Is it time for IP Contact Centers?

For many VoIP has been an unfulfilled promise. In the old days, during the internet bubble, this technology was seen as something that would revolutionize the company/customer interaction allowing a cheap and more efficient way to deliver data/voice communications.

Unfortunately, like so many times, the technology didn’t lived up to its potential. Broadband was just making its first impact and the technology was still very recent and instable. Voice quality could be sufficient in a mother to son conversation, most of the times it wasn’t, but clearly was unacceptable for the business environment, moreover to establish a meaningful relationship with customer. After the bubble burst, VoIP was rethink and awaited better days to go mainstream.

The Skype advent meant a new dawn to VoIP. Finally the technology had reached a stage that could be massively adapted and the contact center industry wasn’t indifferent to this.

For the industry these meant a new paradigm, an enabler that represents a huge opportunity. The main benefits can be summarized in the following bullets:

The consolidation of new business models

Onshoring, offshoring and bestshoring are starting to be common words in the industry. Basically what it means is that companies are deploying their contact centers in countries with cheap labor, where costs are lower.

Outsourcers are setting up contact centers with hundreds of positions, accommodating scenarios where a person can be calling from London and the call picked up in New Delhi. This can be a voice and data interaction, integrated with customer information stored in NY.

With VoIP physical barriers are no longer relevant, contact centers can be distributed and peak interactions are off balanced to the available or nearest center.

The democratization of the contact center technology

Until recently customers had to look for solutions with proprietary technology that operated like black boxes thus creating a dependency on the vendor. The situation was worsen due to the fact a customer could have switches from different vendors which were a true nightmare to integrate and customize, not to mention the TCO of these applications.

Significant costs savings

The ROI in an IP contact center can be measure at different levels. From the hardware point of view the gains are clearly. Instead of relying on proprietary hardware, customers can know have, the same level of functionality, using Witel machines. This represents alone a significant saving.

The TCO of these solutions can also be reduced since the underlying technology and protocols such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), are standard and open. The impact is felt at the maintenance level, ability to integrate new systems and contact center functionality evolution.

By having a distributed architecture, even with remote agents in their homes, contact centers have a better control over the resources and are able to balanced inbound/outbound traffic according to peaks or specific campaigns.

Big contact centers, in the process of considering increasing their number of seats, look at VoIP as an alternative to investments in the traditional vendors; by keeping their actual infrastructure and adding new seats using VoIP. This way they are able to protect previous investments and, at the same time, grow using cheaper technology.

Even though benefits are relevant, VoIP adoption is not for every company. If a company’s business model doesn’t require customer service innovation, differentiation or cannot take advantage of the architecture flexibility provided by a IP contact center, then is not yet time to look at this type of technology.

VoIP is here to stay. According to Merill Lynch, voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) market is expected to grow 25% to 30% per year until 2011and there are many advantages for companies considering this new generation of contact centers, especially those that see in the company/customer interaction a truly important and valuable asset.