Think of this article as an appetizer. If we've whetted your appetite here, we suggest you go to our recent e-book, A Practical Guide to Transforming Your Call Center With IP Technology, for the main course. That guidebook covers both VoIP and multimedia IP routing from the perspectives of both operational managers and of IT/telecom pros. It's available free on-line at http://commweb.com/60407930.

We're going to start by disposing of a few myths, showing you where the real benefits lie. Then we'll discuss how you can manage the transition without getting fired (and maybe even be promoted in the process).

Getting Past The Hype

VoIP does not let you do anything in your call centers that you can't do with time division multiplexing (TDM, i.e., "traditional telephony") equipment. As Schoeller says, "Today, everyone's call routing and queuing software works with both sets of endpoints. CTI [computer telephony integration] is getting easier, but that's for both TDM and VoIP." The advantages of VoIP lie not in new capabilities, but rather in efficiencies that make changes in your operations cost-effective.

Second, there are only two reasons to transition to VoIP: 1. Purchasing New Equipment. If you need to buy new equipment anyway, there's no reason not to purchase something with IP telephony capabilities. VoIP-ready equipment (which may include a hybrid IP/TDM switch) is nearly the universal choice for new contact centers ("greenfield sites"). The same is true for the replacement of telephony equipment that has reached the end of its useful life. We see this a lot in the context of small businesses, where the entire company, including the call center, moves to VoIP simultaneously. Unless you've got a good reason to stick with TDM, why go through the hassle and expense of installing equipment that will soon be obsolete?

2. Linking Dispersed Operations. VoIP lets you connect remote offices and personnel more efficiently. It may be counterintuitive, but as expert Art Rosenberg has noted, centralizing your network infrastructure lets you distribute your people more widely. The benefits of centralized infrastructure can come in several flavors:

Toll Charge Savings. VoIP can help firms achieve some cost savings by reducing the bandwidth of voice signals. You can usually compress IP voice signals to 10% to 20% of the bandwidth of TDM signals. This can be particularly valuable for international operations, where the cross-border telephone toll charges can be significantly higher than domestic tariffs. According to Carol Blanchar of Connexo, "the real boost over TDM comes from being able to 'second source' the data connections between sites."

The cost reductions from signal compression, however, are usually small compared to other benefits of VoIP. Deloitte's George Svoboda, who has consulted on several IP implementations in call centers, warns that the increased cost of maintaining a VoIP-ready network may offset the reduction in toll charges.

Reducing Infrastructure Complexity. Centralizing your network saves you the need to integrate, upgrade and support your call center applications at each site. As Svoboda says, "It's very complex to maintain rules for call routing, and it's expensive to change multiple systems in a dynamic environment. So [multi-center] firms want to virtualize the phone network, using one or two ACDs for all of their centers." This saves on IT support and the time spent integrating new applications at each site.

Expanding the Queue. The biggest benefits to the bottom line usually involve either improving customer service or reducing staffing costs. According to Svoboda, "bigger, multi-center organizations... are looking at VoIP now, since they want to replace their complex predictive dialing and call routing rules with a centralized queue." The goal, as Siemens' (San Jose, CA) Al Baker says, is to provide "a virtually unified resource base... that takes full advantage of enterprise resources that may be distributed geographically." That unified resource can take many forms:

Multiple call center sites. Lori Bocklund of call center consultancy Strategic Contact says, "Multi-site's the killer application [for VoIP]. There's a strong business case for moving to a hub and spoke model, with centralized operation of the network." Linking personnel at multiple sites into a single queue lets you reduce hold times, reduce staffing levels, or achieve some measure of both. It also maximizes the chance that your skills-based routing software will direct the call to the best available agent.

Outsourcing. As the trend toward outsourcing call center operations grows, we expect to see VoIP play a large role in uniting internal and outsourced customer service operations. Lawrence Byrd of Avaya (Basking Ridge, NJ) has observed, "Traditionally with outsourcing, there's no control or reporting at the agent level. With IP, you can do call-by-call management of outsourced agents."

Home Agents. What we said about outsourcing also apply to using home agents ¡ª VoIP can help you to monitor the performance of all of your remote agents.

There is a significant cost, though, that you'll need to balance against the improved ability to gauge agent performance ¡ª sound quality suffers when your route calls over the public Internet. The degree of call degradation will vary with the circumstances of each home-based agent, and will vary from time to time. Schoeller advises, "The cost of a phone call over TDM isn't that expensive, compared to dealing with a frustrated customer if you screw up a contact.... The big expense isn't telecom, it's agent salaries."

Specialists and branch office personnel. Centralization also helps you include personnel whose primary jobs aren't answering customer calls. Byrd observes, "The fundamental benefit of IP in the call center is that it provides infinitely long wires... You can... integrate the call center with parts of the business that you didn't traditionally see integrated, such as branch offices." For example, connecting offices on a unified, converged network, combined with presence technology, would let call center agents direct calls to available technical specialists or sales reps. That maximizes the chance of solving a customer's problem on the first call or closing a sale.

