Voice over IP

VoIP: it’s ready for you, but take care when you choose

They say that all of the benefits of voice over IP have come true and that it is now really a technology you can trust to deliver savings and efficiency.  Our experts are here to aid your choice…and to make sure that you don’t make an expensive mistake

How to buy VoIP wisely

VOIP has been around for nearly 10 years now in many different guises.  Only in the last five to seven years has there been a concerted effort to implement it in the workplace. This has been driven mainly by the drop in data bandwidth prices as well as an increase in a concept called quality of service (QoS), which guarantees a certain speed of data for certain services, in this case, voice.  Gone are the days of broken voices, jitter and lost calls.  On a VOIP circuit with QoS, the sound is crystal clear and indiscernible from a regular analogue call.
In addition, the major carriers across Europe have been spending huge amounts to build massive internal networks to support VoIP.  They have, therefore, been promoting and encouraging companies to jump on the VoIP bandwagon.

Benefits  I've come across some vendors touting VoIP as something tantamount to a miracle cure.  Let's face it, any solution will need to be compared to your specific needs.  However, there are some fundamental differences to VoIP which translate into strong enablers and therefore, significant benefits to call centres, regardless of their size and operation. Three of the most popular reasons to invest in VOIP are:

• The "Martini" effect  Your business will have access to staff anytime, anyplace anywhere as long as they have a broadband connection. This is, by far, the strongest reason to adopt VoIP.
• Savings  A lot of carriers may tell you that VoIP will save you loads of money on call costs.  This may be true, but do the analysis carefully.  My experience is that the costs of providing the bandwidth increase to allow VoIP into your network could offset the savings (some carriers now charge less than 1p a minute). 
• Cheaper  Major telephone equipment makers have been pricing their IP products cheaper than  traditional products. This is no mistake. They want you to move into the VoIP market too.  Their motive is the ease with which they can provide future services.   But be careful.  Some deployments have hidden costs (such as new router costs and/or power over Ethernet) and this can vary depending on the site.

How to buy  Even if you have a traditional system, there will likely be upgrade options which will allow you to take advantage of VoIP without spending a lot.  If your company has a small IT team and your call centre won't be needing any significant integration into your systems, then Centrex-type VoIP might be a good bet.  Just make sure you're not committed to a lengthy contract, as this industry is moving very quickly, and new companies and opportunities are sprouting up all the time.

By Gene Reynolds, consultant with the independent integrator, CC


They’re not all the same

NOT all IP telephony options are the same -- some promise more than they can actually deliver.  So, choose carefully if you want to avoid an expensive investment that you will have to replace in two or three years.  At present there are essentially two types:

Hybrid IP-PBXs This is an attempt by conventional PBX manufacturers to offer IP telephony.   A “hybrid” can be described as a stopgap.  The IP component is offered as an adaptor and provides a compromise between a traditional PBX and IP-PBX.  However, although easy to implement, they still rely on proprietary hardware and have very limited integration possibilities.  In practice, therefore, they offer little more than a conventional PBX.

Software-based "pure" IP PBXs This is the only one that can add real value to a call centre as it is the only offering that allows you to integrate your telephony functionality into your existing back office applications, such as your contact management systems and databases.  The key benefits of such a system are:

• Set-up inbound and outbound call management and call routing,
• Manage sales campaigns and/or multiple franchise support,
• Set-up individual and/or multiple scripts dependent on campaign requirements
• Set-up virtual call centres at remote locations
• Implement call recording without the need for more hardware
• Enables moves and changes without any re-cabling
• Can be included as part of the IT maintenance contract
• Easy integration with existing applications and databases

The beauty of software-based systems is that as they are licence-based, so they place no limits on future growth.  Starting at around £2500 for 10 users, systems such as ours can grow indefinitely as the business grows.  Centres that employ more than 250 agents are now readily adopting the technology as it provides greater flexibility, more control on their operation and ultimately saves money.

By Guenter Junk, CEO,  at Swyx Solutions


Distributing the load

THESE days, everyone is talking about virtual call centres for larger sites -- how agents can work from home, how cost-efficient it is and the improved service.  What is not mentioned is how the smaller call centres, and even SMEs, fit into this picture. 
In-house vs. hosted  Premise-based vendors might have you believe that having VoIP in-house is the same as having it hosted.  And while VoIP will certainly reduce your costs, the hosted model is significantly more cost-effective.

Why?   With in-house equipment, maintenance costs remain.  You still need the servers, call-manager programs and numerous software upgrades.  You have a large capital outlay and can’t predict your monthly costs.   With hosted, the service provider handles all this.  You have one flat monthly fee, and the provider deals with the equipment, upgrades and technical issues.  Features can be added by making one phone call instead of re-integrating everything yourself.

