By Praful Shah, VP of Corporate Development, EagleACD

Information Week reports that the average company spends around four percent of its total revenues on IT (a much higher percentage in information-intensive organizations)making it often one of the largest cost items in an annual budget. As a result, IT and networking resources have typically been regarded as costs that need to be minimized. For a call center, one of the most effective ways to reduce costs is call routing.

The challenge for call center operators is to select the call routing applications that best meet companys specific needs. A company with a single, telephony-only contact center must apply different routing techniques and technologies than a company with a multisite, multiskill, multichannel operation. But no matter what are companys businesses requirements are, contemporary routing applications offer ways to build companys bottom line. The lack of this feature means that calls will not automatically be routed over the most economical facility. This will likely lead to higher transmission costs.

Businesses need a communications system that intelligently routes calls via the most cost effective path without impacting business processes. This requires the voice services platform to be able to use any type of media and technology available to route business calls based on priorities related to user profile, tariff, network availability, and line quality.

Techniques such as automatic route selection (ARS) and least cost routing (LCR) allow most of the traditional and newer voice solutions to route calls along the most cost-effective paths. These techniques must adapt to the nature of voice communication, which is constantly changing and increasingly using corporate data networks. Voice communication requires real time monitoring for routing decisions to be accurate, cost effective, and transparent to the end user.

Service providers such as EagleNet have now focused to a customer-centric approach. Call centers used to be considered cost centers; companies now see the potential of turning their contact centers into profit centers. Contact centers are now used much more as strategic elements in running a business. SBR (skilled based routing) helps to make this possible by establishing a direct relationship between the clients needs and the agents skills. Whereas ACDs were introduced simply to reduce costs, SBR can help to generate profits. ACDs transferred calls to any available agents or to holding queues until an agent became available. SBR transfers each call to the specific agent who can best serve the customer and significantly reduces waiting time for calls that cannot be answered immediately.

To handle incoming calls effectivelyCall Coverage feature automatically redirects calls based on preset criteria, such as time of day or type of call; Send All Calls allows users to temporarily redirect all incoming calls to coverage; Priority Queuing, Back Up Alerting, Timed Reminders, and Attendant Vectoring are very helpful and Night-Service Console provides choices for incoming callers after business hours.

As it does for multichannel routing applications, the business communications platform that supports a network-level routing application can make pre-call routing much more effective. It is now possible to take advantage of information and routing capabilities in the contact server to make intelligent routing decisions at the network level, before an incoming call leaves the cloud. Integrating the contact server with the carrier network does this. The carrier queries the contact server for routing instructions. In an enterprise routing environment, the contact server has instant access to detailed information about every site on the network. That information includes call volumes, queue lengths, talk time, andsignificantlyagent skill sets. In a multichannel routing environment, the contact server is also aware of traffic coming in over e-mail and Web channels, so workloads are more accurately balanced.

Dynamic Call Routing is a traffic management system that gives a centralized, highly automated way to monitor and control trunk traffic offered to the network. This software and hardware augment the existing traffic management capabilities inherent in the intelligence of the switching nodes in the network.

In summary, understanding the power of call routing is very important and critical for the success of call center operation. IP hosted service providers such as EagleNet can help call center operators in optimizing call routing applications.

Praful Shah is a seasoned telecom professional with diversified telecom management and operations experience. Currently, he is the VP-of Corporate Development at EagleACD. He has held increasingly responsible positions, first in R&D at Johnson & Johnson (where he was awarded a patent for his work) and Bell Labs. Then, he shifted to marketing roles at AT&T including the development of marketing strategies for Europe, India and the Middle East, video on demand for the US market and finally global data and voice network operations, establishing contracts with various telephone companies. His volunteer works includes designing, developing and implementing Computer Technology Park and Outsourcing Center for disabled youngsters in India. He has a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and a Masters degree in Business Administration from Rider University.

By Praful Shah, VP of Corporate Development, EagleACD

Since its introduction in 1995, VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) has rapidly become a mainstream technology for contact centers today. More than 50% of all contact centers are currently using or looking to invest in VoIP technology. Ultimately, all contact centers will move to a pure-IP network, however, the majority of contact centers are using the hybrid-IP approach. With the pure-IP approach, the entire IP contact center, including phones, gateway devices and application servers are IP based.