One area to watch here is connecting brick-and-mortar retail operations with call center operations. For example, walk-in traffic in bank branch offices tends to peak during lunch hours, the same time that phone calls reach a minimum. Using tellers to take calls before the lunch hour rush can streamline call center operations.

New roles for the call center. Just as non-call center personnel can serve as adjuncts to the call center, call centers can also backstop other operations. Byrd cites the example of a major insurance provider that uses its call centers as a "universal admin" for the sales representatives in its local offices. If the local agents are available, they take their customers' calls. Otherwise, the calls automatically roll over to the call center to provide quick responses.

Genesys' (Daly City, CA) Monique Bozeman notes that "with the more inclusive linkage that VoIP provides, customer segmentation and skills-based routing grow more valuable." As VoIP makes it easier to direct calls across an organization, it increases the value of the information from caller ID, CRM systems, and interactive voice response (IVR) applications. Bozeman adds that centralization lets you prepare more inclusive reports and do more rigorous analysis of operational data.

Finally, we don't mean to imply that every call center needs VoIP right now. Vendors and service providers will eventually stop supporting TDM, but it's going to take at least a decade to get there. If you don't have far flung call center operations, if you're happy with your call center applications as they are, if you don't expect to be adding or replacing large amounts of telephony equipment, then you probably don't need to move to VoIP in the next few years.

If you do think you'll benefit from VoIP, or even if you're being dragged into IP telephony kicking and screaming, you'll need to approach the process in the right way. That's what the rest of this article is all about.

How To Migrate To VoIP

Depending on your circumstances, switching from TDM to VoIP can dramatically improve your operating results, but, if it goes wrong, it can be a real disaster. Here are some strategies that will help you avoid the pitfalls that you will face when you make the jump.

You'll want to start by building a good relationship with your IT and telecom groups. Bocklund advises, "The whole shift to IP makes people look at how call center fits with the enterprise telecommunicaiton strategy. The Nirvana is an enterprise-wide VoIP infrastructure, an application engine for the call center, and shared infrastructure... but it's a pretty tough Nirvana to achieve." A good relationship with your technical groups is the first step toward telephony enlightenment.

This doesn't mean that your company's telecom strategy should trump your call centers' operational concerns. Svoboda explains, "VoIP is basically a technical problem, so IT and telecom need to be involved ¡ª but it's not good enough to treat this as a technical upgrade. You need to take business rules into account, and to take advantage of new opportunities, so a multifunctional group needs to manage the transition."

It is much harder to operate an IP network that carries voice traffic than one that carries only data; a one second delay in an e-mail is unnoticeable, but the same delay in a phone call can cause you to lose a customer. Your IT and telecom groups have to know what you need to support your operations.

IT/telecom is, of course, more than just a networking service provider ¡ª your techies can help you sort through the confusing jumble of telephony and call center applications to find the packages that will help you improve your results. In the best of all possible worlds, you and the people in the IT/telecom group will be able to say "working together, we cut costs and improved customer service" in your performance reviews.

Don't forget the end users when you are planning for the transition. You'll want to get input from call center agents, their supervisors, the help desk staff, and others who'll be affected by the move to VoIP. Ideally, you should test any changes on customers, too, before you convert your operations (we'll discuss that further in the Pilot section, below).

It's also important to get Finance and Marketing on board. It's easy to sell a CFO on a change that you can demonstrate will save costs. They are also usually receptive to changes that will increase revenues. It is, however, often difficult to convince skeptical CFOs that changes to your operations will have a positive impact on the bottom line through improving customer service ¡ª but those are precisely the most important effects of moving to VoIP. As Cisco's (San Jose, CA) Laurent Philonenko says, "Cost savings [from VoIP] are definitely available, but new functionality and service level improvements are absolutely key."

The more closely you can tie the benefits of any change to the available data, the more likely you are to convince your organization to loosen its purse strings. For example, if you can show a correlation between average hold times and customer retention, and you can call upon your firm's estimate of the cost of acquiring a new customer, you're more likely to build a convincing case for (or against) any changes. To do that, you'll need to enlist the assistance of your Marketing and Finance groups.

You should not shy away from discussing your operations, and how they might be affected by VoIP, with senior management. To effect any major change, you'll need to get their approval, and you'll need at least one executive champion for the project. More importantly, you need to arm your senior managers with the facts. As C-level executives hear more about VoIP, and as the vendors grow more aggressive in their pitches, it's important that your corporate leadership knows that you've given the issue some thought and have good reasons for the plans that you propose. When your CEO asks, "What are we doing about VoIP?," you'll want to have your answer ready.

Finally, be sure that you are represented early in any corporate VoIP initiative. Call centers are often the last operations in an enterprise to switch to VoIP, and you don't want to wind up with a system that doesn't work well for you (and your customers) just because you were last in line.

The most consistent advice we've heard from consultants, vendors, and managers who've gone through a transition to VoIP is to run a pilot program first. In a large organization, you'll want to establish a lab that will let you test the network infrastructure, applications, and procedures that you plan to use to support your call center's operations. Your lab work should include live customer calls and you should collect feedback from test customers. You might want to set up focus groups or use the services of a testing firm such as Vocal Laboratories (Eden Prairie, MN), which uses a statistical sample of consumers nationwide to test customer service operations.

