IP-enabled call centers are often called "contact centers," since not just voice calls but emails, multimedia messages, etc., are routed over the corporate IP/Ethernet LAN and perhaps over VPNs or WANs as well. Whereas an old call center simply provided self-service IVR and assisted service (a human customer service representative) via circuit-switched telephony, the modern IP-enabled contact center expands such help into email support, web support, chat support and perhaps even video support. Calls and other data can be forwarded over the corporate intranet or between centers worldwide. For example, ShoreTel (www.shoretel.com), formerly Shoreline Communications, recently introduced new solutions aimed at large, formal call center operations which operate across multiple locations as a virtual call center. They use skills-based routing to match the best agent to a particular caller as well as support use of lower cost agents where appropriate.
Advanced VoIP systems or add-ons tend to have so many pre-packaged features that creating a contact center environment is not tremendously difficult. For example, the family of Voice over Internet (VoI) products from CrystalVoice Communications (www.crystalvoice.com) are used to enhance both help desk and technical support operations. By placing a CrystalVoice Click-to-Talk button in an IP application or on a website, instantaneous voice communication can occur between online user and the technical support resource best able to assist them, thus obviating 800 number charges and requiring no additional technical staff training.
CrystalVoice also offers Remote Extension, which allows support personnel to be situated practically anywhere; and Interoffice Voice Trunking, which can route incoming call traffic over the Internet to support facilities dispersed worldwide.
Corporate owners of time-honored phone systems may find that IP-enabling their call center infrastructure is not so difficult, either. Nortel Network's (www.nortel.com) Symposium Call Center Server product offering takes the "call-center-to-contact-center" shift into account: The concept behind Nortel's basic call center application didn't change, since the application in the Symposium Call Center Server doesn't care whether it works in conjunction with a TDM switch or an IP next-gen-network device. A call is still subject to skills-based routing regardless of whether the agents are connected by circuit switched or IP networks. Customers who four years ago bought a Symposium can today IP-enable their Meridian One. The Symposium is really a contact center server because it can also route media other than voice, such as e-mail transactions.
Although we use the term "IP call center," most of these centers are actually hybrids. Nortel's Vicki Marvich, director of enterprise multimedia solutions, says: "You always need PSTN gateways somewhere in the system, since most people still use conventional phones. There are very few 'pure' IP call centers."
Apparently, very few people (if any) use an IP phone to make an IP call to an IP call center.
CPE vs. Hosted Solutions
Still, IP expands the ability to deliver multimedia information to contact center agents anywhere; indeed, so much so that some companies have wondered whether they should spend any money on customer premise equipment at all and simply purchase call center VoIP functionality as needed from a service provider (SP). Such hosted contact centers are becoming increasingly attractive to certain kinds of companies.
"Nortel enables customers to choose multiple flavors of IP," says Marvich. "The Symposium Call Center Server, which is our routing and management information and real-time display tool, sits off of the Meridian and Succession platforms today, as well as the larger TDM-based SL100 and next-gen CS2100, the later supporting CS2000 Hosted Call Center configurations."
"Some call centers use IP sets or Nortel's i2004 Internet Telephones that provide familiar business communications in a network controlled by a Nortel Networks Business Communications Manager, Meridian One, or the Succession 1000," says Marvich. "The i2004 directly connects to the LAN via a 10/100 BaseT Ethernet connection, which simplifies moves, adds and changes."
Marvich continues: "We also offer the Remote Office 9150, which acts like a remote PBX and works with Nortel Meridian digital phones. The 9150 can switch station-to-station calls within the remote office without calling upon the remote Meridian One, thus saving IP bandwidth. Also, you can take a 9110 circuit card and snap it onto the bottom of nearly any of the Meridian 2000 phones. Its brother, the 9115, is a more sophisticated PDA-sized adapter that can be affixed to both Meridian 2000 and 3900 series phones."
You merely plug these IP-enabled Nortel phones into any broadband connection that will transport IP, such as xDSL, cable or satellite. The phones will now let remote call center agents or other teleworkers enjoy the same functionality they have in the office: audio conferencing, Caller ID, call transfer and dialing plans.
"It's a VPN solution," says Marvich, "but the really cool thing about the 9150, 9110, and 9115 is that there's a quality of service (QoS) element to it. The system is inherently digital, so if the VoIP QoS falls below a certain setting, the call falls back to the PSTN. We've also enabled networking capabilities between call centers."
"Interestingly, not many teleworkers use Nortel's i2004 Internet Telephone sets, which are pure IP," says Marvich. "That's probably because these phones have no PSTN fallback capability. Obviously, our SPs, whether they be DSL providers or what have you, aren't really offering toll-quality QoS. One must be wary of audio quality, especially when you're connecting with your paying customers."
"Even so, we do see some late adopters going straight to IP," says Marvich. "Typically, they've got call servers, such as our Succession 1000 with the Symposium CC Server and i2004 sets, for use exclusively in their main office. That way, they can control the QoS and have the network data components to ensure that QoS. If you have remote workers you can't always ensure that QoS today, because your traffic has to pass through an SP."
"Most retailers tell customers that, if they have issues, call 1-800 something or other," says Marvich. "They're asking you to pick up a phone and dial, although you could be calling using Vonage, in which case the call travels from IP to the PSTN and then perhaps back to IP if there's an IP backhaul line from the 800 service to the call center."
