Axe the PBX in Your Call Center to Cut Costs
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.