IP telephony enables the consolidation of application
infrastructure, centralizes contact center support staff,
simplifies the geographic reach of application logic
in multi-site call center environments, and creates
a virtual single pool of agents working as one center.
Two consolidation approaches are key. First, voice
server consolidation reduces capital expenditures
and the cost of ongoing maintenance and support. This
reduction in complexity makes the contact center more
agile when responding to customers. Second, virtual
site consolidation increases efficiencies by pooling
agent resources across the enterprise. It enables
staffing backup strategies between the central contact
center and branches.
Consolidating servers optimizes performance and reduces
costs. Yet the biggest cost reductions provided by
IP telephony come from simplifying the applications
and application infrastructure for a call center.
By taking advantage of low-cost, high-performance,
IP-based Wide Area Networks (WANs), applications are
deployed with simplicity throughout the enterprise.
Simpler application infrastructure enables the contact
center IT support staff to react to changing business
needs with increased speed and flexibility. So, the
contact center becomes more agile.
When a business has several contact centers, complexity
and cost can mar efficiency. Usually a single pool
of agents is more efficient than several smaller groups
(and the larger the agent pool, the higher the agent
occupancy level). When technology supports a single
pool, even more efficiency is gained. With IP telephony,
fewer trunks, fewer IVR system ports, and fewer Quality
Management system ports are needed to support a single
virtual call center than to support several smaller
call centers.
By using the right call management system, all contact
center activities across all sites are collapsed into
a single database application, giving consolidated
views of call center performance with a wide variety
of standard real-time, historical and integrated reports.
Regardless of physical location, contact centers
can be logically grouped. Multi-site intelligent call
routing can be used to predict and balance the traffic
load across the IP WAN. Enterprises that have branch
locations can tap into the branch workforce for temporary
contact center work and the branch offices can tap
into the main call centers for assistance during peak
periods. With the right IP telephony applications,
less-busy operations can back up other operations
with temporary help during the busiest periods
.
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