"Enterprises leveraging IP tend to create a ubiquitous agent environment across multiple touchpoints, creating a bigger point of presence for them, and enabling them to employ part-time workers or diverse workers, or even offshore workers," says Marvich. "Thus, they're leveraging IP as a cost-reduction, yet service-improvement initiative; not necessarily in a way to connect to their customers. We think the ability to support remote agents and workers is a key initial driver behind IP and one reason we thought it would be good to go ahead and allow customers to IP-enable their Meridian Ones and leverage IP, but not force them to upgrade all at once. We call it 'evolution and revolution'. They can evolve to IP to leverage the benefits of IP today and then when they feel comfortable with moving to full-IP or if they're in a greenfield situation, we allow for immediate full-IP installations, too."
Over at Siemens Information and Communication Networks, Al Baker, the VP of product management for eCRM solutions, says that "both hosted and customer premise IP contact centers will be in play, depending on the type of company."
"There will always be some large enterprises that spend a lot of money on their own infrastructure application running on their own premises," says Baker. "They want to touch it, feel it, make changes to it. But I believe that in the next two to five years they'll be a strong focus on 'internal voice ASPs' across company domains, which is a centralized, almost mainframe type model, using very large SIP-based platforms such as our hosted hiQ 8000 product. But with the IP infrastructure now available, it's fairly easy even for the mid-market to administer and add applications. So the whole CPE model will still be very strong."
Siemens offers various CPE IP contact solutions as part of their HiPath Portfolio. From the HiPath ProCenter Entry, the new HiPath ProCenter Agile and HiPath ProCenter Compact for the SMB to the HiPath ProCenter Standard and Advanced for medium-to-large enterprise customers, Siemens HiPath ProCenter offerings run on both their Hicom series of traditional PBX systems and HiPath Enterprise platforms.
These IP contact center solutions are powered by Siemens switching equipment such as the high-end HiPath 8000, the HiPath 4000 serving mid-range customers, and the HiPath 3000 and 5000 attending to the SMB world. Each of these are tuned to a particular-sized enterprise, and each has the appropriate functionality. More importantly, each has the IP fabric abilities that are becoming important to call/contact centers.
"We see IP deployment in one of three areas, says Baker. "One, companies take a shelf of a HiPath 4000, let's say, and put it in a building in a neighboring city, where they extend their call center fabric. There will often be a floor of agents there that gets linked to part of the general call center served by the 4000 footprint itself. That's the 'whole-floor-whole-shelf' model."
Baker continues: "The second deployment model we see is where a company extends an existing system by using IP phones and broadband. The agents must be at a remote location because there's available floor space, it's closer to where they live, or they may be working at home¨Cbut they still must be part of the call center."
"The third area we've seen is quite interesting," says Baker. "This is where companies take our IP clients or 'softphones' and they put them anywhere they want to extend their call center's overflow capacity. So, at a specific point in time, maybe they need 10 or 15 more people on board temporarily because of seasonal call volume, so they don't want to do a major installation. In such cases, just by using some IP clients, they can quickly integrate one or more people into their call center, regardless of the infrastructure. They could be using a Nortel or an Avaya switch, it doesn't matter. They just put their phone on 'do not disturb' and then click on their Siemens SIP-based optiClient, our desktop client that supports voice communication via PC. Then they can use, say, a headset off their PC to handle the call volume overflow."
"Note that all these three areas have to do with flexibility and scalability of the call center, vs. infrastructure cost savings," says Baker.
Siemens has pioneered Instant Messaging and Presence in IP contact centers. For example, their new HiPath ProCenter Agile application for the SMB market incorporates elements of Siemens OpenScape software, and allows agents to visually monitor the real-time availability of other agents, managers and experts across the enterprise. When someone's expertise is needed, agents can quickly engage them with one click.
Denzil Samuels, Avaya's vice president of service provider solutions, thinks that there is no "winner or loser" in the CPE vs. service provider debate, since "there are different needs depending on the market segment." Samuels' team, however, did spend six months building a set of releases for SPs, rolling them out in July 2003.
"There were three solutions," says Samuels. "A hosted IP tele-phony solution, a hosted contact center solution, and a hosted messaging solution. When I say 'hosted' I mean SP hosted, meaning that we build them in the SP's data center and we embed functions in the SP's network." Avaya has strategies for large (Fortune 1000) and small (200 and fewer seats) companies, but it didn't have a sales force or partners selling to "larger medium" companies with revenue streams of $200-$900 million. However, Avaya recognized that those same companies all have relationships with SPs; hence, Avaya began developing for SPs.
Developing for SPs can be tough, however.
"When you develop products for service providers you start to deal with multi-tenancy, partitioning, shared platforms, industry standard bladed servers, NEBS-compliance, disaster recovery, enhanced security and a whole bunch of other stuff," says Samuels.

Contact Centers On Demand?
Perhaps the logical extrapolation of the hosted IP contact center idea is the Contact Center On Demand services developed by CosmoCom (www.cosmocom.com), a software company that makes contact center platforms and has targeted telcos. CosmoCom believes that the burgeoning costs of customer care presents an opportunity for telcos to create cost-effective contact center services for their business customers. Since telcos already provide the transport services for contact centers, why not provide the (more lucrative) infrastructure as well?
BT, France Telecom, Korea Telecom, TeliaSonera (Scandanavia) and ePLDT (Philippines) offer contact center services using CosmoCom's platform, which is 100% IP-based. Contact Center On Demand allows a business to outsource the IT resources and manage its staff in-house. CosmoCom's utility pricing for telcos is an attractive "pay for what you use" model.
IP contact centers, whether CPE or hosted, are just beginning to hit their stride. Expect to see many more innovations before they fully replace older call centers.

Richard Grigonis is Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine.