Call Centers and SIP: 5 Must-Read Posts

Call Center | 3 minute read

Replacing PRIs w SIPOne of the major forces reshaping the call center is the conversion to SIP. New data from Forrester shows the trend gaining strength. Their recent survey of IT decision makers shows that 55% of companies either have or are planning to replace PRIs with SIP trunks (see figure).

The SIP protocol covers all enterprise communication, not just contact center. However, for many companies, the journey to an all-SIP environment is starting with their call center.

It’s a logical subset to start with for two reasons:

  1. It’s somewhat isolated from the rest of the enterprise’s telecom usage.
  2. It inherently involves voice traffic coming or going from the PSTN, so there is a good case for lowering telco costs.

In our post, SIP is Seeping into Call Centers, we talked about how a SIP-enabled call center can add 3rd party enhancements (like speech analytics), implement call-attached data (that actually works), and add advanced features like Web Cal-Backs (formerly Visual IVR) and virtual queuing.

If you’re interested about call centers and SIP, here are 5 must-read articles (well actually, 4 must-reads and 1 must-watch, to be accurate.)

1) SIP Trunks and Contact Centers

By Eric Krapf

Eric Krapf is the Program Co-Chair of the Enterprise Connect events. They recently held a webinar discussing SIP and the call center featuring Art Schoeller, a principal analyst at Forrester Research and one of our 12 analysts to watch. It’s available on demand here. (That webinar includes the data behind this post’s cover image.)

Eric writes about cost savings from SIP:

[they] come from more efficient traffic engineering and bandwidth savings as well as potentially better rates from the provider.

Read More …

2) Rethinking the Call Center

By Jon Arnold

Jon Arnold is also one of our 12 analysts to watch and often writes about the call center. In this article, part of his “Rethinking the Call Center” series, he discusses cost savings:

… when VoIP is coupled with SIP trunking … the contact center saves … by cutting back on toll-free numbers, as VoIP enables click-to-call, which customers can initiate from their PCs or smartphones.

Regarding the advanced functionality, he writes:

In terms of enhancing the customer experience, SIP trunking also enables HD audio, which can be a real differentiator …

You need a subscription to read the article, but it is free.

Read More …

3) Webinar: The Ticketmaster Success Story

This Genesys webinar features Elizabeth Grotto, SVP Global Contact Center Technology for Ticketmaster. She recently oversaw a complete conversion to SIP. She talks about how Ticketmaster achieved 60% decrease in annual maintenance costs and ROI in 18 months by doing so. It’s well worth watching.

4) SIP vs TDM for the Contact Center

This post is from the blog of Spoken Communications, a cloud-based call center provider. They have a number of good articles on their blog. This one in particular is succinct and cites some good industry data.

What does [SIP] mean for the contact center? An easier, more reliable, less expensive way to make voice calls and the data that so often must accompany them.

Read More …

5) How is SIP Changing the Contact Center?

This article from Call Centre Helper asks a panel of experts about the impact of SIP:

[SIP] is allowing contact centers to operate more efficiently as transfers, conferencing, one-button recording, queue visibility and caller details are provided by a rich client application…

– Dave Paulding, Regional Sales Director, Interactive Intelligence

Claims that an investment in SIP can generate its own ROI need to be looked at carefully. Because while it’s true that, for example, SIP trunking can be cheaper and a great deal more flexible than traditional TDM trunking, SIP by itself won’t deliver new functionality.

Tony Hesketh, Director, Solutions Consulting, Aspect

Through its native ability to support collaborative multichannel IP communications, SIP also enables operators to rapidly set up innovative services such as web click-to-call, IM with presence and voice-enhanced e-commerce.

William Gray, Managing Director, Macfarlane

“As SIP is an open standard, it interfaces with any other SIP-based platform, device or application. The resulting freedom of choice gives greater flexibility, easier integration and faster deployment.”

Charles Lee, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent

Read More …

 

Fonolo Resource cover image

Discover the Contact Center Trends That Matter in 2024

Dig into industry trends and discover the changes that matter to your business in the year ahead.

Read it Now

Discover the Contact Center Trends That Matter in 2024

Contact Center Trends 2024
Read it Now
Fonolo Resource cover image

Discover the Contact Center Trends That Matter in 2024

Read it Now

See Fonolo in Action

Select the type of demo you'd like.

By continuing to browse our website, you agree to the use of cookies for providing our services, marketing purposes, and analytics. To understand more about how we use cookies and ensure the safety of your data, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

Accept and Close