And while in theory you can have agents working from home on both models, it is complicated to set this up using the in-house model.  With hosted, all you need is a broadband connection.
Why VoIP?  When making your choice, besides costs, consider technology, ease of use and customisation.  Of course, the hosted option allows small- and medium-sized businesses to handle calls when employees are unavailable.  But what are the other tangible benefits?

• Companies like ours have call centres around the world so that, with overlapping time zones, locations can be contacted 24/7 by one number, at one price.  Smaller businesses can use an auto-attendant to queue calls when busy rather than miss sales. 
• On-demand seats.  Say you have a product recall and your call centre is inundated.  With hosted VoIP, you can quickly scale up, adding temp workers.  In-house or traditional methods require extra lines and complicated integration. 
• Customer satisfaction.  VoIP provides an intelligent, dynamic routing system that can send calls to the most idle agent, to all agents or to your best agent.  You decide.  Caller notifications allow you to direct a difficult customer to a manager, and real-time reporting means supervisors can ensure KPIs are being met.
• Security.  Where is the safest place to keep your recorded data?  A secure connection with VoIP is no longer an issue; you only need to decide whether to keep your data off-site or on-premise.  And disaster recovery is no longer a concern; your site can easily be shifted and your customers will never know the difference.
• Employee calibre.  Your call centre is only as good as your employees.  Hosted VoIP gives you the flexibility of allowing staff to work from home.  You would no longer be dependent on the local resource pool.  Virtual call centres are a reality. 
• Hosting means an inherent carrier-grade service – which would be very expensive in house.

The reality of VoIP  What vendors of on-premise call centre services often don’t tell you is that your service enablers – VoIP, in this case – should operate seamlessly in the background.  You shouldn’t need to worry about upgrades, maintenance or fluctuating capital outlay.  You need to be able to focus on your business – 24/7 customer care, on-demand seats and customer satisfaction – and let the experts do their job: enabling all of this to happen.

By David Bukovsky, vice president of products for BroadSoft


Don’t wait for problems

BECAUSE of the sensitivity of VoIP to network performance and delay, it's critical to understand and constantly monitor VoIP as well as overall network performance.  Managing and understanding specific network and VoIP metrics will improve the ability to accurately diagnose and resolve performance problems before user complaints or downtime.
Typically when implementing a new technology, such as VoIP, many network administrators take one of two approaches.  Many install new technologies and then address performance problems as they arise; others anticipate that VoIP will increase their bandwidth needs and upgrade capacity.
These steps, however, may not effectively address the potential VoIP problems.  Deployment issues can cause users to resist using the new technology.  In addition, the disruption of VoIP services directly hits the bottom line by halting business activities.
It’s critical to determine how the network will handle the new VoIP traffic and identify any changes that need to be made to support it by carrying out a site survey.  Understand your overall bandwidth demand and application performance and set benchmarks for acceptable network performance.
An analysis tool that tracks, stores, and analyses long-term activity will define what is considered normal for a particular VoIP environment.
The insights on network and application performance gained from the initial survey site and by continual monitoring of the added VoIP traffic will help you to intelligently configure alarms on the monitoring tool to alert IT administrators when VoIP performance deviates from the norm.  It is also important to maintain a database of call detail records (CDRs) from which reports can be generated for management or service providers.
Here are my top five tips to ensure VoIP best practice: implement quality of service (QoS) prioritisation; monitor the roll out of VoIP to ensure a positive user experience; conduct a site survey; proactively monitor VoIP activity -- don't wait for a problem to occur; automate problem resolution.

By Ian Cummins, European Sales Director Network Instruments


There’s even more

ONCE data and telephony are part of the same IP network, there are more benefits than just reduced call costs.
Internal call costs decrease to nothing, voicemail or conferencing are cheaper and additional services – such as call recording, quality monitoring and changes to call routing – can be more flexible and responsive.

You can turn them on and off and modify them according to demand and their management no longer needs to be outsourced to third parties. 

Staff attrition in call centres with VoIP is generally lower because agents find their working environment more pleasant.  For example, there is greater consistency in the user interface -- typically web-based or Microsoft front-end applications -- making it easier to access and use relevant data on calls and to record and store important customer information.
The agent’s laptop or PC can be used as a phone, which means they can work anywhere.  We have made use of this, in effect creating a global virtual team of 9,000 people.
Voice and data information can be stored and retrieved together, making it easier to monitor performance and judge how best to train agents.  Dependent on the historical performance of your call centre, improvement can be dramatic.
VoIP can improve your agents’ ability to deliver first contact resolution of customer queries through better access to information, leading to a significant impact to brand reputation, and the bottom line, since total cost of ownership is typically 20-25 per cent lower than a comparable TDM systems.
Maintenance costs are lower because all the technologies are in one “box”.
Finally, IP means that start-ups and small- to medium-sized businesses can offer the same quality of service as their larger competitors.  Instead of making large upfront investments, they can pay on use for hosted or managed services from the national telcos, service providers and specialists, such as our own Merchants Consulting.

