The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

By Al Baker, Vice President of Marketing, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc. 

The challenging economy and its murky future have CEOs and senior-level executives planning new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies. Today the contact center is the front line of an enterprise’s customer relationship management strategy and solution. As specific customer interaction (CI) solutions are being tested, refined and implemented, questions are being asked about the strength of the call centers requested to deliver on these strategies; are they made of the “right stuff”?

The first place in the contact center where this question must be asked is at the technology solution underpinnings. Can the foundation of the proposed CRM solution fully support the proposed executive strategy? Many of the strategies enterprises undertake to retain customers and improve market and profit positions will require strength in four key areas:

1. Enterprise Efficiency: Virtualized contact center driving first contact resolution
2. Consumer Personalization: Unified communications (UC) enabled contact center
3. Competitive Agility: Flexible contact center adjusting at the speed of the market
4. Future-Proof: Open non-proprietary contact center

Only a SIP-based CI solution delivers on all four.

SIP: “The Right Stuff”
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol, used for setting up and tearing down multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the Internet.

Virtualized Contact Center
Traditionally a call center has been limited to the building, floor and four walls supported by the company’s TDM voice based PBX/ACD system. With these technology limitations, based on a hardware model over PSTN, the call center has become a detached island in the enterprise. New software based CI solutions built on SIP foundations are bringing the contact center back to the company’s mainland and creating new “virtualized” contact centers without technology walls, network limitations or media boundaries.

With the power of SIP, enterprise companies can have contact center agents working from different buildings, cities and even countries while acting as one entity.  A CI solution, with a SIP foundation in conjunction with an IT application can deliver functionality to home agents, as well as remotely located agents, outsourced agents or contact center agents working from company headquarters. SIP CI solutions not only blend these centers back into the company but also bring the total enterprise and all media options “online” to help drive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies.  

This is made possible because SIP not only creates a virtual contact center but also enables presence and collaboration capabilities within a CI solution. With presence, agents can find experts, anywhere in the enterprise, with the skills and availability to provide support to the “virtual” contact center. When this is done in real-time, while the customer is engaging the center, a higher percentage of “first contact resolution” (FCR) can be reached. Meeting a customer’s requirements in their first contact to the enterprise, versus time consuming multiple transfers, voice mails or call backs pays dividends in multiple areas. By making FCR a critical part of the CRM strategy, not only is customer satisfaction improved and operating costs reduced, but the enterprise achieves new levels of effectiveness and efficiency.

Unified Communications (UC) Enabled Contact Center
Over the past decade consumers have increased their demand for multi-media interaction options with enterprise companies. Consumers expect companies and organizations to enable them to initialize contact whenever and whereever it is convenient for them, with the media option they prefer – telephone, mobile phone, PDA, email, IM or Web. The consumer’s only requirement is that the services provided are uniform, consistent, convenient and personalized, independent of which media is chosen. Also, online media such as email and Web collaboration can play an important role in maximizing an organization’s accessibility, while helping to lower the cost per interaction.

Hardware based ACD technologies were designed to distribute a single medium at a time (predominately voice). This meant agent-customer interactions were restricted, limiting communication richness, effectiveness and most importantly, customer options and personalization. New software based CI solutions, built on SIP foundations, can deliver multi-media interaction options based on a natural unified communication (UC) architecture.

SIP-based CI solutions provide fully integrated and modular voice, IVR, email, IM and Web collaboration modules, allowing enterprises to create UC-enabled virtualized contact centers. Now enterprises can offer their customers a choice of multimedia interactions and self-service options. With blended multimedia routing, queuing and reporting engines, these UC enabled SIP solutions ensure customers are processed consistently apart from the media chosen and within personalized service level targets. Companies are able to maximize the accessibility of their offerings and enhance efficiency and effectiveness of handling multimedia customer interactions. SIP-based CI solutions provide enterprises the right foundation across all media to build personalized consumer strategies.


Flexible Contact Center
Change and speed are the new mandatory competences for today’s enterprise companies. Markets are in constant motion, products are facing shorter lifecycles, customer’s expectations are increasing, global low cost resource skill-pools are entering the labor market and new non-traditional competitors are changing the rules. All of these factors require any CI solution strategy to have extreme flexibility at its foundation. Software-based CI solutions built on SIP foundations provide the highest level of agility.

Next generation SIP-based CI solutions provide new levels of scalability and customization. Sustaining one hundred to many thousands of agents, these solutions support deploying IP-agents where needed, independent of physical location. As software solutions they are designed for data center deployment with high levels of reliability, resiliency and recovery. Built on global license models, users can be located (and relocated) anywhere with modular centralized applications for process consistency, cost-savings and customization. A SIP-based virtual contact center not only optimizes the enterprises resources but also provides the right foundation for competitive agility.

Open Non-Proprietary Contact Center
SIP-based virtualized contact center solutions provide one additional advantage in the long term protecting future investments. SIP-based customer interaction solutions embrace open standards. Their open frameworks and architectures support the evolution of an enterprise’s communications environment, simply and cost-effectively. By utilizing open interfaces and Internet standards, these SIP CI solutions converge seamlessly with an organization’s existing PBX and IT infrastructure to maximize existing IT and communication infrastructure investments. In addition, open standards frameworks permit these CI solutions to be easily integrated into a wide variety of vertical and horizontal business applications enabling easier deployment and integration into business processes. Over time this advantage may be the most important one giving the enterprise a CI solution that is very close to “future proof”. 

Enterprise companies can now implement strategies focused on CRM, knowing they have the “right stuff” - next generation contact center solutions delivering on unified communications with SIP as their foundation.

About Al Baker:
Mr. Baker has specialized in telecommunications, enterprise applications, and CRM for over 20 years and draws on experiences in engineering, product management, product marketing, strategic planning, sales management, marketing, and competitive analysis. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Northwestern University and a MBA from the Stanford Graduate School.

About Siemens:
Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc. is a global supplier of Voice, UC, and Contact Center technologies. The company's Open Communications approach to providing software, solutions and services for enterprises of all sizes enables business processes to be more productive, faster and more secure - with any device, network or information technology infrastructure.