posted 4/09/2001 06:31 AM EDT   

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There's plenty of information floating around about what IP telephony can do to reduce companies' long-term telecom costs, but it's not always easy to locate call centers that use IP telephony.

I'm interested in finding out from participants if any of you are using (or have used) IP telephony systems in your call centers.

If so, we all have a lot we can learn from you, and I'd like to ask you a few questions. You don't have to respond to every question, but anything you can share helps contribute to our understanding of the role IP telephony plays in the day-to-day operations of call centers.

1. What IP telephony system do you use and how did you implement it? (For example, did you install a physical system at your site or did you use software with an off-site IP telephony switch?)

2. How would you describe your experience with IP telephony? (For example, did your IP telephony system work as you expected?)

3. What was the feedback from your customers as well as from call center agents at your company?

posted 4/11/2001 08:46 AM EDT   

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As a seller and installer of Unified Messaging systems, our clients who have begun their migration to IP Telephony seem happy. It is still early, but folks who have made the move are awaiting the days when their investments in the technology translate into savings. No one is sure how long that will take however. The initial costs are significant, but those who see the big picture say the savings will be there...... eventually.

posted 4/11/2001 10:45 AM EDT   

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As an experienced Call Center Consultant with over 15 years experience in building Call Centers my advice to clients is not to be afraid of IP Telephony, There is a view that IP Telephony is inferior to PSTN. This view is fast becoming outdated. IP telephony has been been in use by in some manner by most Fortune 500 Companies for a reasonable time and most recently every major PABX Manufacturer has introduced their own IP PABX Line of equipment. It is a forward looking solution that opens up new opportunities and capabilities of the distributed call center model that would even allow call centers to adapt a work at home model. Most of the new IP PABX's are highly scalable with a much easier growth strategy than the PSTN PABX. New vendors are also entering the market such as Cisco and others increasing competitiveness and reducing costs. CTI in this new environment is also becoming easier with the convergence improving call center agent productivity. Infrastructure costs can also be reduced through a well planned single network delivery straegy and telephony service costs will also experience a reduction.

Quality can be managed via a use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) and minimal compression with properly allocated bandwidth.

As a consultant my current recomendation to clients is

1) If replacement of the current PABX is a given, then replace it with an IP based solution.
2) If the current PABX has to be part of the solution look for an IP Gateway.

My reasoning for these recommendations is based on the direction of call centers baing responsible for multimedia access which includes direct voice chat capabilities over the internet. This requires bringing both PSTN and IP into a single call distribution and management stream so that queues can be properly organised and delivery to the agents balanced.

Companies that provide full Ip based Solutions are Nortel, Lucent, Seimens, Toshiba to name a few some of the lesser known are Mitel, Teltone.

posted 4/12/2001 08:36 AM EDT   

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If you would really like to get some real life examples of IP Telephony I can get refrences and demos on live Voice Over via Frame Relay. I implement the Business Communications Manager, a Nortel Networks IP Telephony Solution. If you are interested contact me and we can make arrangments.

posted 4/12/2001 09:20 AM EDT   

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What equipment (telephony boards) do you use as a reseller of unified messaging?
Any Problems with those products?

I have a Korean customer developing right now.

posted 4/16/2001 09:07 AM EDT   

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Real-world implementation of IP telephony is no longer a pipe dream. The technological obstacles of a few short years ago have, for the most part, been cleared.

At Empirix, we have installed an IP solution at our Waltham headquarters. The physical system is installed at our site. (I am not presently at liberty to say which supplier we used.)

By and large, our implementation has been a successful one. Though there are some rare exceptions, voice quality has tended to be very good, and most often indistingushable from PSTN service. We are still fine-tuning the system, and the quality steadily improves.

We have had calls from customers asking about implementing their own IP telephony solutions. When they ask about the level of quality they could expect from such a system, they are typically surprised to be told that our system is IP based.

The key to our success, I believe, was our pre-cutover testing. We connected a Hammer VoIP test platform to our IP PBX and hit it with thousands of voice calls to track voice quality. We were able to provide a system load far in excess of what we would normally see in the real world, and as a result, we had a solid idea of what we would see when we put the new system in production.

posted 4/25/2001 09:03 AM EDT   

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In my role as the CTO/Sales Engineer for a VAR of Inter-tel systems, I see the advantages of employing VoIP where it makes sense (in a hybrid system) A large call center customer of ours, who is growing rapidly, finds value in running a single wire to the desktop - where there is a computer, and a call center agent, there is an IP Softphone. Adds, moves, and changes in a fast-paced environment is much easier with IP Phones.

Call centers can also reduce their 800# costs with call buttons on their websites. The web shopper clicks a button on the website and establishes a VoIP call that hits a gateway and enters the phone system like any other caller - directed to the appropriate ACD group.

And last, but not least, the sub-$400 IP Single Line Adapters - The IP SLA can make any analog phone an IP extension off your main office switch OR any trunk of any other branch office accessible to and from the home office - Say goodbye to interoffice calling expenses.

Look for the ROI - it's there.

posted 4/26/2001 07:03 AM EDT   

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In my organization, iSKY, we have been heavily into the testing mode for IP. We have recognized two facts: IP is definitely a low- cost option ; in addition it will allow our communication centers to utilize agents at remote locations.The remote agent factor has weighed heavily into our decision to utilize IP.
Our testing via the use of soft phones through the LUCENT switch has been underway for some months and will shortly be in the implementation phase.
As an Outsource vendor to Fortune 1000 companies we conducted intensive research into the use of IP to ensure that it was a tool that we wanted to implement.
We now view its introduction into our centers as the next logical step in providing our clients with the highest level of customer care.

posted 4/26/2001 11:46 AM EDT   

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One of the beauties of IP-telephony is that you don't need telephony boards. The hardware is distributed in the network and shared. Gone are the days of one board for the voice mail, one for the IVR, one for the recorder, one for the predictive dialer... (I'm of course talking about real IP telephony, not PBXes with add-on IP gateways.)