SIP – set to deliver a dramatic impact on contact centre technology Total Cost of Ownership

While choosing an IP-enabled converged voice and data infrastructure can provide contact centres with significant bottom-line benefits - such as optimised communications and the ability to manage their call centre resources more effectively - there have always been concerns about integration, both with existing systems as well as with future implementations.

IP has always had tremendous potential in the contact centre environment, however many organisations hold quite legitimate concerns about key integration issues such as the different platforms involved, evolving standards and interoperability across the enterprise, particularly when it comes to key initiatives such as virtualisation, integration and the delivery of Quality of Service.

That’s why there’s recently been such interest in the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) open standard, which now seems set to accelerate the adoption of IP-based solutions in customer contact centres, and offer entirely new standards of performance when it comes to balancing technical capability with performance. With the SIP open standard now increasingly viewed as the protocol of choice for IP communications, organisations are responding to its richness and readiness to replace proprietary protocols and its ability to create more efficient and collaborative ways of communicating.

Focus on reduced Total Cost of Ownership

It’s becoming clear that the key driver for successful and long-term SIP implementations will be the reduction in Total Cost of Ownership as organisations successfully move from proprietary hardware to the more open SIP standard.

SIP’s simplicity ensures a low barrier of entry for device manufacturers, a wide choice of gateways and endpoints, and a healthy level of competition that works to keep prices low. However, that simplicity can also lead to inconsistencies in standards adherence, and that requires a strong focus on integration support.

Because SIP is a protocol that can be used for any type of communications session – whether it’s traditional voice, instant messaging, video or any combination of these – the implications for integration are significant. SIP is independent of the application and the channel, removing the need for traditional interface technologies. Instead SIP employs ‘SIP headers’ that hold all they key protocols and applications interface information needed to ensure more effective collaboration. For contact centre operations, this opens up considerable freedom of choice in hardware and applications, leading to far greater flexibility, easier integration, and the faster deployment of new services.

As important is SIP’s ability to go beyond just voice to handle a range of other media. This presents entirely new opportunities, both in the mix of different technologies and solutions that can now be deployed across customer service environments, and in the way these new solutions are deployed. Organisations can now communicate with customers using their preferred channels – whether its voice, e-mail, IM, SMS or video, while SIP technology also opens up the potential for smarter solutions for more traditional customer service tasks. An example here might be the deployment of a new kind of hybrid self-service payment application where as soon as a sensitive transaction such as a card payment needs to be made, the agent can hand the interaction over to a dedicated payments processing application based on SIP enabled technologies, increasing efficiency and security for both the customer and the organisation.

Changing the dynamics of integration with SIP

Previously this kind of application would have been difficult to integrate and expensive to implement. SIP changes the integration dynamic, bringing traditionally expensive CTI-style applications – typically the sole domain of contact centres with 100 seats or more – to a whole new market. SIP-enabled integration opens up the potential of smarter contact centre solutions to thousands of mid-size contact centres, enabling them to compete with far larger competitors. This new opportunity also encourages the introduction of new SIP-enabled services that organisations can use to help drive customer satisfaction and agent effectiveness to new levels.

At Sabio we have identified six key business drivers that we believe will help accelerate the adoption of SIP-enabled solutions within UK customer contact operations during 2008 and beyond. Because SIP can be used for any type of session, from voice to instant messaging and video, its flexibility makes it an ideal platform for future-proof application development.

It is a mistake to see SIP as a next generation technology, as it’s actually a standard that can really deliver value for some of today’s most pressing customer service technology challenges. We predict it will be areas such as resource virtualisation, extending customer service functionality to the branch and back-office, and adding support for new media channels - that will start to see the first benefits from the SIP effect.

Key SIP business drivers will include:

• The need to reduce TCO and overall infrastructure costs – SIP’s open standards approach lowers the barrier of entry for device manufacturers, reducing Total Cost of Ownership for contact centre technology, streamlining overall infrastructure costs and opening up the potential of powerful multimedia, multi-channel contact centres to a wider broader range of organisations.
• Enabling interoperability between new and existing vendors – SIP also provides an ideal way for organisations to leverage some of their existing contact centre technology investments while starting to implement open standards-based IP components. An example might be the replacement of their existing proprietary ACD hardware with a SIP-enabled ACD-style software solution
• Virtualisation of resources across multiple locations - with SIP’s flexibility, organisations can now effectively virtualise their existing contact centre resources and view multiple sites as a single virtual pool of agents that can provide better resource utillisation and customer service
• Integrating the back-office with customer service operations – SIP opens up the potential to extend traditional customer service capabilities from the contact centre to other key areas of the business such as the back-office and beyond. SIP’s ability to leverage presence technology for status and availability can also help find topic experts to quickly resolve customer issues
• Support for new media channels and blended multimedia interactions – thanks to SIP’s multi-session capability, organisations can really start to take advantage of blended multimedia interactions, effectively transforming every customer touch-point into an opportunity. For customers this will mean companies communicating with them in the way they prefer, whether it’s voice, e-mail, IM, chat or video
• Extending contact centre operations into new locations – because SIP is easily scalable it provides organisations with far greater flexibility when it comes to extending contact centre operations into new locations, or combining additional contact centres from acquired businesses

According to analysts such as Gartner, SIP solutions are now ready for mainstream adoption is that they’re ready to help today’s contact centre infrastructures react rapidly to changing customer demands. Whether that’s improving resourcing flexibility for remote or expert agents, opening up media flexibility to channels such as IM or video, or enabling flexible migration paths, SIP is certainly set to make a difference in 2008.

Need for comprehensive testing

Organisations need to be 100 per cent confident about interoperability when they first introduce SIP components into their infrastructure, and that level of confidence can only come from a close analysis of manufacturers’ support for standards and features, in-depth reviews of interoperability tests, and a rigorous lab-based testing approach.

While SIP will inevitably unlock compelling business benefits – particularly in terms of reduced overall infrastructure costs - organisations still need to be certain that their different SIP-enabled hardware and software inter-operate successfully under the SIP standard.

That’s why at Sabio we’ve just launched our new SIP Testing service to help customers make the right SIP implementation decisions, and ensure that they build a solid infrastructure base for their future SIP-enabled projects.

We believe that it’s this kind of comprehensive SIP testing approach that will help proof test target SIP infrastructure implementations, and help organisations to take full advantage of SIP’s acknowledged benefits.