30 Minute Interview

“IP infrastructure has become a commodity”

Eyal Ben-Chanoch, Senior Vice President, System Engineering, Aspect Software spoke to Dominic K on unified communication and the future of contact centre technology.

Eyal Ben-Chanoch

Unified Communications in contact centres

Early risk-averse adopters pursued the competitive advantage the technology promised, followed by the small to middle enterprises and later by the large dominant players. Among the early adopters were small companies that needed the functionality but could not afford the expense of multiple stand-alone systems, as well as rapidly growing BPOs, which stood to benefit greatly from the flexibility a unified system offers. Over time, it became clear that a unified platform promotes innovation in the contact centre. Complex applications no longer required months to develop, and contact centre managers could develop these applications, test, deploy and fine-tune them in real time. This fact alone was not enough to convince existing customers of legacy products to migrate. However, the integrated IVR with the outbound and ACD functionality helped smooth the way by offering features that would otherwise cost significantly more if implemented as point solutions.

Today the technology has become mainstream with a large deployment footprint of hundreds of contact centres with hundreds of thousands of agent seats and IVR ports. The interesting fact is that with the flexibility of the architecture and the open interfaces the system provides, it is difficult to find two identical deployments. Each business operation determines how it prefers running its contact centre, and the technology complies – not the other way around.

An effective contact centre operation must have the flexibility to use its resources, whether human or technology, for more than one application. Call-by-call blending, unified desktop scripting and integrated intelligent routing are some of the tools provided by a unified platform.

Competitive advantage can be achieved with rapid application development where the time from idea to production is significantly shorter than if multiple disperse systems had to be coordinated and made to work together. Quality management, effective consolidated reporting and business analytics complete the package to allow managers get the most out of their contact centre operations.

Open Source IP in the contact centre

There is evidence to suggest that the IP infrastructure has become a commodity, meaning that there are many providers offering similar products that provide connectivity, bandwidth, quality-of-service delivery and security. This has a significant impact on contact centres as open source VOIP offerings enable a lower price point, which leaves the business with more capital to invest in higher-return business applications that ride on top of that commoditised infrastructure.

Open source IP refers to the utilisation of open source software within some of the voice product components. Our commitment to standards has been demonstrated in our SIP Interoperability Policy, supporting standards compliant SIP interfaces without reliance on proprietary extensions. In adopting the Asterisk Business Edition, we accomplished both, offering our customers a fully featured IP PBX that is developed and enhanced by hundreds of engineers throughout the world combined with superior support.

In addition to the basic functionality, which allows directing communications from one SIP user to another, there are some exciting capabilities that open a window for innovation. Most instant messaging users are familiar with the fact that they can view “who is online” at any given moment. This “presence” feature can be utilised for many new applications in the contact centre space: remote login, agent adherence and proactive and prioritised customer service, to name a few.

Trends in the contact centre space

There are two main business trends in the contact centre industry: one involves the need of more industries or sectors to establish contact centres to support their customers, and the second is that the customer’s profile is changing. The modern contact centre provides a superior service experience for a fraction of the price of in-person interaction. These savings are driving businesses to use automation and contact centre technologies while also trying to meet the challenge of retaining customers.

Self service integrated with Web interaction and cell phone-specific services will be the way this generation is slated to do business.