According to DataMonitor, Global TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) and IP-ACD market size is projected as follows:

The hybrid- IP approach is an extension of the traditional TDM infrastructure with the addition of IP trunks and line cards. In this architecture, the channels for voice, e-mail and Web chat are segmented and housed on multi-platforms. With this platform, contact center functionality is not jeopardized whether the end-point is circuit-switched or IP.

EagleACD understands existing architecture of customers as well as their evolution towards an IP network. Consequently, EagleACD has decided to offer contact center services on the hybrid-IP platform, offering customers a migration path without obsolete capital investment for the TDM infrastructure. We continuously invest in our telecom network and data network.

EagleACD has taken a three-prong approach to reduce overhead cost for contact centers:

1. Total costs
2. Administration costs
3. Agent costs

1. Toll Costs- For call routing from one center to another center, there is no toll costs (transport costs) for IP network compared to TDM network. This provides an improved cost management in the contact center.
2. Administration Costs- Multiple sites of contact centers can be administrated from a single location for performance tracking, quality monitoring and workforce scheduling.
3. Agent Costs- IP contact center can provide multi-skilled routing capabilities, the call center operators can leverage large pool of agents based on customer needs and traffic fluctuations. This reduces the total number of required agents and helps to reduce agent costs for the contact center.

In summary, the hybrid IP network is an intermediary step to pure IP network balancing the existing TDM infrastructure as well as gaining benefits of IP network. EagleACD will continue to move towards the migration of an IP network.

Praful Shah is a seasoned telecom professional with diversified telecom management and operations experience. Currently, he is the VP-of Corporate Development at EagleACD. He has held increasingly responsible positions, first in R&D at Johnson & Johnson (where he was awarded a patent for his work) and Bell Labs. Then, he shifted to marketing roles at AT&T including the development of marketing strategies for Europe, India and the Middle East, video on demand for the US market and finally global data and voice network operations, establishing contracts with various telephone companies. His volunteer works includes designing, developing and implementing Computer Technology Park and Outsourcing Center for disabled youngsters in India. He has a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and a Masters degree in Business Administration from Rider University.

By Praful Shah, VP of Corporate Development, EagleACD

The audio conferencing services market is continuously converging with other growing conferencing services such as Web conferencing and Video conferencing. This trend helps the audio conferencing market to maintain its steady and moderate growth. Also, there is a shift in end-user preference from scheduled or unattended conferencing to an on demand (reservation less) conferencing. This feature helps to reduce the time involved in setting up the conference.

According to Frost & Sullivan's U.S. Audio Conferencing Services Market, services market generated revenue of $2.25 billion in 2004. Total market revenue is expected to reach $3.13 billion by 2011. Enterprises of all sizes are increasingly making more conference calls than ever before as indicated by the increase in minutes. In fact, the minutes are projected to swell from 14.53 billion in 2003 to nearly 35 billion in 2010. This surge in minutes is expected to create a demand for more ports, not only from service providers but also large enterprises that would like to conduct conferencing in-house.

These projections indicate that telephone traffic volume will grow at about 10%, while services revenue will only grow at about 5%. The market dynamics will intensify the competition for revenue per minutes use. Service providers will be required to come-up with new marketing innovations and operating efficiency to manage pressure on profit margins. This has compelled market vendors to focus on functions, reliability, convergence, and integration as product differentiators in the increasingly commoditized market.

The market transition to IP has ignited the convergence of audio, data, and video conferencing into an integrated solution, promising to render the concept of stand-alone audio conferencing obsolete. Service providers with integrated conferencing capabilities can sell more minutes at a higher price when services are bundled.

Eagle Teleconferencing, a customer-centric service provider, immediately realized that IP based Web conferencing and video conferencing services could provide a incremental revenue opportunity through satisfying customer needs as well as exploring new applications such as in-stream advertising. Streaming media allows delivering message, live or recorded, to be broadcasted to audience world using the power of Internet.

Eagle Teleconferencing is focusing its future development efforts towards delivering converged services in order to meet customer needs. By providing a converged conferencing service, providers are able to add a level of differentiation to their reservation less and operator-assisted conferencing services.

Converged networking for Eagle Teleconferencing has resulted in both cost savings and efficacy requirements because only one network is deployed, maintained and managed. Since IP connections are ubiquitous throughout the enterprise conference rooms and to every enterprise desktop, scaling audio and video over IP applications is easy because the network is already deployed, debugged, up and running.

Eagle Teleconferencing's goal is to continuously grow with satisfying customer needs globally.

