Transcript
WHITE Mobility PAPER
Roadmap for Implementing a Multi-Site IP Contact Center March 2007
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Table of Contents Section 1:
Executive Summary...................................................................................... 1
Section 2: The Flatten, Consolidate and Extend Strategy & Its Benefits. ............... 1 Section 3:
Implementing the Flatten, Consolidate and Extend Strategy ............... 2
Identifying the Potential...................................................................................... 2
Building the Business Case................................................................................. 2
Design and Implementation................................................................................. 2
Section 4: Why Avaya: Key Differentiators.................................................................. 5 Section 5:
Summary........................................................................................................ 6
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Section 1: Executive Summary Internet Protocol (IP) has altered the technical and economic landscape for multi-site contact centers. It gives IT managers enhanced, easier-to-use and more cost effective tools for building, consolidating and extending multi-site contact center environments. It allows enterprises to cost effectively deliver advanced contact center capabilities to secondary locations, branches, outlets and at-home agents. And, it allows enterprises to centralize IT management by integrating all of their servicing capabilities – in-house, outsourced, managed care – under a common technology umbrella. Implementing a multi-site IP contact center requires the right technology, business processes and partner. Success depends upon a well-defined implementation roadmap that details each phase of the process. The framework for building a multi-site IP-enabled contact center is outlined below. The recommended steps will guide your implementation, help you realize operating efficiencies and cost savings, while creating a robust, high capacity and high availability operating environment.
Section 2: The Flatten, Consolidate and Extend Strategy & Its Benefits “Flatten, consolidate and extend” is a strategy that helps companies improve their financial performance and their customers’ experience by using IP to simplify the contact center infrastructure. Enterprises “flatten” their contact center infrastructure when they use IP technology to eliminate expensive carrier and networking services charges. The highly scalable systems enable enterprises to “consolidate” multiple distributed ACDs and their supporting applications into a single instance located in a data center, centralizing simplifying management of the contact center infrastructure. Contact center applications over IP can “extend” to locations and operations anywhere in the world, as it eliminates physical and geographical limitations. Flatten. IP implementations yield tangible benefits for the contact center and the IT organization by significantly reducing the cost and complexity of these departments. IP networks make it unnecessary to use network management and carriers to move traffic between sites. This eliminates the majority of carrier fees and network management costs for advanced routing features. Any enterprise with more than one contact center will find it cost effective to migrate to an IP environment. Consolidate. For IT managers, IP eliminates the need to maintain separate call management and supporting systems, such as ACD, IVR, Predictive Dialing, recording, quality assurance, and workforce management, at each site. This greatly reduces hardware requirements, maintenance fees and support requirements. In addition, enterprises that have multiple and decentralized servicing locations – such as remote offices, branch offices or outsourcers – and are committed to providing their customers with an outstanding and consistent customer experience, regardless of the channel they use, should consider migrating to an IP environment. Extend. For contact centers, IP greatly simplifies the management challenge by eliminating routing and queuing restrictions; interactions can be cost-effectively routed to the best-qualified agent, regardless of their physical location. IP provides full transparency, regardless of whether the center is located inside or outside the organization, and improves the customer experience. Standardizing and reducing complexity increases interoperability and provides the most cost effective business continuity and redundancy. All of these benefits result in significant cost savings. As a result, companies that successfully migrate to IP, even on a hybrid basis in conjunction with their existing TDM-based solutions, can expect to realize a 30 percent reduction in operating costs.
Section 3: Implementing the Flatten, Consolidate and Extend Strategy The following is a three-part guide to identifying the potential presented by IP, building a business case for migration to IP and ultimately to designing and implementing an IP infrastructure.
Identifying the Potential • Document operating costs. Assess your current operating environment to determine the competitive advantages of consolidation, the savings migration to IP can be expected to deliver, as well as forecast the cost of future growth using the current model versus an IP model. • Inventory your contact center assets. Determine which current contact center assets are fully depreciated and forecast how many years it will take to fully depreciate each of the remaining assets. • Formulate a high-level architectural design. Document your technical and functional requirements and develop an IP-based contact center architectural plan that will enable your enterprise to optimize the performance of its contact center(s). (Bring in outside expertise if you don’t have IP experience in-house.) Compare your current system to the projected future architectural design with an eye to filling all system and functional gaps. • Identify duplicate systems and applications. Consider which of your existing systems and applications will become redundant when you consolidate contact center management to one site.
