Taking a SIP:What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center

August 2008

A Business White Paper

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Table of Contents

3 Executive Summary

3 IP Transformation within the Contact Center

4 SIP: The Protocol of Choice

5 Enabling the Next-Generation Dynamic Contact Center Creating a Breakthrough Customer Experience Improving Agent Experience and Contact Center Performance Comprehensive Operational Improvements with SIP-Enabled IP

10 The Freedom to Migrate Instead of Rip-and-Replace

11 Conclusion

12 About the Genesys IP Contact Center Solution

Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 3 of 12Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center

Executive Summary As contact centers consider migrating from traditional digital switching platforms to IP-based solutions, there’s an exciting development that is simplifying IP communications and extending the benefits beyond telephony network cost savings. The emergence of the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) open standard is speeding the adoption of IP-based solutions and simultaneously delivering compelling business benefits and opportunities for innovation.

With SIP, contact centers are empowered to join the IP transformation — shifting from a closed, proprietary communications infrastructure to an open, standards-based environment. This IP transformation drives greater business value for contact centers by providing the foundation for improving agent productivity, virtualizing agent resources, reducing infra-structure costs and, above all, improving the customer’s experience. Through the power and flexibility of SIP-enabled IP solutions, companies can now fully realize a customer-centric strategy with innovative, multimedia customer service offerings as the centerpiece.

This white paper is intended for executives who are seeking to understand why SIP is a must-have technology for the contact center today, and how SIP-enabled IP solutions can help contact centers strategically align with the goals of the enterprise through an easily integrated, open standards-based software approach.

IP Transformation within the Contact CenterWhile momentum has been building for IP-based solutions in contact centers, the floodgates of opportunity have now been flung open with the widespread vendor adoption of open standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Now, it’s more efficient, cost-effective, and beneficial than ever before to move to an IP solution. Contact centers that are poised to replace aging time-division multiplexing (TDM) systems or deploy new systems for branch offices or enterprise departments can now embrace the transformation to IP with greater confidence. The resulting benefits include these powerful capabilities:

• Universal access enabling any employee, located either within the walls of the contact center or outside (such as mobile applications for field service, home agents, subject matter experts, or branch offices), to interact efficiently with the company’s customers.

• Leveraging Multimedia interaction, such as instant messages, video, presence, and Web collaboration to enhance the customer experience in innovative ways.

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• Virtual Centralized Contact Center, for multi-site and remote-site operations hosted in the corporate data center or by a managed service provider, to increase productivity and speed deployment of new capabilities.

• Consistent application of business rules through application software — not embedded in proprietary hardware — that controls interaction management for voice and other communications

Figure 1. Total TDM vs. IP Agents Shipments, Worldwide, 2002-2011

The rise of SIP-enabled solutions brings an additional transforming benefit: the opportunity to migrate gradually to IP by retiring the legacy ACD (automatic call distributor) — literally unlocking it from the physical PBX and reshaping it as a flexible, software-based application able to leverage all the capabilities of IP.

SIP: The Protocol of Choice Why is SIP so important for IP transformation? By moving to a SIP-enabled software solution, contact centers can begin to free themselves from proprietary hardware constraints and costs.

When the move to IP began with digital PBXs, vendors created systems that essentially duplicated the features traditional PBXs offered. To do this, vendors developed proprietary protocols to address missing functionality in open standards. Then along came SIP.

SIP (based on IETF RFC 3261) — now the protocol of choice for IP communications — provides the richness needed to replace proprietary protocols and create a more efficient and collaborative means of communication. With the SIP open standard, organizations are now becoming unlocked from the constraining proprietary IP solutions.

Source: Gartner - “Forecast: Contact Centers, Worldwide, 2002-2011” (by Drew Kraus, December 2007)

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The beauty of SIP is its simplicity: it can be used for any type of communication session, from voice to instant messaging to video or any combination of these — a session can even be a collaborative multimedia conference call. Independent of the application and channel, SIP is also flexible and scalable — making it perfect for deployment in a future-proof application environment. SIP also works well with other Internet applications because it was designed to closely resemble the HTTP and SMTP Internet protocols, (the ones that power the Internet and e-mail).

SIP provides two overwhelming advantages that contact center decision makers need to understand. The first is the freedom of choice in hardware and software — resulting in greater flexibility, easier integration, faster deployment, and cost efficiencies.

Second, the flexibility of SIP to handle much more than only voice makes it a game-changing technology for contact centers. Using SIP, companies can move beyond simply doing things better to providing new services that drive customer satisfaction and agent effectiveness to entirely new levels.