By Paul Scott, line of business director – customer interactive solutions, Dimension Data UK


Five top tips

NOW that the technical issues holding back the widespread adoption of IP telephony -- such as poor voice quality, limited routing and queuing features and security issues -- have been resolved, VoIP is the de facto choice.
Here are my five top tips to follow when considering a pure or hybrid IP-based system:

Ensure your network is ready It must have the speed and capacity necessary to carry voice, as well as the ability to implement a quality of service (QoS) policy.  The QoS should give voice priority over other non time-critical network traffic and, where practical, use VLAN (virtual local area network) to separate voice traffic completely.

Build for the future Technology changes so quickly that it is essential that your IP system is scalable and can keep pace with your call centre.  Some are opting for a mix of IP and traditional telephony; for these it is crucial that the move between the two is seamless.
Make sure that your system can offer everything from the ability to answer, prioritise, route and report on incoming customer contacts to outbound capabilities, workforce optimisation, interactive voice response, performance optimisation and support for a multiple customer contact channel.  You may not need these now, but you never know when you will need them in the future.

Remember security Follow the configuration best practices in the in-built security that comes with most IP systems.   Study the applications themselves, scrutinise things like authentication, access control levels, encryption and users actions.   And always monitor remote users and portable devices.

Choose the right headset You can’t simply use a traditional headset.  Depending on your IP system, you can choose from an IP hard phone headset, a softphone headset or a headset that can handle both traditional phone calls as well as IP.   It is important to note IP telephony sends information using twice the bandwidth of traditional phone lines, which means that the sound quality is clearer and richer.  Therefore, you must have a good quality headset with wideband or hi-fi sound.   As always, ensure that your headsets comply with the legislation which says noise levels must not exceed 87 dB(A).

Training There is no point is using IP if you are not going to train staff on how to use it effectively.  They need to understand how to operate it, how to enter the system securely as well as how to diagnose and solve equipment and network problems. 

By Dale Peters, regional managing director, GN UK and Ireland


Getting rid of IP telephony hang-ups

NEARLY four in 10 (37 per cent) of big companies use IP telephony to communicate to customers -- whether through in house or outsourced call centres -- according to independent research we recently commissioned.
While this shows strong take up, 25 per cent of companies only use IP telephony, or VoIP, internally and 20 per cent don't use it at all, implying that the potential impact on caller experience and customer service is significant.
Our research showed that more than half (53pc) of enterprises are concerned about or experiencing call quality issues, perhaps highlighting some remaining hang ups about VoIP technology.


We have found that, once installed, IP telephony systems often run into problems where the conversational and listening quality is inexplicably poor.  Echo, speech distortion and noise levels still prevail, which can have an undesirable impact on business image and performance.
Most consumers can recount frustrating conversations they have had with their bank or credit card provider.  Either they can't hear what the agent is saying because of low volume or there is a hiss on the line.  This may be down to their IP telephony system.
Using traditional software tools may suggest that the network is working fine, but doesn't allow investigation into the conversation and listening quality, leaving customers exasperated and with a poor opinion of the customer service. 
Companies selling IP telephony offer “quality of service” (QoS) tools to check that the network is working properly.  But a green light from these is not enough.  Quality of Experience depends not only on the IP network but also on the voice application performance, which QoS tools do not assess.
It’s like a parcel tracking system.  You can check that your package has left the depot and when it arrives.  But there is no way of knowing if the contents are damaged until it is opened.
We believe that measuring the quality of experience is integral to a consistent and acceptable call centre user experience.  Without such software monitoring the technical contents of all voice traffic IP telephony equipment can be deemed to be operating correctly using standard quality assurance tools, yet voice quality can be poor and the user experience can suffer. It is imperative to be able to pinpoint issues affecting user experience in real time, wherever they are in the system, so that they can be resolved with minimum impact.
As IP telephony becomes commonplace, ensuring that voice data is correctly transported from one point to another is only part of the picture.  Without quality of experience software, businesses and consumers will continue to experience frustration with the technology.  And with unified communications about to bring video into the mix, quality of experience will come even closer to the fore.

By Anthony Finbow, CEO of Psytechnics