subject: Call Centers ramp up VoIP [print this page] VoIP has changed the way we communicateVoIP has changed the way we communicate. By using the internet as the medium by which voice and video travels, making long-distance and international calls can cost as much. If you're calling a fellow VoIP user, the call may cost nothing at all. Today, there are a number of VoIP providers that offer "free calls" worldwide. The beauty of VOIP is that it costs a lot less than plain telephones. VOIP or Voice over Internet Protocol uses the internet as the medium through which voice travels. It costs up to about 0 percent less than traditional telephone lines and can save a whole deal especially on long distance phone calls. In fact VOIP would practically cost nothing more in addition to your Internet service fees if it did not have to go through traditional phone carriers when connecting to conventional phone subscribers. If you were to connect to fellow VOIP users, it would not cost anything at all.
Almost half of the call centers in Asia will use voice over Internet Protocol systems by the end of next year, according to new research. A report from the Yankee Group says that despite VoIP adoption lagging behind earlier predictions, the call center market is embracing the technology. Forty-seven percent of call centers are expected to roll out VoIP by 2007, compared with just 17 percent in 2005. The key reasons for using the new technology are to manage multiple call center sites cheaply and flexibly, and to be able to place agents anywhere, including at home. The largest call centers--those with more than 500 seats--will see the greatest increase in VoIP adoption from now until the end of 2007, the analyst firm predicts. Though VoIP for the enterprise has been much hyped in recent years, Yankee Group said adoption has not met its predictions.
"This lackluster performance of VoIP products and services in the enterprise and more specifically in the contact center marketplace indicates that much more than technology and end-user perception are involved in driving the market for VoIP applications to a higher level," the report said. The biggest concerns for contact centers looking to roll out VoIP are costs, including fears of high upfront costs. Overall, respondents believed they would see savings of 6 percent to 15 percent from using the technology. Other concerns include voice quality a worry for 46 percent of the market, and security and reliability. Call centers are looking to buy VoIP systems from telecommunications companies and telephony hardware and software vendors rather than system integrators and value-added resellers, the report said. And though data-networking vendors are still in the minority, they've made progress in capturing market share, the analyst firm said.
The new VoIP platforms offer appealing features, such as a quick connect function. This feature helps to reduce abandon rates by connecting the call with the agent prior to connecting with the customer, thus eliminating the lengthy pauses associated with dialer-generated calls that many customers associate with incoming sales calls. Another function that many VoIP switches support is automatic recording, so a company can capture 100 percent of its calls. Consequently, calls can be automatically tagged and categorized for use to either streamline business actions or resolve disputes. Companies can also automate many of their internal processes, and use the customer intelligence captured to refine and enhance its customer service and sales initiatives. Contact center agents can be trained via best practice interactions, which are captured and later organized via the VoIP recording component. As a result, improvements in contact center service quality and frontline supervisor productivity become more possible.
The potential benefits that unified communications offers include improved productivity and lower operating costs. Employees will be able to respond to messages instantly regardless of where they originate; businesses will be able to cut their communications cost because they will rely on fewer components. Unified communications meshes well with the growing variety of user inputting devices. While there has a great deal of progress with using VoIP in the call center, there are still a few barriers to adoption. Many companies do not have the infrastructure to support the new devices. In many cases, CRM hardware is a long-term investment, one spanning several years, so companies may have to wait months or even years before being able to re-examine their infrastructure. Yet, those shortcomings are viewed as short-term issues. Many companies are now using VoIP to enhance their CRM deployment and many more will be joining them during the new year.
