Call center adoption of
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) enables the decoupling of telephony and call transport from the applications that manage caller interactions. These applications include
call routing, call queuing, call reporting, call recording, dialing, and interactive voice response (IVR). SIP allows call center software applications to participate in call management and to exchange relevant call data with other applications using simple and powerful open Internet protocols. SIP relegates communications hardware to a commodity while transferring business value to
call center software applications.
To implement full-featured contact center functionality, automatic call distribution (ACD) software traditionally relies on a PBX for a number of media manipulation functions in addition to call handling. Such media manipulation is required to implement IVR, call queuing, call recording, conferencing, and dialing capabilities. Off-the-shelf IP media servers now provide these functions, all of which can be accessed through SIP and open media manipulation protocols such as MRCP and MSCML. The adoption of SIP and SIP-controlled media servers offer a brand new paradigm for enterprise communications. In fact, they render the PBX obsolete!
Off-the-shelf media gateways and media servers can be used to create a "midpoint" between callers and agents. Located at a voice point of presence (VPOP), this midpoint can be controlled through SIP and open media management protocols to implement the necessary media manipulation functions for IVR, call queuing, recording, monitoring, dialing, and conferencing applications. Using midpoint architecture, it is possible to implement a full-featured SIP call center environment as a pure software application, relying only on off-the-shelf networking elements for call and media management. With this configuration, call center agents can access any telephony function they need (hold, call transfer, conference, etc.) directly and use inexpensive SIP phones to receive voice calls.
Deploying such midpoint architecture for telephony and media manipulation dramatically simplifies the delivery of call center software-as-a-service (SaaS). The VPOPs can be housed in the carrier's network or at the enterprise premises and connected to a hosted contact center application running in the cloud. Midpoint architecture also gives contact centers the business flexibility to work with any carrier, telephony or transport of their choice.
A single application center can connect to multiple VPOPs each located in the geography of a call center's choice. The calls stay at the edge close to the callers, eliminating the need to backhaul voice to the hosted application center. This makes it easy to deploy global call centers inexpensively.
Transera, a provider of SaaS virtual call center software, has incorporated a patented approach to midpoint management into its software.
While multi-sourcing - the mixing of an enterprise's own call center agents and those outsourced from one or more third parties - delivers tangible economic benefits and business flexibility, it presents some new challenges. It can lead to islands of isolation with each contact center location operating independently, using its own unique infrastructure, business processes and best practices. The result is maladies such as inconsistent customer service, fragmented resources and uneven performance. And if businesses lose the ability to manage multiple contact centers effectively, the costs can outweigh the gains.
Ideally, every company wants the best of both worlds - the competitive advantages of call center multi-sourcing without sacrificing the business benefits of centralized control. The solution lies in virtual call centers - centralized management of distributed resources normalizing the variations across multiple contact centers, while delivering consistent functionality and performance. Businesses are already adopting virtualization across a wide spectrum of business applications and IT infrastructure. Modern data centers employ virtual machines, storage networks, Web services and service oriented architectures (SOA) to gain centralized control of distributed resources. The same benefits can accrue to call centers that adopt similar virtualization solutions for customer interaction management.
In the world of call centers, metrics drive the daily operations - call volumes, call wait times, call handle times, agent staffing levels, sales conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores, etc. Continuous call center improvement comes from listening to customer calls, assessing first call resolution, measuring agent performance, and then using this information to improve agent recruiting, training and staffing, IVR menus, CRM knowledge bases, and other business processes. The old adage - you can't improve what you can't measure - applies in spades to call center operations. Supervisors live (or die) by key call center performance indicators (KPIs). Visibility is everything. Call centers that produce the best results and provide the highest quality customer service know what is going on - in real-time, not in hindsight. "Actionable intelligence, now!" should be the mantra of every call center manager.
Fortunately, there are call center software solutions that restore visibility and allow enterprises to regain control over distributed call center operations. Office Depot, a global retailer of office supplies, is a case in point. They mix agents from in-house call centers and multiple call center outsourcers and combine them to form a single global virtual call center. Any agent anywhere can answer any call from any customer anywhere in the world - period. Office Depot call center managers know the exact status of every call and every agent regardless of their location or affiliation. They can perform call monitoring on any call in real-time and record any customer interaction for later inspection. They can also hire and fire call center outsourcers at will based on their performance. Office Depot has been using Transera's SaaS virtual call center software (Transera Virtual Call Center Solution) for more than three years to run their contact centers.
http://www.transerainc.com/transera/home/multi-source-call-center-solutions.php
Businesses both big and small are required in today's economy to serve customers globally. Customer expectations are high and companies have to constantly compete by delivering excellent sales, service and support, often around the clock. But providing
quality global customer service across time zones is costly and difficult to manage and implement.