“SIP enables the power of open systems to be brought to the world of telecommunications, particularly in the contact center. Due to the rich multimedia requirements, open systems allow customers to select non-proprietary hardware and software for queuing, routing, and applying treatments to interactions. For these reasons, we expect SIP to emerge as the de facto standard for enterprise IP communications.”

— Art Schoeller, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group

GSN Uses SIP for PBX MigrationGlobal Speech Networks (GSN), based in Melbourne, Australia, works with companies to centralize multi-site IVR operations. When the company decided to offer a hosted contact center agent solution, it determined that SIP-enabled IP technology was the most effective way to go.

Now GSN can offer a compelling story for prospective customers. With many digital PBXs approaching “end of life,” GSN’s customers can use the company’s hosted contact center solution for a phased approach to migrate away from the PBX. GSN replaces legacy call center functionality with its SIP-enabled software-based contact center from the “cloud.” By using SIP-enabled IP, GSN was able to dramatically expand its market with an entirely new service.

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Enabling the Next-Generation Dynamic Contact CenterOrganizations can harness the powerful multimedia, multi-channel capabilities of SIP-enabled IP to realize a revitalized, next-generation dynamic contact center — a contact center fully-enabled with real-time intelligence, flexibility, open applications, and the ability to proactively respond to and take advantage of customer behavior.

Most contact centers today must manually react to external conditions, making it difficult to respond to fluctuating traffic. For example, traffic may surge one moment, putting great strain on resources, and then drop unpredictably the next, forcing customer service agents to sit idle. This model puts a great burden on operations, as businesses struggle to simultaneously optimize agent availability and task allocation, control costs, generate revenue, and drive customer satisfaction.

A dynamic contact center is a more advanced model with built-in processes to make proactive adjustments in real time to automatically manage fluctuating variables by optimizing and balancing traffic, resources, and call outcomes.

IP transformation is a critical foundation for creating a dynamic contact center, allowing companies to achieve unprecedented optimization of cost, quality, and revenue. With a spectrum of exceptional customer services, a well-managed distributed/remote agent workforce, and enhanced agent productivity, the SIP-enabled contact center delivers on the customer-centric strategy central to organizations today.

Creating a Breakthrough Customer ExperienceBy enabling contact centers to leverage multimedia interactions as never before, SIP-enabled IP solutions can literally transform the customer experience to improve customer retention and set the stage for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

78% 82% 44%

Say contact center agents have a significant influence on their opinion of a company

Would do business with a company based on a great contact center experience

Of defecting customers cite a poor contact center experience as the sole reason

Source: Genesys Research

Figure 2. The Customer Experience is Central to Your Business

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With a SIP-enabled IP solution, contact centers can transform every customer touch-point into an opportunity to deliver on a company’s brand promise. Multi-channel integration means that contact centers gain the flexibility to respond to and interact with customers in a multitude of ways, regardless of the channel in which the interaction was started. Imagine the ability to detect the multimedia capabilities of a customer’s phone or device at the point of contact. The agent then has the widest range of response choices available to assist the customer: for instance, an instructional video could be sent to a video-enabled device, or a menu of options could appear on a mobile phone as an alternative to traditional IVR. Contact centers can use “co-browsing” or “page push” technologies to guide customers to the information they need or to suggest a relevant product or service.

By embracing SIP/IP, contact centers can dramatically improve customer satisfaction by:

• Communicatingwithcustomersviathechannelthateachmostprefers:voice, e-mail, IM, chat, or video

• Leveragingpresencetechnologytohelpagentsresolveacustomer’sissueby instantly determining status, location, and availability of subject matter experts

• Incorporatingagents,branchemployees,andexpertsanytime,anywhere—irrespective of location and telephony infrastructure, enabling a dynamic customer-centric experience

• Fullyexploitingmultimediatocreateablended,consistent,multi-channelexperience that better resolves customer queries and issues

GRAA Experiences Seamless Integration of Multimedia and New AgentsGroupama Rhone Alpes Auvergne (GRAA), a division of the French insurance conglomerate Groupama, decided to leverage SIP to incorporate multimedia capabilities so that customers could use devices such as smartphones to interact in a more productive manner with the contact center. The company envisioned customers sending a picture of a car accident to their carrier from the scene or receiving an SMS message with insurance adjuster appointment details.

At the same time, GRAA needed to incorporate 200 additional agents working in eight new locations. Using a SIP-enabled software solution, GRAA was able to add new agents and capabilities and begin migrating agents to an IP environment at a significantly lower cost than if it had to purchase PBX hard phones and a CTI-enabled PBX license. Now, GRAA plans to completely migrate to SIP-enabled IP for all its agents.

