VoIP enhances Home based Call Centers

Sure, voice over IP technology could help U.S. corporations move even more of their customer contact centers overseas than they have already. After all, VoIP, like the Internet itself, makes a user's physical location irrelevant. But the same technology can also help those same businesses keep more of that work at home. The reason: it'll let them extend the full capabilities of their contact centers to domestic workers who can't, or won't, commute to physically centralized facilities — not for $13 or $14 an hour. The change could come fairly quickly. A new Yankee Group report finds that 47 percent of agent seats in U.S. contact centers will have VoIP capability by the end of 2007. That's up from a mere 17 percent last year. The numbers are even higher with the real contact center pros, the ones that provide outsourced services to enterprises that don't want to do it themselves. In that group, 50 percent are already using VoIP, and 75 percent will in another 12 months, according to senior analyst Ken Landoline, author of the report. The report is the result of interviews with 351 "contact center decision makers." Transporting the voice call to the agent over IP links is actually the least important aspect of the advance. VoIP-based contact centers — the updated term, to reflect their broader capabilities, for what used to be called call centers — can work just as well, or perhaps even better, if the calls travel through a gateway and over the PSTN to agents, particularly if the agents are working remotely. What's more important is that the calls travel as IP packets through the heart of the system. That lets enterprises transform their contact centers from physical to virtual operations, in which agents can perform exactly the same functions no matter where they are located. "There is still a shadow of doubt about VoIP's quality of service," notes Landoline. "The real advantage of the VoIP application is the ability to use the unified application distributed throughout the enterprise." A VoIP system also gives those agents a lot more — and a lot more powerful — capabilities than they would have in traditional call centers using automated call distribution (ACD) equipment. The capabilities, based on IP-based features the older systems couldn't provide, are familiar. Presence awareness is one. Agents often receive calls they are not equipped to deal with, and need to bring in someone better qualified. "In a new VoIP system, they can look on screen at a buddy list and see who's available for the call, and just click on it," explains Landoline. "In the old days they would have had to call ahead to find out who is available, and then bridge in the call." VoIP also brings contact centers the usual benefits like unified voice mail, e-mail and fax capabilities, accessible through on-screen interfaces. And it allows managers to see, and gather data about, the status and performance of virtually any agent working for them anywhere, as easily as if they were all in the same building. It's that "agents anywhere" capability, as Landline puts it, that has companies excited. "More and more, people want to connect remote agents working from home, so that they can tap into some of the labor pools they haven't been able to use effectively in the past," he explains. "All they would need is a high-speed Internet connection and a telephone and a browser. You literally can work from your kitchen table on your laptop." A recent development will make it even easier for U.S. corporations to use domestic call agents. On August 18, Sprint Nextel began offering hosted contact center services, providing IP-based network and data center infrastructure. The service will allow enterprises to run VoIP call centers using their own agents, without having to shell out for equipment or facilities. The service, which runs on an Avaya platform, targets a variety of enterprises and needs, according to Susan Winter, product marketing manager. These include organizations whose customer contact needs vary by season or day of week. They could be financial services companies, particularly those with tax-related activities; companies with internal benefit enrollment deadlines; government agencies with weekly or monthly registration deadlines; and travel-related businesses. Companies just getting started are also potential customers. But Winter, too, sees the service's VoIP component as playing into the larger picture. "An industry trend is that there are going to be a lot more remote agents, with companies utilizing more domestic resources," she says. Being able to tap local workers without having to build a brick-and-mortar site is a significant advantage, she claims. The flexibility that remote work offers makes it easier to is get and retain high-quality agents, she adds. All of this could put a major damper on what seems almost a knee-jerk impulse among U.S. corporations to send customer contact work overseas. It's not just that it'll increase the pool of agents, by making available those who for one reason or another can't commute to centralized facilities. It's also that those agents can be in places like Idaho rather than India. That will help alleviate issues like "correcting" accents and overcoming cultural differences. It'll also change the cost equation. No longer will the choice be between equal-sized buildings in the U.S. and overseas. It'll be, rather, between smaller facilities in the U.S., with a lot of remote workers, and larger facilities overseas, where few workers are set up to work at home. That's important because even in developing countries, modern office buildings with state-of-the-art communications systems can be expensive. The impact on highly English-literate countries like India and the Philippines could be significant. Both have taken advantage of advanced telecom technology to transform themselves into major customer-contact outsourcing destinations. In a way, of course, it's just a new twist on an old story: what technology gives, technology can take away. The only difference now is how far it takes it, and how fast.