Praful Shah is a seasoned telecom professional with diversified telecom management and operations experience. Currently, he is the VP-of Corporate Development at EagleACD. He has held increasingly responsible positions, first in R&D at Johnson & Johnson (where he was awarded a patent for his work) and Bell Labs. Then, he shifted to marketing roles at AT&T including the development of marketing strategies for Europe, India and the Middle East, video on demand for the US market and finally global data and voice network operations, establishing contracts with various telephone companies. His volunteer works includes designing, developing and implementing Computer Technology Park and Outsourcing Center for disabled youngsters in India. He has a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and a Masters degree in Business Administration from Rider University.

BY PRAFUL SHAH

The role of a contact center is more than customer services; the contact center has evolved and is responsible for revenue as well. Currently, more than 50% of contact centers have turned into profit centers. As the role of the contact center evolves, the transactions performed by a contact centers are evolving as well, ranging from taking orders, responding to marketing campaigns and more education interactions with customers. The contact center now plays a central role throughout the customer cycle from identification, acquisition to service.

We are in the midst of an astounding transformation in the way organizations serve their customers. Most contact center organizations today, are transforming into customer-facing organizations, and these centers do not have to be location specific. Customers want interaction with companies in order to provide them with higher levels of differentiated service. All interaction is through multi channel contact such as live agent, e-mail, IVR, voice mail, Web chat, instant messaging or fax.

Customers have two choices for selecting a call center. The first choice is for the premises based call center. The second choice is for the Virtual IP hosted call center. Designing a contact center is a challenging and time-consuming task, with broader operating and financial implications. During last few years, the mobility of workforce is also playing a bigger role in the decision-making process.

Once business and customer needs are determined, you need to understand and select the right set of products and features in order to integrate the required functionality. The call center is required to provide system features by using state-of-the-art IP and Telecom technology (ACD, Predictive Dialer, IVR, Reporting, Monitoring, Conferencing, Email, Web chat). High reliability is expected through layers of backup servers, backup electrical generators, and backup voice and data networks. It is not unusual to have 10 different products that need to be integrated together. This technical complexity of the contact center requires experts from every technical domain to work together in order to architect the solution.

In a premised based contact center, once contact center technology is implemented and next is to integrate all of the required applications, and to train users (call center managers, administrators and agents) on all of the products (i.e. PBX, IVR, CRM, ACD, etc.) integrated into a call center. This is an arduous task for anyone. The process is often longer and more complex than creating, compiling and executing the training sessions. It does not necessarily end there, whenever there is an upgrade to one of the components in the contact center, training, manuals have to be implemented to all the representatives.

One of the biggest hidden costs of deploying a premise based contact center is the cost of maintenance. It now becomes essential to employ a telecom expert, a Networking expert and an IT expert in order to stay abreast of training, updates and additions associated with the different applications in the contact center. In a premise based contact center, the technical people constantly have to carry out projects to improve the contact centers functionality and reliability. Whenever an application goes awry, technical team must determine if the issue is an artifact of the integration of the various applications or an issue with that particular application. This requires a huge investment that is both costly and inefficient.

The virtual IP hosted contact center model, which EagleACD provides, is a valuable tool for giving small and medium businesses the functional equivalent of a premise-based call center. This includes a full operational and administrative control, access to all real-time and historical reports, without lead-time implementation. Contact Centers offer full control of call treatment with monitoring and recording of all media for the most effective call center management and quality assurance. This approach takes away all the pain, cost, time and resources of the vendor. It eliminates planning or budgeting for an integration project. Additionally, there is no need to track, maintain and implement product updates from various vendors. IP Hosted contact center provides a complete solution and ensures quick implementation. In other words, the operators do not need to invest or maintain the communication infrastructure. This product adoption strategy allows you to be up-and-running much faster and much cheaper.

With EagleACD, everything is integrated not only from agents perspective but also from administrative points of view. Adding an agent is very simple, selecting his/her skills, access rights and the agent is automatically provisioned to use the call center. Also, reporting and management tools are synchronized. Similarly, queues and recordings are easily available. This flexibility represents tremendous savings in time, money and energy.

IP based call center is the future trend, as a number of call center operators are either evaluating or implementing this option. There are six main reasons to consider IP based center such as EagleACD:

1. No upfront capital investment

2. Speed of deployment (can be set-up in matter of days)

3. Super Scalability and easy distribution

4. Predictable and low per minute fees

5. No training, maintenance or upgrade costs

6. Fully integrated solution (easy to use, allowing multiple customers to run on a shared environment)