From: www.itworld.com

VoIP in your contact center -- much more than cheap phone calls

by Sudhakar Kondisetty

April 18, 2001 —

 

Companies thinking about investing in voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) frequently cite the cost savings reaped from the elimination of long-distance tolls as the only primary benefit of the capability. While adding IP capabilities to your call center will indeed have an immediate impact on your operating expenses, it's naive to think that long-distance cost savings are the only, or even the most important, benefit of an IP strategy. If implemented properly, VoIP can greatly enhance your entire customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. In fact, as an integral part of a multichannel contact center, VoIP has the potential to enhance customer loyalty, improve operating efficiency and boost sales. With these benefits, it's no wonder that IDC recently reported that by 2003, call center systems will make up almost 30% of worldwide VoIP revenues, which are projected to total $1.4 billion. But before you IP-equip your call center, it's important to understand how IP fits into your CRM strategy. It's also important to work with a vendor that understands the importance of your customer relationships and how IP will add value.

Perhaps the most obvious advantage of adding VoIP to your call centers is the reduction of long-distance costs. This benefit is particularly enticing for customer-facing contact centers, most of which offer toll-free numbers for customers to call for service and support -- numbers that are free for the customers but represent a major expense in charges paid to public switched telephone network (PSTN) providers.

Thus the possibility of making VoIP available to customers that have Internet telephony-enabled PCs and encouraging these customers to use VoIP rather than PSTNs is attractive to any business with a mission-critical contact center. Forrester Research Inc. estimates that Internet-based contact centers can gain a 43% cost advantage over PSTN-based contact centers.

That's a powerful incentive, but it's not the only benefit VoIP offers, and it may not even be the most important. The Internet-enabled contact center can provide other important business advantages.

The convergence of PSTN-quality voice and data over a single network now makes it possible to replace the traditional hardware-based telephony switch, the foundation of today's contact center, with an IP-based, software contact-routing application that performs the same functions. These "switch-free" contact servers can greatly simplify the CRM infrastructure and reduce associated costs. This is an especially important benefit for small to midsize companies that are considering installing contact center capabilities in-house. An IP based call center is less expensive and easier to deploy than a hardware telephony switch with Web capabilities. This converged system also gives the enterprise a single, integrated network that allows more standardization and reduces equipment requirements.

For companies that have multiple contact centers, these advantages are multiplied. Today's companies with multiple contact centers require a hardware switch at each location in addition to costly T1 lines for multisite routing and load balancing. A switch-free VoIP solution installed at one location can perform routing across multiple sites using the LAN or WAN for both routing messages and voice. Distributed contact centers that take advantage of satellite offices or remote agents will also become more viable, thanks to VoIP.

In the past few years, the surge in Internet use by consumers has forced companies to equip their traditional call centers with the means to respond to customer queries from a variety of channels including phone (both wired and wireless), fax, Web chat and e-mail. As customers come to expect better and more personalized customer service, companies should look at their CRM strategy as a profit booster. Recent research by The Forum Corp. indicates that the average business is losing between 15% and 35% of its customers annually and 69% of these defections are due to a poor sales or service interaction with the customer. Yet, according to the Harvard Business Review, cutting customer defections by just 5% has the effect of boosting profits between 25% and 95%. It's clear that managing customer interactions successfully can have an instant impact on the bottom line.

Yet the opportunity to communicate with customers across many channels has also posed many challenges for companies. How do you communicate with customers across multiple channels while also providing a consistent experience for them? How do you handle customers using new channels such as wireless to interact with the enterprise? The most advanced "contact centers" use media blending software to consolidate traffic from multiple media channel servers -- interactive Web servers, e-mail response management systems and automatic call distributors -- into one portal so contact center agents have a complete view of customers needs across multiple mediums. There's no breakdown of the barriers that separate inefficient media silos and an effective VoIP solution should take this into consideration.

VoIP can take these multichannel contact centers to the next level by making it possible to combine voice and data in powerful CRM applications that merge Internet capabilities like wireless, e-mail, text chat, graphics and video with the personal voice of sales and service representatives. By combining all these channels, contact center agents are now able to view a customer's needs, history or queries through one portal. This provides for more efficient and more accurate service (increased profitability) and, most importantly, a happier customer (increased loyalty). In addition, call centers that have traditionally been "cost centers" can now be converted to "profit centers."

While digital media are relatively new, with much potential yet to be realized, telephony-based CRM applications are mature business tools that have developed over years of responding to specific business needs. Properly designed, the switch-free contact server can carry forward the capabilities of these refined, effective applications and bring their benefits to bear on digital media contacts as well as on telephone contacts. These applications can perform the following critical functions:

By adding VoIP capabilities to contact centers now, companies can stay ahead of the curve as digital technologies grow and mature. Over time, customers will require companies to respond to their reequests, no matter what type of digital "toys" they may be using to correspond.

For any business-critical infrastructure, vendor selection is a crucial aspect of technology selection. Companies that make poor choices in the initial stages of adopting VoIP in their contact centers will find their mistakes costly both in terms of lost competitive advantage and money spent later to replace or re-engineer ineffective solutions. Some characteristics to look for in a VoIP solution vendor include the following:

The convergence of voice and data networks is the next significant step in the evolution of CRM technology. The advantages extend far beyond mere cost savings on PSTN toll charges, and companies that move early and make the right choices will be the market leaders of the next decade.


Computerworld