Tag Archives: sip-trunking

Why Your Call Center Should Consider SIP Trunking

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Why Your Call Center Should Consider SIP TrunkingLet’s start with some basic definitions: “SIP” (Session Initiated Protocol) is a signaling protocol designed for initiating interactive user sessions over a data connection. A “trunk” is a circuit between switching systems that can carry a specific number of calls at a time. Your call center has a trunk today which carries the phone calls, and it is either a traditional “TDM Trunk” or a “SIP Trunk”. More and more call centers are switching over to the latter for cost savings, increased flexibility and advanced features.

What makes SIP trunking exciting is that you can have a single “pipe” from the call center to your carrier (and the worldwide phone system) that carries all your business traffic: Voice, video, and data.

Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf said:

It is my honest opinion that we have barely scratched the surface of the various applications to which SIP may be adapted. If we have seen 1% of the applications of SIP so far, then there are still 99% waiting to be invented, developed or deployed. The generality of SIP will make it a major workhorse of the Internet this century.

Read on to learn more about what SIP can do for your call center. Continue reading →

SIP Trunking and Call Center Call-Backs

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SIP Trunking and Call Center Call-Backs

We had a terrific webinar last week about call center trends for 2014. It’s available for on demand viewing here. (And if you’re interested in that topic, we have a related whitepaper available here.)

Just like the last few webinars, we had so many questions at the end, that I had to keep my answers really brief and we still ran out of time. (I have to remember to leave more time for questions!) One of the attendees asked about SIP trunking and how it relates to our call-back solution. I’d like to expand on that a bit here.

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Call Centers and SIP: 5 Must-Read Posts

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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 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.)

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