Many businesses are forced to balkanize their customer service operations with multiple isolated call centers each replete with a full suite of contact center technology investments. Such investments have to be tailored to the expected call volume peaks at each site leading to waste and overspending. Moreover, enterprises are unable to share agents across call centers when call volumes overwhelm capacity in one call center while agents sit idle in another. They can't deploy follow-the-sun operations that allow staffing of contact center agents in the time zone where it is convenient. Worse, they can't provide consistent service to their customers regardless of time and place.
Fortunately software solutions are now available that enable the inexpensive deployment of a single virtual contact center across the globe. Ideally, a solution should decouple telephony and media manipulation functions from the contact center application. This allows the application to be located centrally and shared globally while the telephony and media manipulation functions are dispersed geographically close to the callers.
The most effective solutions also exploit off-the-shelf media gateways and media servers to implement the set of telephony and media manipulation functions needed for full-featured contact centers. Enterprises locate these inexpensive gateways and servers in the geography where the calls originate and connect them to their local telecom carrier on one side and their global IP network on the other. Calls originating on a local carrier land on the nearest gateway-server complex for call treatment, call queuing, call routing and automatic call distribution to any agent connected to the global IP network under the control of the single virtual contact center application. Call monitoring, recording and transfer using the same gateway-server complex is also highly desirable.
One company that aims to deliver on the promise of a true one-world virtual contact center is Transera. The company offers a patented virtual call center solution that uses distributed off-the-shelf gateways and servers to dramatically reduce the cost of capital, while enabling the sharing of agents across globally distributed call center locations.
Contact center technology evolved around the telephony switch simply because it was already present at the customer site before the
call center arrived. Typically, the switch vendor delivers a proprietary automatic call distribution (ACD) application which works only with their proprietary switch. The proprietary PBX and associated phones cost $1,000-$1,200 per agent on top of the $1,000-$1,200 per agent for the ACD. Various other contact center applications such as IVR, call routing, quality management (QM), outbound dialing, workforce management (WFM) and customer relationship management (CRM) have to integrate with the switch through a proprietary computer-telephony integration (CTI) link to get access to call and agent states and data. All of this equipment and software is complex to integrate and expensive to maintain. In fact, it is the bane of a call center's existence and forces customer service decisions to be constrained by technology rather than driven by business need.
Now there is a better way. Get rid of the proprietary PBX and phones and replace them with Open SIP telephony and inexpensive SIP phones. Junk the on-premises ACD and replace it with an on-demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) virtual call center. Finally, replace expensive PRI trunks with cost-effective SIP trunks from a carrier. Moving from proprietary premises technology to open SIP and SaaS technology can yield significant cost savings which accrue from reductions in telephony, telecom, software and operations costs. Telephony costs can be reduced by 90%, telecom costs by 10%, software costs by 40% and operations by 25%. These are savings no business can ignore.
Most virtual ACD systems require customers to route calls to their data center for call treatment and queuing, and connect calls to agents by backhauling the calls to the call center sites. A more sophisticated approach is to use off-the-shelf inexpensive Session Border Controllers (SBC) and IP Media Servers (MS) combined with SIP trunks provided by a carrier for VoIP transport. The virtual ACD software would then be located in the SBC/MS complex at the enterprise's premises to implement the call treatment, call queuing, call recording, call monitoring and conferencing features needed for contact center operations. This architecture eliminates the need to route calls to a hosted ACD application center and backhaul the voice traffic to the agent locations. Not having to backhaul voice traffic saves $50-100 per agent per month in transport costs. These savings are in addition to the other savings resulting from adoption of open SIP telephony.
Transera uses its patented midpoint management software to enable the solution described above, providing significant savings to its customers.
So what are you waiting for? Axe that proprietary PBX and embrace open SIP telephony to enter the open communications and SaaS world of the 21st century.
Contact centers typically invest about $2,500 per agent in capital and $500 in annual maintenance for the call center technology that handles call queuing and automatic call distribution to agents. In other words, to deploy a 100-seat contact center, businesses need to shell out $250,000 in upfront capital and $50,000 in annual maintenance. On top of this, they have to pay for ongoing call center operations and hardware and software upgrades every few years. Many businesses do not wish to lock up such capital in call center technology purchases and, in addition, lack the requisite operational staff to manage implementations of this complexity. Call centers are looking for ways to benefit from the technology without suffering the headaches of owning and managing it. Furthermore, companies only want to pay for the technology that they actually use rather than lay out large sums of cash for call center systems that often sit idle or under utilized.
Hosted call centers may appear to be the answer. Hosting current contact center solutions often means simply moving the boxes businesses used to house on their premises to the data centers of a hosting vendor. This is a false promise to cure IT headaches. Hosting this way usually implies dedicated software and hardware as well as staff to manage it all on an enterprise's behalf. There are no scale or call center virtualization advantages and hence no real cost savings. And frequently, a hosting solution like this adds additional transport costs because calls have to be backhauled from the hosting vendor's data center to an enterprise's call centers.
