Call Center Magazine: What's the real value of IP in the call center? Is it something that managers and in-center personnel need to worry about?

Oscar Alban, principal, global market consultant, Witness Systems: The real value of IP is that it provides the opportunity for contact center professionals to think differently about their business. The basic infrastructure of the contact center has not changed over the last 25 years. The only thing that has happened is that many manual processes such as monitoring and forecasting and scheduling have been automated. With IP the virtual contact center becomes more of a reality. One example includes a large and successful outsourcer who has almost 8,000 agents all working from home. Not only are they working from home, but supervisors, managers and trainers are as well. This indeed is going to require managers to think about how they are going to manage the business.

Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager, Cisco Systems: The value of implementing IP telephony in the call center is its ability to transform the way companies manage their customer service initiatives. Unlike TDM systems, IP-based contact centers enable organizations to manage multiple, informal contact centers from a single location. This virtualization eliminates the need for buying, managing and maintaining infrastructure at each location, ultimately delivering tremendous time and cost savings.

Other significant advantages of IP contact centers include mobility and disaster recovery, so companies can quickly resume business through another center if one of their locations is shut down unexpectedly.

The transition from TDM to IPbased contact centers is well underway, but has been relatively transparent to agents and managers so far. This will change as contact centers begin to leverage the presence capabilities inherent in IP communications and take fuller advantage of the benefits it brings.

Richard Costello, president, Amcat: The real value of IP in the contact center is the ability for the center to take advantage of customer interaction methods such as email, chat, IM or SMS. Though voice still comprises 90% of the communication format, the IP network allows other forms of communication to serve as a portal into the center. The center could attempt to "integrate" the IP communication with the TDM platform but that seems somewhat counter-productive. With the emerging availability of SaaS ["Software as a Service"] products that can be deployed more efficiently and less expensively than many premises based products, the acceptability of standards (VoiceXML, SIP, SALT, etc.) and the prevalence of the Internet network to serve as a foundation for multimedia events, IP is a logical choice of communication platform. I think in-center personnel should be aware (rather than worried) about IP, particularly to take advantage of distributed or remote agent positions, broader communication formats and stable, easy to deploy alternatives to existing TDM infrastructure. As many contact centers are reaching end of life cycle on Y2K purchases, IP should be on the consideration matrix. The value of IP is NOT in the lower cost of ownership and MACs (Moves, adds and changes). This is geek talk. The value is that it serves as a means to an end -- being, better interaction with customers. If it does that (and I believe it does), then it is beneficial.

Call Center Magazine: Why has it taken so long for IP technology to become important to call center operations? What's been the hold-up -- hasn't this been around for as long as the Internet? Isn't the melding of voice and data through IP exactly what was promised ten years ago under the guise of "CTI"?

Kevin McPartlan, vice president of product direction, Nuasis: There are three primary reasons IP hasn't taken hold in the call center before now. The first is the belief that VoIP solutions offered poor voice quality and were unreliable. The second is the long-standing assumption that the call center software application requires an underlying telephony infrastructure (PBX). The third reason is the popular belief that moving to IP requires significant upgrades to existing infrastructure to get advantages in the contact center. IP has been around for quite some time, and these three reasons, though no longer true are still deterrents to many for introducing IP into the contact center.

CTI has been around for more than 15 years, but most companies have not deployed it due to the complexity and expense. VoIP has the capability to take the previously separate telephony infrastructure and roll it into the contact center application as software. CTI was a bridge between two separate networks whereas VoIP enables everything to be on a single network.

Laurent Philonenko, Cisco Systems: While IP telephony has been around for a while, IP telephony applications for the contact center are relatively recent on the market. Cisco, for example, began selling IP contact center applications just three years ago, but already has more than 3,000 customers worldwide using IP in their centers. It's true that CTI attaches information to voice calls to provide a data "screen pop," but CTI was never designed for the networking side of the business so it can't offer the end-to-end functionality of IP telephony.

Richard Costello, Amcat: There are a number of reasons why IP has been slow in adoption. First, the reluctance of the TDM providers to seed the market space for this technology. Rather than embrace IP as a format to aid communication (the supposed business model of the CLEC), it has been fought with vigor. It is still being subverted, as in the recent action of some CLECs in blocking Vonage calls across the last mile. Another is the unreliability of the network itself. Latency, jitters -- all the early-on stuff. One wouldn't build a business model on poor voice quality. The positioning of IP in the early years also contributed to its slow adoption. It was "sold" as a product -- or at least the fundamental underpinning of a product. Cheap (free) long-distance, email, video conferencing, etc. The average consumer (including the average business consumer) didn't separate IP from the product.

In the last few years, I think there has been a better job of making the distinction between IP as a transport mechanism, from products services etc, that operate over the transport mechanism. There has been more attention to adding reliability to the transport layer, independent of adding whiz-bang products. The end result is a transport layer that is robust and reliable.

One could, fundamentally, say that IP has been around since the Internet, but look how it has transformed -- from ARPANET NCP in ‘66 to TCP/IP in ‘83 and beyond. What has fundamentally changed is what is being carried by the network. There has been a huge explosion in the products and content available over the IP network. Like many things in their infancy though, some of the first iterations were abysmal. Remember ASP? Monolithic, not customizable, targeted to a small audience. A lot of hype and hope.

I don't really see IP as related to CTI. IP is a communication transport layer whereas CTI is an interaction management tool. Each could (and has) existed independently but are also complementary. I think IP will help CTI by making it more available and more feature-rich.

Brett Shockley, CEO, Spanlink: In our experience, some businesses have been reticent to trust their most critical communications operation to what they considered to be "bleeding edge" technology. There are several contributing factors:

• Standards had to be in place for the vendors to build IP and VoIP-based call center systems. This really only happened in and around 2004.
• A major set of upgrades took place for Y2K so many of the systems were either new or not fully depreciated until now so major upgrades could not take place.
• A lack of strong leadership from the contact center vendor community to drive customers to migrate by demonstrating the transformational value of IP communications in the contact center.
• The challenge of aligning business transformation with technology transformation in terms of how you manage virtual resources, how you manage your systems and how you manage your business.
• A lack of strong applications that support virtualization in a meaningful way.
• The perception that there is no "killer application."

In reality, we've seen time and time again that the contact center is the "killer application" for IP communications that justifies an overall VoIP migration. CTI integrated voice and data transactions at the desktop, but stopped short of breaking down the geographic silos that enable an organization to operate as a cohesive customer interaction network.

Knowledge workers, subject matter experts and highly skilled customer service agents are key in this new interaction network. We needed to figure out how to make this new customer interaction network work effectively -- we've figured that out now. Integration of voice and data transactions at the desktop is an important element for strong customer interaction -- and the requirements extend today to tools that enable virtual team interaction and management.