Leveraging SIP and Open Standards in the Contact Center of Tomorrow

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The traditional call center-rows of agents in headsets answering
calls-is becoming obsolete. In a consumer-driven, Internet-enabled
world, your customers aren't just calling you. They want to reach you
via email, IM, text, and more. And simply taking calls isn't enough to
keep customers loyal-you need to proactively reach out to build
relationships, up-sell, and solve problems before they become
deal-breakers.

In short, you need a contact center. You need to reach your
customers using the communication channels they want. You need to
balance inbound and outbound communications so that no one is left
waiting. And you have to do all of this while cutting costs, improving
agent efficiency, and maximizing the value of every customer. 

In recent years, many companies have adopted a “Flatten, Consolidate
and Extend” (FCE) approach — where they have flattened routing layers
into a single contact center application, consolidated applications,
servers and management into a simplified architecture, and extended
virtual access to agents regardless of location. This has provided many
businesses an effective communications model for globalizing and
extending reach and operations across the business. This flexibility
provides process and operations returns on resource utilization and
productivity, and extends IT a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in
delivering its objectives of simplifying support and resiliency at the
edge of the business, where your customer facing resources reside.

Today, flexibility, speed and innovation are key demands from
management to deliver the differentiated customer service that every
business needs to grow and thrive. The task of providing a manageable
and cost-effective way to deliver on those aspirations is expected even
when business goals are not clear. These new realities are driving a
contact centre paradigm that takes a step beyond the FCE approach to
deliver a more agile and adaptable framework that delivers a superior
customer experience while dramatically simplifying applications,
integration and infrastructure. 

Intelligent Customer Routing (ICR), coupled with FCE, helps achieve
these goals. Don't let the word “routing” confuse you. ICR is not just
about routing. It is about enabling superior customer experiences - as
delivered by intelligent technologies. It is about letting you create a
customer service strategy to exceed customer expectations by leveraging
unified self service and assisted service in the most effective manner.

With ICR you can segment calls based on unique business-logic
algorithms that contribute to highly personalized service from start to
finish. Such sophisticated segmentation lets you treat every caller in
ways that are most relevant to them - whether that's offering them a
convenient callback, sending them to the perfect expert, asking them
relevant questions to speed up the overall transaction, or offering
them the ability to do more in automated applications.

ICR lets you do all this and start saving money immediately. The
largest expense categories in your contact center are carrier services,
contact management applications, agent staff and agent support
resources. ICR savings can come from all of these areas - from reducing
or eliminating costs associated with site-to-site transfers, to
simplification of infrastructure by making the most of technologies
such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), to smarter use of live
agents and enterprise experts.

In addition to saving money, you can gain competitive edge and
create new revenue streams. Because you truly know your customers and
what their buying and behavior patterns have been in the past, you can
better tailor the offers and promotions that are most likely to hit the
mark.

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By leveraging ICR you can offer each and every customer a “personal
concierge” for their service experience. Intelligent self service
satisfies more callers. The more efficient use of hold time lets you
truly blend self service and queuing. And intelligent routing gets
callers to the right agent or resource with the right information.

The benefits of ICR are clear:

Enhanced customer experience: meeting customer demand with a
seamless interaction experience and 24X7 availability

Service differentiation:
presence-aware and multi-modal applications that can inspire brand
loyalty, generate positive word of mouth referrals, and repeat business

Lower TCO: ICR helps you
optimize resources and reduce recurring expenses including operational,
management and maintenance elements

Reusability and flexibility:
encapsulation of common business application elements through web
services allows for integration with existing web application
environments and a Service Oriented Architecture.

Resiliency and fault tolerance:
a multiplex redundant architecture and dynamic management of media
servers provides assurance to businesses that their applications will
always be up, in service, and providing value.

Investment Protection:
application and platform investments are preserved with an ability to
mix a hybrid of existing and new routing and self service applications
concurrently.

SIP, Web Services, VoiceXML and a number of other open standards and
technologies, provide a new framework of building blocks to re-think
and optimize the architecture model. SIP is an Internet protocol for
establishing, manipulating and managing communication session. SIP is
set to deliver a dramatic impact on contact centre technology TCO.
While choosing an IP-enabled converged voice and data infrastructure
can provide contact centers with significant bottom-line benefits -
such as optimized communications and the ability to manage their call
centre resources more effectively - there have always been concerns
about integration, both with existing systems as well as with future
implementations. This SIP based approach radically simplifies
applications infrastructure and support, and drives economies of scale
while enabling the organizational goals of flexibility, speed and
innovation.

New technology and changing business drivers are leading
organizations to take the next step in an open standards architecture.
Intelligent Customer Routing facilitates new intelligent customer
service operating models delivering more consistent, more satisfying
customer experiences. ICR simplifies applications and network
infrastructure, removing significant operating expenses from an
enterprise. Together, SIP and ICR spell a bright future for companies
looking to customer delight as a true differentiator.

by Mohammed Hayath, Head — Application Sales, India and SAARC, Avaya