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While IP telephony deployment growth rates are doubling every year and projected to get even stronger in 2007, thanks to Microsoft´s Unified Communications, IP contact centers have lagged. Contact center managers are all too aware that they are at the epicenter of customer contact and are fearful of unreliable, unmanageable and un-interoperable systems impacting corporate performance. But how much of this fear is justifiable? Contact center manager´s fears are being tested by a new wave of IP telephony contact centers entering the market equipped to address changing business requirements and booster reliability. Companies such as Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel, Syntellect, Aspect Software, Genesys Telecommunications, NEC and others are promoting SIP-based IP contact centers as a means to lower operational cost, improve agent responsiveness and reporting.

There are three major design approaches to contact centers:

• 1) best-of-breed components where managers design their own contact center;
• 2) bundled suites which are ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨all-in-one" packages; and
• 3) service-based solutions.

These are offered as either a time division multiplexing (TDM) circuit-switched solution, IP telephony solution, or a hybrid of the two.

Until recently, call center technology was designed with TDM-based PBXs, automatic call distribution (ACD) and softswitching, interactive voice response (IVR) systems and voice portals, computer-telephony integration (CTI), universal queuing, Internet e-services, virtual operations, remote agents, outbound dialing and other forms of contact. Important support applications include reporting, analytics, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance and workforce optimization. With the high cost of acquisition, TDM-based call centers were affordable mainly to very large enterprises, disregarding the small and mid- markets. Not only was the economic barrier of entry high, sometimes in the millions of dollars, but disparate call center technologies convoluted the application and associated networking environment, increasing integration efforts with corporate databases thanks to complexity.

But over the past ten years customer contact interaction has changed significantly. Widespread use of voice mail, e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones and web-based applications has enabled new ways in which corporations can connect with customers and prospects. Customers now want around-the-clock access, independent of both end-point device and communications method. Contact center managers call supporting multiple end-point types multi-modal, while supporting multiple communication methods (outbound voice, e-mail, web collaboration, IM, etc.,) multi-channel communications. Both multi-modal and multi-channel are characteristic of the new design challenges confronting contact center architects. IP telephony and SIP are building blocks to support changing contact center design by increasing reliability, management, interoperability and support of multi-modal and multi-channel customer interaction.

Business has changed and so too must contact centers to keep up with customer requirements. The efficient use of labor or agent pools require that contact centers be geographically independent. The race to solve a customer´s issue and time spent with a contact center agent is a competitive advantage. Providing agents with access to enterprise experts who can address a customer´s question, in real time, could lead to up-selling or retaining a customer. Updating corporate data bases after an agent-customer transaction and putting into motion the appropriate workflow creates an efficient business process. These are but a sample of the types of connections, interoperability and flexibility required by modern business and their contact centers.

So are IP contact centers ready for prime time? Can they calm the fears of contact center managers while enabling a more agile enterprise with the tools to address changing customer requirements? Market research says that by 2008 nearly 33% of all contact centers in North American and Europe will go through a refresh phase. This will be a key time period for IP telephony contact center deployment. Contact center design requirements will consist of traditional elements such as reliability, scalability, manageability, security, cost and interoperability with an increased emphasis on customer access, agent access to experts and corporate database integration. Let´s take traditional requirements one by one and explore how an IP telephony-based contact center addresses these challenges.

Reliability: Reliability can also be viewed in terms of availability, that is can IP contact centers achieve five-nines availability or is the contact center available 99.999% of the time? Five-nines translate into 5.26 minutes of downtime a year. Two key design aspects define availability: first, a component´s mean time between failure or MTBF and its mean time to repair or MTTR define its availability by MTBF/(MTBF+MTTR); second, how components are interconnected into network has calculable ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨system" availability.

For over a year now, communication managers or the devices that set up and tear down connections have the same MTBF and MTTR ratings as TDM-based PBXs. IP telephony contact center network designs are distributed and de-centralized. TDM-based contact centers are highly centralized with single points of failure. IP contact centers are modeled as parallel systems thanks to redundancy and packet network attributes while TDM call centers are serial systems. Availability for serial and parallel system is calculated as such:

As=A1*A2
Ap=A1 + A2 - A1*A2

While the electrical engineer in me is tempted to fully develop the two equations, let´s just make some observations. First A1 and A2 are component availabilities while As and Ap are series and parallel system availability. The key lesson to learn from the above two equations is that in serial designs system availability is always less than the availability of its components while a parallel design system availability is always greater than the availability of its components.

In short, the IP contact center design offers more options to improve system reliability than its TDM-based architecture. If availability is less than the stated number of nines reliability, the designer could be adding parallel Ethernet switches, redundant servers, WAN links, etc., to increase system reliability. IP contact center designers have more options to manage reliability and availability than legacy TDM.

Scalability: Today´s IP contact centers scale down better than a TDM-based system. Most recent IP contact center vendor announcements focus on small to medium sized business as IP and standard computing hardware have lowered the barrier of contact center entry. IP contact centers have been proven for large global companies with greater than 20,000 employees as over one third are currently evaluating or piloting the technology.

