Expand Your Call Center Universe

As the holiday season orders pour in, catalogers at this time of year find themselves seeking ways to maximize the use of their contact centers. One potential solution for peak ordering periods worth considering is voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), which enables catalogers to increase the size of the contact center at will, or even hire additional reps to work from their homes, when physical space in their existing contact center runs tight.

VoIP allows contact center managers to deliver both phone service and broadband Internet connectivity to customer service reps (CSRs) along the same connection. Voice and data both are converted to packets of information that are sent the same way — across an Internet connection. Each CSR shares the bandwidth of that connection, and “since you’re contracting for a set amount of bandwidth, you can automatically turn on additional service as demand arises,” says Dave Peterson, president of Bedford, N.H.-based contact center consultancy Powerhouse Consulting.

To date, however, few catalogers have adopted VoIP. A recent survey by the IT research and analysis firm Yankee Group revealed that VoIP adoption was at just 17 percent of all contact centers in North America. But the need to flexibly manage networking across multiple contact centers and remotely connect off-site agents is expected to drive an additional 30 percent of contact centers to implement VoIP by the end of 2007, the survey revealed.

What’s more, an additional 38 percent of respondents to Yankee Group’s survey said they actively are researching and investigating the possibility of implementing VoIP.

For now, however, the top reason cited by survey respondents for not using VoIP is the high cost of implementation. Peterson says it costs at least $750 per contact center seat, provided the contact center already is using the most up-to-date core infrastructure. If the local area network (LAN) for single site contact centers or wide area network (WAN) for multisite contact centers hasn’t been upgraded recently, the costs could be even higher.

Other cost drivers cited by Peterson include the number of contact center seats and call volume. Voice quality is another concern revealed by Yankee Group’s survey. Because the human voice is broken down into packets of data in a VoIP system, some of those packets can get lost along the way, resulting in a stuttering or echo-filled phone conversation between the CSRs and your customers.

Quality Improves

But voice quality is improving, Peterson says, because the compression algorithms used to convert the human voice are getting better. He notes that today’s compression methods allow contact centers to put twice as many reps on the phone using standard VoIP trunking compared to a typical non-VoIP T-1 line.

But one attraction of VoIP is the capability to create virtual call centers, making the physical location of your call center immaterial. Whether you’re managing two contact centers across the street from one another or across the country, all of the agents working at these centers are logged into the same system.

While this can be done with traditional phone lines, it requires each site to have its own internal network, which must then be linked to the other networks. VoIP flattens the architecture of this system by creating a single contact center that covers each site, Peterson says. This reduced complexity smooths things out from an administrative point of view.

Disaster Recovery

The decentralized contact center model made easier by VoIP also ensures that if one contact center is incapacitated for one reason or another, there always will be one to take its place. Chris Powell, contact center manager at Vermont Teddy Bear, says that he institutes a similar practice during the gift cataloger’s holiday sales spikes. “I don’t like to put all of my eggs in one basket,” he says. “So during our busiest season, I employ several off-site contact centers in addition to hiring more agents in the in-house contact center.”

Lou Orsi, vice president of vendor and service center relations for Carle Place, N.Y.-based multititle gift cataloger 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, says he’s been using home-based reps for more than five years because of their increased performance.

“These professionals,” he says, “often are able to outperform traditional reps because they’re older, more experienced and dedicated, so they can continue to work from home profitably.”

Peterson also points out that another cataloger uses VoIP to allow CSRs to work from home to enable them to avoid sloshing around in snowy Colorado weather. While that’s a special case due to the nature of doing business in that part of the country, some other catalogers let their agents work from home as a perk. For instance, a West Coast-based cataloger in a high-traffic city has moved 30 of its 450 CSRs to home-based operations because it’s easier than fighting through Seattle freeway traffic.

Some VoIP Suppliers

• Avaya offers hosted Internet protocol (IP) telephony on a per user, per month basis for small- to medium-sized businesses. Services include network infrastructure for on-site IP applications, including distributed contact center models, which allow agents to work remotely from any location. For information, visit Avaya.com.

• Siemens’ HiPath family of VoIP solutions offers a scaled model for growing contact center operations. Small- to medium- sized businesses can start off with HiPath 3000, which offers real-time instant messaging between connected agents. Additionally, Siemens’ solution allows the ability to mix and match IP and traditional telephones within the same system. For more, visit Siemens.com.

• Nortel’s Contact Center Manager Server offers skill-based routing, which automatically routes calls to the agents best equipped to handle them, whether you’re operating at one site or across multiple locations. For more, visit Nortel.com.

• Cisco’s Unified Communications Solution combines voice and data products to allow agents to access and manage voicemail, e-mail and fax messages from a single mailbox. The IP infrastructure also includes power over ethernet so phones stay connected, even in the event of a local power outage. For information, visit Cisco.com.