4. IP Contact Center:
the Advantages Over a Traditional Call Center

You can hardly overestimate the importance of a reliable contact-center, especially for a business with a significant number of clients.

Efficient client call-service has been a problem for many years already. Call-center service history started long before VoIP and Unified Communications technologies appeared on the scene.

First, call-centers were based on traditional analogue phone systems. Operators worked in huge offices, with their phones connected to a PBX with call-center software.

Rapid computerization process of the late 80’s - early 90’s lead to a computer-to-telephone integration (CTI) that in its turn made possible integration of the call-center service with CRM-systems and other enterprise software.

Finally, with the emergence of VoIP and Unified Communications technologies, call-centers were switched to IP-platform and call-center software obtained new features that allow processing customer requests received by e-mail, internet and so on. These all lead to the creation of IP Contact Centers that today dominate the IP-telephony networks market.

IP Contact Center – the Advantages of VoIP 

You have most likely read the numerous articles about great functions and advantages of IP contact centers. Let’s not repeat all that again, but rather emphasize the advantages of VoIP-based contact centers over traditional telephone systems.

IP Contact Center scheme

1. A Unified IP Platform to Process All the Client Requests.

The main purpose of an IP Contact Center is to provide the business with the unified platform processing all client requests, regardless of their source. The same solution is used to process requests received by:

• phone,
• email,
• fax,
• website,
• live chat and instant messengers.

2. Geographical Independence in Deployment.

Another advantage of an IP Contact Center is its geographical independence in deployment - the operator of your contact center only needs to be connected to your enterprise LAN to accept and process client requests.

For example, contact-center units may be located in different offices of your company (in the same city, or in different regions and even in different countries) – in this case, an IP Contact Center will provide you with intelligent call routing over the distributed offices and branches.

With a geographically distributed contact center, you can use your human resources more effectively –

• form several teams of operators located in different offices,
• create remote workplaces, etc.

With such flexibility, you can involve extra personnel in your contact center to operate round the clock.

3. A Unified Network.

IP-technologies allow merging your data and voice networks into a unified infrastructure for you to:

• halve your network setup and operation costs,
• encourage common work standards that guarantee quality of your customer service,
• deploy 3rd party solutions in your VoIP network.

When you consider an IP contact-center as a solution to process all of your client communication requests, then an IP-based solution appears to be the only reasonable choice.

4. Client Service Unification.

As an IP-Contact Center processes all the client requests with a unified IP-platform, it allows you to unify the client service business processes and manage them centrally. With a unified IP Contact Center, you don’t have to support several business processes for processing client requests, received from several sources.

IP Contact Center Integration

The main issue of IP Contact Center deployment is its integration with existing enterprise information systems, such as CRM-systems, contractor databases and HR systems. Basically, there are 2 main goals of contact center integration with existing enterprise applications:

1. Integration for Intelligent Call Routing

As soon as an incoming call is connected to the contact-center and the phone number of incoming call is known, integration with enterprise systems can help the contact center software to automatically route it to an appropriate person/department. For example:

• using the city code of the incoming call, the contact center software can route the call to the nearest office in the city,
• depending on the client service business processes, the contact center can route the call to the most appropriate operator, who can be:
  • a manager that serves the calling client,
  • an operator that worked with this client last time,
  • a debt specialist should it become known that this client has debts overdue.

2. Integration to Increase Contact Center Staff Performance

As soon as a call is delivered to an operator, it is important to provide your operator with up-to-date information, which is stored in your CRM software.

Moreover, your company may have several heterogeneous applications that have various information about your clients. Your operator must have quick access to any of these systems to ensure efficient request processing. A contact center, integrated with these systems, will trigger them to automatically open the client card, once the incoming call is received.

You can also use integration to provide your operators with:

• a single sign-in to the software used in contact center,
• a single interface for time-out recording,
• a single interface for logging the contact call summary.

Special attention should be paid to the integration of IP telephony functions into the CRM interface or any other application used by your operators, as it allows your operator to receive, dial, redirect calls and perform other phone functions right from the application interface.

To solve the integration issues effectively, a custom application is often considered to integrate your contact center software with the existing enterprise applications, according to the business processes of your contact center.

IP Contact Center Vendors

Contact center solutions are offered both by leading IP-telephony system vendors and independent software development companies. To name the most noticeable solutions:

• 3Com Contact Centers by 3Com
• Aspect Unified IP Contact Center Software by Aspect
• Asterisk IVR Server (opensource VOIP project)
• Avaya Customer Service Editions by Avaya
• CCDesign Suite by NEC Unified Solutions
• Cisco Unified Contact Center by Cisco
• FrontRange IP Contact Center by Frontrange
• Intervoice IP Contact Center by Convergys
• IPFX Unified Contact Center by IPFX
• Genesys Intelligent Customer Front Door by Alcatel-Lucent
• OpenScape Contact Center by Siemens Enterprise Communications
• Syntellect Customer Interaction Manager by Syntellect

What to Do Next

So, an IP Contact Center takes the advantages of VoIP technologies to

• process every message type in a single place,
• obtain flexibility in deployment,
• drastically reduce installation and operational costs,
• have unified business processes to improve your service.

If you plan to deploy an IP Contact Center, you can start with the vendor list above to select and examine the solutions that support your IP telephony vendor and provide the functionality you need.

If you already have an IP Contact Center, you can consider the integrating ideas listed above that can be applied to your business to increase the performance of your client service.

Read the next chapter: 5. Voice Portal and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) - How to Process up to 80% of Your Incoming Calls Automatically

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