Another way to test the waters before diving in is to bring VoIP to the rest of the enterprise before bringing the changes to the call center. The more valuable it is to link together dispersed customer contact operations, the more you'll want to push for early VoIP adoption in the call center. Many companies also start with an internal IT or HR help desk before they go live with VoIP for customer calls.

If you've got more than one call center, you'll want to roll VoIP out to one at a time. That lets you work out the local kinks while the other centers in your network serve as backups.

If you're with a smaller organization, you may not have the resources to set up a pilot program, and you may not have the scale to make a phased rollout practical. You're also more likely to be purchasing a "turnkey" package rather than integrating "best of breed" software from multiple vendors, which makes testing less important. That doesn't mean you should leap without looking, however. The simple expedient of not turning off your old equipment and applications until you're sure that the new stuff works can save you a lot of headaches.

Finally, you'll want to consider the option of using hybrid IP/TDM switches. Hybrids let you make the transition more gently, reducing the risk of failure, and let you squeeze the most value out of your legacy equipment. On the other hand, it is easier to garner all of the benefits of centralized infrastructure if you stick to a pure IP solution (i.e., a "forklift upgrade"). Hybrid seems to be the most common path today. However, Svoboda says, "You see a lot of forklift upgrades if equipment is at the end of its life, and the company needs to upgrade anyway." Rather than taking a side in this debate, we'll simply suggest that you explore both options when you're looking to move to VoIP.

Genesys' Fabrice Della Mea advises that, for a smooth transition, "the thing is training, training, training... You have to demonstrate to agents that they won't lose any features they had before." There's not a lot that we can add to that.

The Take-Away

VoIP can be a powerful tool in the call center, but it can also be an unmitigated disaster. If you do it right, when your call centers move to VoIP, you'll be offering the most efficient and enhanced customer service available. We agree with Connexo's Blanchar that "the technology helps you integrate with data center services, create customer loyalty by offering different service levels, and selling content, but the living, breathing relationships are still the key." It's a sentiment that's mirrored by everyone with whom we've spoken about VoIP, and one that we heartily commend to you as your approach to IP telephony.

Want More...?

¡ª Our e-book on IP In The Contact Center is available on-line at http://commweb.com/60407930. Avaya's Dave Benston gave a great talk on this subject at Call Center Demo and Conference in February; we posted the video on-line at http://pqhp.com/cmp/cc05/index.htm#dave. Dale Pickford of Ocwen Financial discusses his firm's transition in the IP Communications & Contact Center Migrations Web cast available at http://www.commweb.com/pastWebcasts.jhtml.

Twelve Questions When Planning A Transition To VoIP

Before you specify infrastructure requirements and business process changes, you should audit your current customer contact operations. Your goal is either to see how you will achieve a return on an investment in VoIP or to discover that you won't. The operational review should answer these questions:

Where are we falling short of fulfilling the needs of our customers?
What are our priorities for customer contact operations?
If they gave us VoIP for free, how would we change our operations, applications, organizational structure, staffing, and training to reap the benefits? (This is the Art Rosenberg test for new technology.)
How will the changes affect our customers?
Which of our current applications and processes are worth protecting when we move to VoIP?
What do we need to do to ensure that we have a secure, reliable, VoIP-ready IP network, given our expected technology budget?
Who will serve on the transition team, and who will lead it?
Do we need to bring in consultants experienced in VoIP migration?
What could go wrong in the transition, and how are we going to minimize the risks?
What can we do to test the new infrastructure and operations before we take them live?
What is the logical IP telephony migration sequence to support the needs of our customers and our agents?
How will we measure the results?

VoIP's Not Just For The Big Boys

When Sure Dry Basement Systems, a small contractor in Northern Wisconsin, lost the lease on their headquarters, they decided to upgrade their telephone system at the same time they moved to their new facility. Although the company's call center has only two operators devoted full-time to handling customer calls, the company built its new telecom infrastructure around its customer contact operations.

According to Sure Dry's Eric Turner, the company had two primary goals for their new telecom system. First, they wanted to plug the leaks in their customer service lines, ensuring that no call goes unanswered when the two operators are busy. That meant bringing other office personnel into the customer service queue. Second, they wanted to get the most out of their customer database, using information in their customer relationship management system to route calls more effectively and to provide automatic screen pops with customer information to the person who answers each call.

Their solution was an integrated package from FrontRange Systems (Pleasanton, CA), combining that vendor's IP Contact Center product with the GoldMine sales automation package. Sure Dry uses the package both for multimedia skills based routing of customer calls and as its office PBX. Their experience shows that, while the details will differ, the same principles that guide the move to VoIP in a multinational, multi-center customer service organization apply to a business that fields only 100 calls per day. By thinking first about the person-to-person interactions with their customers rather than about the technology, Sure Dry found an elegant solution to its communications needs.