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Improving Agent Experience and Contact Center Performance Not only is the customer experience elevated to an all-time high, the SIP-enabled IP solutions also give agent productivity and satisfaction a powerful boost.

For example, SIP enables contact centers to leverage universal employee access — the ability to extend the resource pool to encompass any agent or expert. This means that contact centers can enable branch employees, home offices, and expert agents — regard-less of their location — to efficiently manage their time and resources, gain greater con-trol of their ability to assist with customer service, and improve first-call resolution rates.

Figure 3 Universal Access through a SIP-Enabled Solution

Universal access also allows contact centers to more effectively manage spikes in volume by routing certain customer calls to remote sites, which prevents customers from waiting on hold, or even being blocked, due to single contact center saturation during the peak hours, and results in better customer service performance.

In addition, through presence technology in SIP-enabled solutions, subject matter experts can make themselves more available for customer contact and issue resolution, while leveraging home-based agents lowers costs, decreases agent turnover, and ensures greater flexibility to quickly meet fluctuations in volume.

Due to routing rules based upon criteria such as customer priority, agent skill set, availability of experts, and other business rules that ensure intelligent use of valuable resources, the customer is quickly put in touch with the best resource — expert, home, or branch agent — for their specific need.

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Comprehensive Operational Improvements with SIP-Enabled IPWhile customer service is a central benefit, deploying a SIP-enabled open IP solution also delivers a gamut of operational improvements for the contact center due to the creation of a simplified, flexible environment that is extensible and scalable to support future business needs.

Companies can now consolidate contact center environments to ensure centralized administration and improved resource virtualization. Contact centers with multiple sites can be managed as one virtual pool of agents, which better utilizes resources, strengthens customer service, and reduces maintenance costs. Remote agent management in such a virtual environment also allows changes to a single agent or agent group allocation to be made in real time without having to reprogram the switch. In addition, small remote sites can be brought online much faster.

SIP-enabled IP also reduces the total cost of ownership as contact centers gain a greater choice of vendors and simplified upgrades. As customer service software is separated from proprietary communications devices, contact centers can further reduce costs by eliminating hardware-based ACDs altogether.

Finally, SIP-enabled solutions can provide contact centers with more flexible, cost-effective approaches to business continuity by delivering uninterrupted service levels through capabilities such as emergency default routing, backup and recovery of established sessions, and hot standby. In the event that a system goes down, the software-based SIP solution can ensure high availability through a back-up system that saves any calls that might be impacted. In a disaster situation where the entire contact center is disrupted, companies have the ability to quickly reroute calls to other centers or branch employees.

In cases where the entire contact center is disrupted, software-based SIP solutions enable companies to quickly reroute calls to other centers or branch employees as part of a business continuity response.

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The Freedom to Migrate Instead of Rip-and-ReplaceThe power and simplicity of the SIP open standard mean that contact centers can begin to reap the benefits of an open IP solution without ripping out and replacing current infrastructure — and instead migrating at a pace that suits their unique requirements. A SIP-enabled IP contact center solution makes IP transformation feasible by integrating with a contact center’s existing PBX infrastructure. This allows organizations to introduce innovative contact center functions by separating the ACD from the PBX and replacing it with a SIP-enabled solution. For contact centers not requiring advanced enterprise telephony (such as personal voice mail), they have the option of replacing the hardware

switch entirely with a software-based switch for call control, routing, and management functionality. In this case, contact centers save costs on hardware and main-tenance by eliminating the proprietary hardware and simplifying the management of the environment.

Figure 4 Genesys SIP/IP Enables Flexible Migration

As shown in Figure 4, the Genesys solution supports TDM, IP, or hybrid IP/TDM environments and thus enables flexible migration from TDM to IP. Contact centers that have already invested in PBX can still leverage the existing PBX infrastructure while also implementing open standards-based IP components. In all cases, the Genesys solution enables a single, centralized virtual contact center environment for the optimal utilization and management of all agents as well as other resources.

As customer service software is separated from proprietary communications devices, contact centers can further reduce costs by eliminating hardware- based ACDs altogether.

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The Freedom to Migrate Instead of Rip-and-ReplaceThe power and simplicity of the SIP open standard mean that contact centers can begin to reap the benefits of an open IP solution without ripping out and replacing current infrastructure — and instead migrating at a pace that suits their unique requirements. A SIP-enabled IP contact center solution makes IP transformation feasible by integrating with a contact center’s existing PBX infrastructure. This allows organizations to introduce innovative contact center functions by separating the ACD from the PBX and replacing it with a SIP-enabled solution. For contact centers not requiring advanced enterprise telephony (such as personal voice mail), they have the option of replacing the hardware

switch entirely with a software-based switch for call control, routing, and management functionality. In this case, contact centers save costs on hardware and main-tenance by eliminating the proprietary hardware and simplifying the management of the environment.

