where are your customers located? The more geographically dispersed they

are, the more beneficial VoIP becomes. This is especially important in terms of

supporting a virtualized, decentralized operation where agents can be based more

closely to where key customer sets are.

7. How well do you really know what happens on every call? Proper call

monitoring and reporting tools are essential, especially if you have outsourced

operations and home-based agents. Not only do you need real-time visibility across

your agents, but you also need the right tools to respond when calls are not being

handled effectively.

8. What security elements come with a VoIP solution? Once you understand the

potential risks associated with VoIP, you need to know how this will be addressed

by the vendor. They may be providing the solution, but it’s your network and

corporate data that could be at risk.

9. What steps have you taken to ensure maximum uptime for your network? This consideration is fully within your control, and with broadband being more

vulnerable to outages than TDM service, you need to address this before moving

ahead with VoIP.

10. Have you done a full network assessment? As noted earlier, without proper

IP-readiness, your network will have problems supporting VoIP. You may need to

add more bandwidth, but this does not address all possible problems. Unlike most

data streams running over your network, VoIP is real time, and you must have the

tools that prioritize this traffic and provision enough bandwidth to ensure business-

grade quality – especially in the contact center.

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Conclusion

With the capabilities provided by VoIP, contact centers can do so much more than

answer routine questions about a company’s products. Rather than view an inquiry as

a nuisance, it should be welcomed as an opportunity to have dialog with the customer

and to discover what defines value. There are two keys for doing this – well trained

agents, and the right tools to respond with.

VoIP definitely speaks to the latter, as it becomes the starting point for communicating

the way customers want to interact. Agents can be far more effective when they can

use all the modes – voice, text, chat, email, video, etc. – instead of being limited to

taking toll-free calls.

Aside from providing the underlying technology, VoIP brings flexibility that legacy

telecom simply does not have. With VoIP, businesses can choose to keep the contact

center on premise and under their control – or shift to a hosted model, where the

operations are outsourced. Aside from giving large enterprises these options, the

hosted approach gives many smaller businesses their first viable contact center

opportunity, and a better chance of competing head-to-head with larger competitors.

Another aspect of flexibility is that businesses can adopt VoIP regardless of what their

existing phone system setup is like. Some may choose to replace end-of-life systems

outright with VoIP, while others will opt to continue with what they have, whereby VoIP

capability can be added without any capital expense or disruption to the network.

The important conclusion here is that VoIP options exist for any scenario, and the

business case is very strong. There are no longer any technical limitations, and the

economics alone make VoIP a smart move for the contact center. This Buyer’s Guide

should serve as a valuable entry point for understanding the various paths you can

take, and just remember that they all lead to the same place – making customers

happy and keeping customers in the fold.

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About Ziff Davis

Ziff Davis, Inc. is a leading digital media company specializing in the technology market, reaching over

40 million highly engaged in-market buyers and influencers every month. Ziff Davis sites, which feature

trusted and comprehensive evaluations of the newest, hottest products, and the most advanced ad targeting

platform. Ziff Davis B2B is a leading provider of online research to enterprise buyers and high-quality leads

to IT vendors. More information on Ziff Davis can be found at ziffdavis.com.

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