Call centres strike right chord with IP

Call  centres (also known as contact centres) in India are gradually adopting the Internet Protocol framework to make consumer experience a breeze and save costs.

"As companies shift to the IP platform, the contact centre solutions provide greater transparency and control for clients besides saving costs of up to 40 percent," explains Sunny Rao, country head, Genesys India.

The savings of 40 percent are possible because of a virtualised contact centre which makes optimum use of bandwidth by launching the calls in the destination country and only returning the calls back to the service centre, which have been answered by voice.

"Over 50 per cent of the out bound calls hit an answering machine which uses up a lot of bandwidth and this can be freed up by using  IP technology," says Rao.

A Frost & Sullivan report to be released later this month states the number of seats in pure IP will grow from 10 percent in 2006 to 34 percent in 2013. The reason is that 'a single network is not only less expensive to purchase and operate, but the operations can be configured and managed in a single place to ensure a consistent experience for the customer'.

Industry players, though, are more bullish about the faster adoption of the IP platform in India. YES bank, for instance, is implementing Cisco's multimedia solutions.

"The benefits of these solutions would directly impact the customer as customer response time would reduce from close to five minutes to close to 30 seconds," said a Yes Bank official. Other early adopters of the IP platform include multinationals and large third-party service providers like IBM Daksh and HCL whose clients globally have standardised on it.

More recently, a large Code Division Multiple Access telecom player (name not disclosed) in India has become a Genesys customer for its speech recognition software as well as a reseller, selling hosted contact centre solutions that bundle bandwidth with minutes.

Sajan Paul, head, Technology, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel India, asserts, "Currently, 80 percent of the phones shipped into India are IP phones and over the next two years there will be a 100 percent shift. IP phones will soon become a de facto standard and it is the base for adoption of other IP-based services like integration of web chat, email."

"A contact centre (or call centre) is the key window for the customer to reach out to the organisation anytime, anywhere. As such, there are certain baseline experiences that one expects and to get brownie points with consumers, it is important for these centres to differentiate. This is where technology will play an important role," says Amit Mehta, director (marketing), Avaya GlobalConnect.

Technology is also the key when it comes to cost savings for the company and providing more transparency to the clients who are now outsourcing complex processes.

The demand for IP platforms is from large contact centres as well as medium and small enterprises. Minhaj Zia, business development manager - Unified Communications, Cisco India & SAARC says, "Large call centres that invested in call centre technologies 4-5 years ago are now looking at IP platforms as their assets diminish. Over the next two years, the growth for call centre technology will come from the small and medium enterprises as well."

How firms will enhance user response

Once contact centres shift over to the IP platform, they will be able to implement facilities like Automatic Call Distribution, Computer Telephony Interaction, speech-enabled Interactive Voice Response and workforce management.

ACD, for instance will help the 'sales and service' team will be able to identify callers, respond to and call customers and others, forward calls to the appropriate party, check the use of phone lines, collect usage statistics, permit the users to record messages and offer other services.

CTI, on the other hand, will help organisations can plan the needs of the staff as per estimates of call traffic. Consumers will not have to wait in a queue to be heard.

Speech-enabled IVR systems are expected to replace touch-tone systems. Finally, workforce management implies determining and managing staff schedule.