Figure 4 Genesys SIP/IP Enables Flexible Migration

As shown in Figure 4, the Genesys solution supports TDM, IP, or hybrid IP/TDM environments and thus enables flexible migration from TDM to IP. Contact centers that have already invested in PBX can still leverage the existing PBX infrastructure while also implementing open standards-based IP components. In all cases, the Genesys solution enables a single, centralized virtual contact center environment for the optimal utilization and management of all agents as well as other resources.

Therefore, contact centers have the following flexible options for SIP/IP adoption:

• KeepexistingPBXincurrentsitewhileexpandingnewbranchofficeswith SIP/IP

• KeepexistingPBXincurrentsitewhileprovisioningremoteagentsinSOHO (Small-Office-Home-Office) with SIP/IP

• KeepexistingPBXincurrentsitewhileaddingnewagentswithSIP/IPatthe same site

• KeepexistingPBXincurrentsitewhilegraduallyconvertingsomeagentswith SIP/IP at the same site. Re-provision the newly idle PBX ports for other staff in the organization

• Re-deployPBXforinternalorganizationalusage,whileconvertingthecontact center into SIP/IP environment

Conclusion With the emergence of the SIP protocol as the open standard that frees organizations from proprietary hardware, contact centers are finally able to safely reap the extensive business benefits of implementing open standards-based SIP/IP solutions. By leveraging the dynamic multimedia capabilities of SIP, contact centers can seamlessly deliver exceptional customer service and increase satisfaction, while also optimizing agent and resource efficiency. With a dynamic contact center model, contact centers can react faster to external conditions and respond more quickly to fluctuating variables by better balancing traffic, resources, and call outcomes.

Companies that actively migrate toward SIP-enabled IP solutions are better prepared to ensure universal access, allowing any employee to assist with customer service for faster issue resolution and better business continuity through a more flexible, cost-effective, multi-channel approach.

Replacing ACDs With Better RoutingAfter moving the company’s internal voice traffic to IP, a leading financial services firm has been replacing its legacy ACDs with SIP/IP technology. In addition to eliminating its dependency on proprietary hardware, the company needed the ability to perform intelligent skills-based routing at the agent level — the legacy ACD used a complicated scheme of multiple groups instead of true agent-level skills-based routing.

By taking a pure software approach using a SIP-enabled IP solution, the company was able to meet all of its objectives for the complete replacement of its legacy ACD hardware. Now, instead of hardware that needs to be maintained at multiple locations all over the country, the company relies upon a centrally-located, SIP-enabled software solution to intelligently route calls to the best agent.

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SIP offers a way for contact centers to migrate to IP-based solutions while continuing to leverage current investments in the contact center infrastructure. By selecting SIP-enabled IP solutions that don’t require an expensive rip-and-replace, organizations can begin to transform their contact centers at a pace that best suits their needs and future-proofs their environment against technology and business changes. SIP-enabled IP also reduces the total cost of ownership as contact centers gain a greater choice of vendors, simplify upgrades, and reduce costs on hardware and maintenance.

Organizations that embrace SIP-enabled IP solutions in their contact centers especially gain a distinct competitive advantage in customer service, flexibility, and operational efficiency. By leveraging the power and flexibility of SIP-enabled IP solutions, enterprises will be best positioned to deliver the types of new services required in an increasingly customer-centric business environment.

About the Genesys IP Contact Center SolutionThe Genesys IP Contact Center Solution, including the Genesys SIP Server, provides the freedom to select the hardware infrastructure and contact center applications that best meet an organization’s business needs today, while future proofing the environment for tomorrow. The Genesys SIP Server provides open and flexible multimedia, and agent monitoring functions that integrate the Genesys suite with any SIP-enabled IP infrastructure.

The Genesys IP offering is SIP-enabled and provides:

• IntegrationwithleadingSIP-basedapplicationsprovidesmorevenderchoices, simplified upgrades, and reduced maintenance costs

• MigrationtoIPatanorganization’sownpacewhilemaintainingthe current system functionality; no need to rip-and-replace

• Supportformultiplecustomerservicecommunicationchannels,includingvoice, e-mail, chat, IM, and video

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Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the world’s leading provider of contact center and customer service management software — with more than 4,000 customers in 80 countries. Genesys software directs more than 100 million interactions every day, dynamically connecting customers with the right resources — self-service or assisted-service — to fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use agent resources. Genesys helps organizations drive contact center efficiency, stop customer frustration and accelerate business innovation.

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