Manageability: Device management of routers, switches, servers and end-points are just as potent as device management of TDM call centers. Support applications such as reporting, analytics, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance, workforce optimization, etc., are offered by contact center vendors and are increasingly being opened to a wide range of ISVs or independent software vendors. With ISVs now focused on various aspects of contact center management and support, creativity and value is being created around a vendor´s contact center offering.

Management and support applications are a major bright spot in IP contact centers as corporations will increasingly have more choice available to them versus waiting for their contact center vendor to develop management and support applications. Most contact center vendors have created ecosystems of partners designed to encourage application development upon their contact center platform. This ecosystem competition between suppliers will spur innovation and choice for enterprises well beyond what has been available in the TDM age.

Security: Building defenses to secure an IP contact center is different than in a TDM environment. Clearly exploits have the potential to propagate throughout an IP network and infect contact center agents, data, applications, etc. While there are many defenses for IP networks such as firewalls, IDS, IPS, NBAD or network-based anomaly detection devices plus network access and protection control, IP networks do pose a greater effort and expense to secure contact centers. Some firms, such as American Express, have chosen to limit connections between contact center and corporate production networks through firewalls. If IP contact centers are fully connected to production networks, then an overall network security strategy needs to be defined and implemented so as to mitigate the risk of exploits causing harm to its operations.

Cost: This is a key attribute of IP contact centers; its acquisition cost relative to TDM-based systems is lower. IP contact center cost savings stem from the following: standard computing hardware to run applications, soft and thin client agents reduce end-point cost, leverage existing IP network and computing operational support services.

For example, one of my clients required a contact center in a location that was not previously equipped. It has deployed an IP contact center in another facility and was thus able to quickly deploy a 600 person contact center over two sites. We estimated that this client saved $1M thanks to its existing IP telephony contact center. In other words it would have cost this company $1M more to deploy a traditional call center with PBX and ACD equipment.

Interoperability: While there is much differentiation between vendors, one of the key areas for contact center managers to analyze is a vendor´s migration plan to IP. Contact centers will not transition or cut over to IP contact centers over night. There will be a phased migration resulting in a hybrid TDM/IP system in place for many years. Interoperability between TDM and IP provides incumbent contact center vendors with an advantage.

Another key interoperability area is with application development environments, especially web services and SOA. More on this below.

Multi-modal and Multi-channel Customer Access: Thanks to Session Initiation Protocol or SIP, IP telephony contact centers can support a wide range of end-points and communication channels. As SIP is an IETF open internet standard most, if not all, main stream contact center vendors have embraced it as their vehicle to support multi-modal and multi-channel customer access.

Agent Access to Experts: This is another key SIP and IP telephony benefit of IP contact centers. Agents equipped with their own expert buddy list upon which they can leverage during important customer discussions is a major value add. Agents have been building ad hoc ways of reaching back into the enterprise for years. Many use public IM services to find experts within their own enterprise to address customer issues. This opens up security vulnerabilities, is not measurable and does not provide journaling. The effectiveness of the agent reaching into the enterprise for assistance is situational upon the agent´s experience and the size of their professional network. Enterprises can systematize this and measure it so knowledge workers can be part of an agent´s network. SIP is a standard approach to increasing an agent´s professional network so that customers can be up sold, or their time spent with an agent reduced and issue resolved with a single agent.

Corporate database integration: Contact center evolution is focused on expanding an agent´s pool of resources to include knowledge workers and linking agent interactions with business applications and process. Here is where IP telephony, SIP and web services come together to deliver value far greater than TDM systems could.

True, developers can write programs that turn calls into e-mail and/or audio files based upon TDM architecture. Developers can offer contact center agents the ability to communicate with customers via interactive desktops too. But to enable these communication services requires developers to cross communication silos of e-mail, v-mail, chat, instant messaging, etc., all with their own set of complexities. IP converges application silos onto one network, but the application integration is still too complex and brittle. To cross these silos developers often find themselves with an ?¢‚Ǩ?ìn-squared" problem to write to and most importantly to maintain. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìn-squared" problem is unsuitable for use as a foundation for business-critical processes.

The short term product improvements from contact center providers will enable a longer term goal of communications-enabled business process. Many of the above mentioned vendors are either offering or are planning to offer development platforms which abstract the complexities of their proprietary protocols as well as telephony specific APIs such as JTAPI, TAPI, CTI I and CTI II, SIP for web services/SOA. As web services are embraced, IT departments will then have the tools to reliably add communications to business process.

Communications software as a web service that can be massively consumed at a business level without the heavy burden of CTI-style integration, provided that web service is underpinned by an SOA, offers enormous opportunities for developers and enterprises. IT departments will be empowered to link communications to corporate databases, workflow and knowledge management software and other resources to support business decision-making.

IT departments will increasingly contribute to a discussion on how to improve and transform what a business does and how it does it. IT, system integrators and independent software vendors will be able to look at a business´s current applications and determine, based on business process demands, what elements need to be re-factored into discrete intelligent communication services. Gone are the days of writing communication applications without the knowledge, rules and assumptions of the business process.

Web services will tighten the linkage between agents and their enterprise back office systems. After an agent´s interaction with a customer and transaction is completed, the enterprise needs to know what occurred and to take action upon it. This linking of agents to back office systems and enabling a more structured way in which they can reach into the enterprise are opportunities that contact center managers are seizing today.

So