Building the Business Case • Identify one-time and ongoing project-related costs. Create a summary of costs that include new hardware and software, professional services, incremental bandwidth, internal resources, write-offs, penalties and fees for canceling existing contracts. • Identify hard savings. Calculate network management fees for CTI, transfers and other advanced features, carrier charges, reduced per-minute rates, real estate, hardware, software and maintenance fees for redundant applications (servicing applications, WFM, quality assurance, recording, reporting applications, IVR, CTI, ACDs, dialers, voice mail, scripting applications, etc.), and full-time employee savings. • Identify soft benefits. Many of the benefits of migrating to IP are hard to quantify, but do contribute significantly to improving the operating environment. These include an improved customer experience, enhanced brand, increased customer loyalty, standardized service throughout the enterprise, increased agent retention, improved skills-based routing to a larger agent pool, redundant operating environment, etc. • Conduct ROI analysis. Prepare an ROI analysis and determine the payback, net present value and internal rate of return for this investment. • Identify sponsor. Develop the stewardship of a senior level project sponsor, perhaps the CTO or the EVP responsible for the relevant business unit. • Assemble project team. Create a cross-functional team of technical personnel and business managers to staff the project. Assign responsibility for the network: the new architecture may change the support requirements for your applications. Prior to fully implementing the new architecture, determine which business unit will be responsible for managing the new network and centralized applications. Coordinate with business managers: during each phase of the project, business managers should be encouraged to examine and modify their operating procedures and, if necessary, retrain staff to realize the full benefits of the technology improvements.
Design and Implementation • Conduct a network assessment. Analyze, identify and address any weaknesses in the current system; determine Quality of Service of voice-over-IP resources to meet your enterprise’s requirements. Add incremental bandwidth, if necessary.
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• Design a secure network. Address security at all levels of the design. Identify all potential points of risk. Identify and invest in solutions that minimize the chance of security breaches. • Address survivability. Design a network that addresses slowdowns and failures by building in alternative paths for IP traffic. • Provide for redundancy. Incorporate redundancy into the network and contact center applications to minimize unplanned disruptions in service. Duplicate network paths and servers. Design the network so that other sites can provide support during failures. Create gateways to provide business continuity if problems occur at the central site or network. Provide redundancy for all supporting contact center applications, such as the servicing application, workforce management, quality assurance, interactive voice response, voice messaging, dialing, scripting, etc. • Prioritize. Divide the project into short and measurable phases of three to six months and prioritize phases based on achieving maximum customer benefit and financial gains as early as possible. • Create baseline measurements. Prior to beginning each phase, determine baseline measurements of performance of the center or function to use for comparison when the project has been completed. It may be wise to conduct a customer satisfaction survey before beginning the implementation – and perform others during the process – in order to quantify the customer benefits. • Implement and test. To mitigate concerns and minimize risks, conduct one or more pilot implementations before moving to full implementation. After the successful pilots, obtain authorization from all impacted departments to undertake full implementation in phases. • Coordinate with finance and procurement groups. Coordinate with finance, procurement, asset management, telecom and IT groups to ensure that all hardware, software, systems and network circuits are either redeployed or that contracts are cancelled as they become redundant during the process. • Measure and communicate. After each phase, assess the effectiveness of the implementation using your baseline measurements and communicate its success. IP-enabled architecture empowers business managers to vastly improve service and support, as it eliminates many limitations of the previous technology topology. During each phase of the project, contact center and business managers should be fully apprised of changes, their benefits and impact. • Initiate operational improvements. Identify and adapt business processes as necessary to realize the benefits from the technology enhancements. Equally important are the new opportunities that may emerge from the new architecture: business managers should be encouraged to modify their site-based processes to realize the full value of technology enhancements, giving them access to enterprise-wide metrics and capabilities. This is an essential step that will expedite adoption and help you realize the benefits of the new architecture. Speeding up the realization of benefits will give an enterprise a substantial strategic differentiator over its competitors. • Create more meaningful reporting. Once the new architecture is in place, review and consolidate reporting systems. Eliminate redundant reports. Design new ones that provide a complete and consistent view of all contact center activities across departments and geographic locations. During each phase of the project rollout, trainers should work with contact center and business managers to explain the impact of the changes and their benefits. Furthermore, new opportunities will emerge with the new IP-enabled architecture, empowering business managers to vastly improve service and support. Because the new topology eliminates many limitations, business managers should be encouraged to modify their sitebased processes to realize the full value of the enhancements, including access to enterprise-wide metrics and capabilities. Training is an essential step that expedites adoption among key stakeholders and helps enterprises realize benefits of the new architecture sooner. IP-enabled call centers offer a substantial differentiator over competitors, so fully utilizing their capabilities promptly can be a strategic imperative for the enterprise.
IP Project Implementation Checklist
Use this implementation checklist to make sure that you have the right resources and plans in place to succeed with your initiative.
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Have you drawn a high-level architectural diagram for your proposed environment?
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Have you identified system and functional gaps in your current operating environment?
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Have you documented all functional and technical requirements for your new IP contact center environment?
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Do you have a project sponsor?
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Have you assembled a cross-functional team of business and technical managers that has decision-making authority?
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Have you quantified the savings and costs associated with your proposed IP environment and built the business case and return on investment model to facilitate the project approval process?
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Have you identified all necessary resources and expertise to assist you in successfully implementing your new IP-enabled environment?
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Have you inventoried your current contact center assets to identify all systems that will become redundant once the IP infrastructure is in place?
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Have you assessed your data network to identify potential weaknesses and identify the necessary fixes to avoid any negative impact on quality of service (QoS)?
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Have you addressed system survivability and redundancy?