In contrast, on-demand contact centers deployed as software-as-a-service (SaaS) are built ground up as multi-tenant software applications. These virtual call centers use Web services that scale and reside on an inexpensive shared infrastructure. On-demand call centers typically offer browser-based user interfaces for call center agents and supervisors, reducing their desktop footprint and hence support costs. On-demand contact centers commonly make extensive use of open source technologies and commercial off-the-shelf networks, storage and servers to reduce acquisition and call center operations costs. They also wrap their applications with contact center service management software and utilities to reduce monitoring, diagnosis and break-fix costs.
True on-demand contact centers deliver real cost savings for businesses without sacrificing functionality or feature set. Enterprises can't get these savings by simply having someone else host and manage traditional on-premise call center solutions. For an example of a SaaS virtual contact center solution, check out Transera.
Companies that target consumers with direct marketing campaigns containing offers to respond via a toll-free number face a formidable challenge. The responses flood in from the targeted customers in short intervals soon after the campaign is launched. This is a great problem to have because it means the marketing campaign is generating the desired call volumes. The challenge lies in routing these calls to the most qualified call center agents who can convert the leads into sales, while keeping abandoned calls to a minimum.
Direct marketers typically rely on call center outsourcers (in addition to their own agents) to handle calls on their behalf. However, they face a fundamental tradeoff in terms of staffing versus service levels – paying for more call center agents reduces wait times for callers but also increases expenses. Given the unpredictability of consumer response to specific campaigns, it is hard to commit to strict staffing levels at each chosen contact center outsourcer. Call center outsourcers try to staff their call centers with adequate agents to respond to the varying demands of their clients but face the challenge of maintaining desired service levels across multiple customers. Often companies pay for dedicated agents for an expected call volume and resort to shared agent pools (agents that take calls on behalf of multiple clients) to handle overflows. Many companies simply allocate the incoming traffic across multiple call center outsourcers (known as multi-sourcing) in fixed ratios and hope for the best.
Ideally, call center agents should be rated in real-time based on their service levels and performance. Calls can then be routed to the best performing agents while maintaining the desired service levels. This approach takes the guesswork out of call routing and levels the playing field across call center vendors. It forces outsourcers to compete for their client's business by staffing their call centers adequately with the most skilled agents they can hire and train.
When call center outsourcers compete in real-time for the business of their clients, everyone wins: call center customers are assured best performance across their vendors and the outsourcers are assured more business from their clients if they outperform their competition. Enterprises can choose the set of contact center outsourcers they wish to do business with and keep everyone honest. Transera is an example of a company that enables this approach to intelligent call routing. Transera’s Scorecard Routing software overlays the existing call centers of outsourcers and integrates with their current operational data to compute and compare their real-time agent performance. Let the games begin!
We offered a webinar on this topic on Friday, June 25th with our customer Bob Reilley of Aon Integramark. If you’d like to view the replay, click here.
Multi-sourcing is the disciplined provisioning and blending of business and Information Technology services from the optimal set of internal and external providers in the pursuit of business goals.
- Wikipedia
In the context of call centers, multi-sourcing means using a mix of agents - some as employees and others provided by call center outsourcers. As they relates to call centers, the operative words in the definition above are 'blending' and ‘optimal.' Blending connotes pools of call center agents who can perform the same function regardless of whether they are employees or outsourced providers. Optimal implies efficient and effective use of these agents regardless of their affiliation.
But first we must ask - why have a multi-sourced call center? Just as water flows to the lowest level, work migrates to the lowest cost labor market. Call Center outsourcing when coupled with off-shoring can deliver dramatic cost savings in call center operations. Beyond cost savings, companies can benefit from the outsourcer's core competencies in recruiting, training and retaining agents as well as their best practices know-how. Outsourcers can also provide the additional agents multi-source call centers need to deliver consistent service levels, especially when seasonal variations in call volumes demand extra resources.
However, it is best to keep some call center agents in-house. Those agents can stay close to the customer sales and service processes and effectively provide a basis for benchmarking outsourcers. It is also prudent, if not imperative, to use more than one call center outsourcer. This gives enterprises the business flexibility to negotiate competitive contracts and avoid critical outages if certain outsourcers fail to deliver on their commitments. Plus, call center outsourcers perform better when they compete for an enterprise's business.
Multi-sourcing is widely practiced these days by companies large and small across many industries including retail, telecommunications, financial services, travel and technology. As an example, this short video describes how Wirefly uses Transera's virtual call center software to transform global call center operations.
(NOTE: To view the entire
Wirefly video case study a short registration is required.)
The key to success with call center multi-sourcing is managing outsourcer performance with constant vigilance on their adherence to negotiated service level agreements (SLAs). Companies such as Office Depot, Wirefly and AON have mastered this game with Transera's virtual call center software for multi-source call centers.