TuVox Speech Central

Recently, I was helping out on a project for one of our customers. The customer had on-premise IVRs at multiple call centers with multiple phone numbers from multiple carriers landing at each site.

The customer wanted a CTI-integrated, fully-redundant hosted speech solution to automate just a part of the call flow, with the existing call flows still being serviced by the respective IVRs.

And… all of this in the TDM world!!!

The sheer complexity of the solution boggles the mind. We were discussing crisscrossing tie-lines, bridging calls back-and-forth, with CTI servers at multiple locations. It was just too complicated. Of course, we figured it out, but it’s a very complex solution.

I was fantasizing how much easier things would have been if the IT group was open to (and had justified budget for) a VoIP based solution. Nowadays, even though most IT groups have some plans to roll out VoIP based solutions, many don’t have a comprehensive plan to migrate contact center infrastructure.

An all-IP solution for contact centers comes with the promise of universal routing, pre-treatment of calls, centralized voice portals, reduced infrastructure costs. Imagine not having to deal with terminating circuits, “take back and transfer” costs and expensive CTI infrastructure.

The key thing to remember is that companies must have an enterprise-wide vision to rollout the all-IP solution. In my experience, most companies start-off with a pilot projects with specific purpose and then future projects become dependent on the choices made previously. I have seen VoIP plans getting quickly derailed due to inability of legacy hardware to be upgraded or due to interoperability of the hardware/software choices from various vendors.

To start out on the right foot, it is crucial to align with the right IP open standards at the enterprise level. This will pave the path to the future possibilities via interoperability of newer applications. SIP has been becoming a dominant standard in the VoIP market place. Its popularity can be attributed to lower complexity, higher extensibility and better scalability.

Most IT organizations start off by first converting their corporate phone systems to an IP-PBX, followed by interconnecting call centers over VoIP thus avoiding take back and transfer and toll costs. This is usually followed by upgrading contact center software.

Today IP-based contact center software can also act as an IP-PBX thus negating the need for separate solutions. Some of the latest contact center software offers “virtual” contact server features to manage multiple contact center locations and a pool of remote agents into a single global real time queue. Gone are the days when agents at one location would sit idle due to poor load balancing across centers.

To further make the VoIP value prop appealing to the SMB market, some of the carriers are now offering SIP trunking capabilities which can provide carrier based SIP call routing to other IP or PSTN locations without the on-premise gateway hardware. This can really make linking new outsourced call center facility for those peak needs much faster and more cost efficient.

On the CTI front, most companies will admit that rolling out a multi-site traditional CTI solution is hard and expensive. I think SIP is going to make a huge impact on reducing the costs and complexity of rolling out multi-site, CTI-enabled call centers. Lately, a few SIP-enabled integrated contact center products and new protocols are emerging that show the promise of multi-site, multi-vendor integration, leveling the playing field. Imagine having a hosted call routing app that can pre-treat the calls, gather basic information and route these partially automated calls to any call center, any home agent or any outsourced location over VoIP along with a screen-pop with relevant captured information. All of these without a million dollar price tag.

Now that’s a compelling value prop to migrate contact center infrastructure to all-IP platform.

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