Coming Soon: The Killer Apps for Contact Center Transformation
1 Sep, 2004
By: Roger SumnerAfter years of waiting, several factors are finally converging that will soon make the true promise of IP in the contact center an inescapable business reality. First is the growing recognition that converging voice and data over IP is simply more cost-effective than maintaining two separate networks. Second, depreciation of pre-Y2K investments in Time Division Multiplexing (TDM)-based contact center infrastructures is driving enterprises to evaluate alternatives. Third, and perhaps most significant, session-initiated protocol (SIP) and web services are being increasingly implemented throughout the networking, telephony and telecommunications industries to enable unprecedented service enhancements.
The bottom line here is that within the next few years, IP contact centers will be able to deliver true, end-to-end, any-to-any connectivity: Any customer will be able to use any media channel to seamlessly communicate directly with any employee in a company. Similarly, in the brave new world of the all-IP contact center, any employee will have instant access to any application, system or business partner required to resolve that customer's inquiry. That resolution can then be communicated back to the customer in any way the customer prefers, or over any media channel the customer happens to be using at any given point in time.
Redefining Personalization
More than simply providing multi-channel access for customers, or enabling contact centers to cut costs by easily distributing call handling tasks globally, the next phase of IP implementations in contact centers will add significant functionality that will re-define the concept of personalization. Consider the following scenario: A business traveler purchases plane tickets online and enters both his cell phone number and email address as contact points. The day before departure, the airline makes some scheduling changes that affect the traveler's flight. To maintain an optimal relationship with the customer, the airline automatically re-schedules him on a slightly later flight and, since their contact center supports an SIP-based presence application, automatically queues a call for an agent to his cell phone-when he turns it on later that day-to apprise him of the change.
When the traveler arrives for his re-scheduled flight, his active PDA is automatically recognized by the airline¡¦s network as he enters the airport, a WiFi hotspot. As a result, the contact center application is able to check in the traveler automatically, as well as send a message alert thanking him for his understanding of the scheduling mishap, offering him a discount on his next flight, and indicating he is set to go. He proceeds to his gate without any delay, a satisfied customer. Sound farfetched? It's quite possible with SIP technology.
Trends Fueling Convergence
It is IP-enabled applications such as the one detailed above that led Datamonitor to conclude that "the next five years will finally see IP become mainstream in the contact center." In addition to its already-proven benefits of supporting multiple media channels and enabling low-cost offshore staffing resources to be leveraged, the key reason the future of IP is so bright is because evolving standards are enabling new services that can deliver unprecedented operational and customer support benefits. These standards include SIP and web services.
In addition, the increasing convergence of applications, including voice with data, point solutions into product suites and enterprise applications with enterprise communications, is leading the way for contact-enabled business processes. SIP and web services will be among the tools that companies will use to leverage contact center knowledge to drive business processes.
Besides its ability to enable consolidation of remote agents into a centrally managed contact center infrastructure, the growing adoption of SIP is critical to the future of the IP contact center for several additional reasons, including the fact that it enables presence-based communications. That is, communication links can be automatically established based on an individual's availability. If your PC is switched off, you don't exist to the network. But as soon as you turn it on, you can automatically become available to receive communications. What makes this concept so powerful for contact centers of the future is that SIP-enabled presence detection can be applied to any user agent device that supports SIP.
A large financial institution that currently relies exclusively on contact center agents to direct calls to stock brokers, for example, will be able instead to rely on presence data to route calls directly to an available broker. This minimizes call handling costs and gets the customer to the service or information they need faster and more efficiently.
In such a business model, responding to customer inquiries becomes an integrated business function for all staff-not just for contact center agents. In fact, Gartner predicts, with an 80 percent probability, that by 2007, "Customer service will no longer be an isolated business function, but rather an essential business process" and that 'an enterprise's skill in leveraging and integrating its communications tools into key business processes and workflows will be a competitive differentiator."
SIP and Presence
Presence is also a key requirement for pushing customer service throughout the enterprise. It works because when an SIP-enabled device is turned on it is automatically registered as being available to the network. This information can then be coupled with business rules that specify which calls or type of calls can be routed to any specific device and when, as well as how these calls should be handled if the device is busy. Skills-based routing parameters can also be factored into the presence-based routing rules to enable any person in the enterprise to function as a contact center agent.
In addition to enabling presence, the SIP-based applications that are only available through IP-based infrastructures dramatically simplify application integration because SIP is essentially a normalization protocol that is indifferent to media. As a result, proprietary common message translation applications are not required to seamlessly integrate, say, web interactions with IP phone calls.
This benefit is so significant that as SIP-based applications become increasingly widespread, they will become another driver for IP network adoption since they will simplify-and lower the cost of-system implementation while eliminating vendor dependencies. This means that enterprises will be able to select best-of-breed contact center solutions regardless of their embedded infrastructures and pre-existing vendor relationships-two factors that have historically played a major role in solution selection decisions. As Frost & Sullivan concluded, "The ease of use offered by SIP will allow faster application deployment, thereby allowing contact centers to realize the true promise of IP telephony."
Web Services
Another evolving IP standard that will streamline application integration while breaking down vendor dependencies-and therefore drive IP network adoption-is web services. A web services application enables companies to "wrap up" other applications or devices in such a way that they can seamlessly communicate with one another. A router that has been wrapped up with web services, for example, can be seamlessly integrated with legacy workflow applications or other contact center applications that have been similarly wrapped up-without the need for proprietary interfaces.
Based on XML, web services thereby enables easy information sharing across any application anywhere in an enterprise, or even external to it. A retail clothing company may rely on a contact center to accept orders, for example, and then have those orders automatically and seamlessly routed, over an IP network, to the manufacturer, who then ships the order, and sends notification back to the retailer, who continues to manage all customer-facing interactions. Not only do these web services-enabled systems eliminate the need for the retailer to maintain inventories and therefore offer competitive pricing structures, but the system integration can be completed easily, without proprietary interfaces that restrict solution choices by either the retailer or their business partners.
The Great Enabler
The bottom line is that with web services and SIP, contact centers can achieve what they were always meant to achieve-the delivery of highly personalized services that create and cement the strong customer relationships required for capturing and maintaining market share. New IP services are the great enabler for meeting this objective because they allow contact center services to be driven throughout the enterprise and its business partners. This distribution enhances existing business processes to ensure that the enterprise can cost-effectively deliver to the customer the service they want, when and how they want it.
In other words, IP is becoming essential for contact centers because it enables optimized and personalized customer service to be delivered in the fastest and lowest-cost manner. Whether IP is facilitating transparent integration of low-priced offshore staffing resources, streamlining implementation of redundant contact centers, allowing contact centers to support multiple media channels, or supporting evolving "killer apps" we can say, without qualification, that IP is here to stay.
It's been several years since industry pundits first proclaimed that IP would revolutionize the contact center, and while many of those predictions were a little too aggressive, there is no doubt that the great transformation is, finally, ready for takeoff.