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Have you involved security experts to address security at all levels of the network and system design to minimize the potential of security breaches?
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Have you separated the project into a series of measurable 3-to-6-month phases and obtained buy-in from all impacted areas?
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Have you designed your plan to begin with a pilot so that it can be reviewed and enhanced before beginning a full-scale implementation throughout the enterprise?
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Are IT and business managers ready to modify procedures and realize the benefits once the new IP technology is in place?
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Have business managers identified reporting changes required to take advantage of the new IP-enabled environment?
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If your enterprise follows this comprehensive checklist, you will be on your way to IP-enabling your contact center architecture. It is strongly recommended that you find an appropriate technology partner – one that you are comfortable working with and who can make this critical transition happen for you. While your enterprise may effect this transition only once, a technology partner like Avaya will have been involved in thousands of similar transitions.
Section 4: Why Avaya: Key Differentiators Avaya leads the industry with its Intelligent Communications solutions. Avaya is uniquely positioned to assist your contact center in implementing an IP-enabled architecture that allows you to execute the strategy of flatten, consolidate and extend. Avaya’s differentiators include: • Richest contact center feature set. Avaya offers the most functionally rich and well-designed contact center solution in the industry. Avaya has dedicated more than 28 years to building the most innovative and scalable contact center solutions for many of the market’s most demanding customers. Avaya contact center solutions include more than 700 high-value features that are in production in more than 32,000 customer locations around the globe. • Industry leading, patented call assignment technique. Avaya provides industry- leading predictive and adaptive techniques that govern the assignment of agents to calls so that contact centers can achieve their efficiency and effectiveness goals. For instance, Business Advocate is a patented Avaya software solution that optimizes the performance of contact center agents and improves customer satisfaction by ensuring that the right agent handles each call. It reduces call abandonment rates, increases agent occupancy rates, lowers the average speed of answer and minimizes service delays. • Massive scalability. Avaya supports massively scalable multi-site contact center solutions with the Avaya integrated ACD/PBX and Avaya Communications Manager (ACM). A single instance of ACM today supports 7,000 agents, 12,000 trunks, 9,000 voice prompts and announcements, 12,000 queue positions and 300,000 busy hour completions. Avaya plans even greater scalability in future releases. • Network-agnostic architecture that supports TDM and IP. Avaya contact center solutions are designed to optimize the performance and interoperability of diverse TDM and IP-based contact centers while protecting the customer’s existing investments. • IP performance optimization. Avaya’s Converged Network Analyzer (CNA) vastly improves the performance and dependability of a customer’s IP network. CNA provides detailed visibility into how well paths through the converged IP network are functioning for both IP telephony and data applications. When the IP wide area network design provides diverse paths between locations, CNA enhances the reliability and voice quality of these applications by optimizing their performance in real time. • Highest security protection. Avaya understands the importance of providing secure solutions that minimize exposure for its customers. Avaya contact center solutions can be completely isolated from the corporate LAN/WAN, if desired, and IP-based conversations can be fully encrypted. • Business continuity, full redundancy and high availability. Avaya contact center solutions are designed to be fully redundant and to minimize service interruptions caused by network outages. Avaya high availability solutions ensure system performance. • Layer 7-call recording. Avaya uses the native software-based service observe capability of ACM to provide 100 percent or random call recording. This is an elegant and simple approach to call recording that eliminates administrative complexity and avoids the need for a bandwidth-intensive, network sniffing approach.
• Global services. Avaya is the leading provider of contact center professional services throughout the world, helping customers build optimal, world-class service environments. Our programs include contact center strategy and architecture, network design, application integration, implementation, security, business continuity planning and maintenance.
Section 5: Summary Implementing a multi-site contact center is a complex task that requires cross-functional support and the cooperation of managers throughout the enterprise. At the same time, it is well worth the effort for the significant benefits it delivers to the enterprise. Once the new IP infrastructure is in place, the business units will have an opportunity to change their processes to take advantage of the new architecture. Those that do will realize improvements to their bottom lines, while improving the customer experience, building their brands and customer loyalty. If you would like more information on Avaya Intelligent Communications, including IP Telephony, contact center solutions and more, visit www.avaya.com.
About Avaya Avaya enables businesses to achieve superior results by designing, building and managing their communications infrastructure and solutions. For over one million businesses worldwide, including more than 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500®, Avaya embedded solutions help businesses enhance value, improve productivity and create competitive advantage by allowing people to be more productive and create more intelligent processes that satisfy customers.
For businesses large and small, Avaya is a world leader in secure, reliable IP telephony systems, communications applications and full life-cycle services. Driving the convergence of embedded voice and data communications with business applications, Avaya is distinguished by its combination of comprehensive, world-class products and services. Avaya helps customers across the globe leverage existing and new networks to achieve superior business results.
© 2007 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved. . Avaya and the Avaya Logo are trademarks of Avaya Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. . All trademarks identified by ®, TM or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, . respectively, of Avaya Inc., with the exception of FORTUNE 500 which is a registered trademark of . Time Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 03/07 • MIS3301
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