Hosted “All-in-One” IP Telephony Platform Supports UC Services for Both Enterprise Users and Customers
As recent studies have found, customer-service business processes are the top priority of enterprise organizations that have started implementing UC capabilities. Those applications account for over 90% of the highest priority responses in a study of business process applications that are primary targets for UC implementations. This means that communications involving either customer-facing staff or customers directly (self-services) are of most importance to the enterprise for UC flexibility benefits.
By now, everyone understands that traditional business telephone (voice) applications are slowly but surely becoming an integrated part of multimodal unified communications for both enterprise users and customer interactions. This involves shifting legacy TDM network connections to SIP-based VoIP networks, implementing software-based call management (IP Telephony), and exploiting multimodal endpoint devices on the desktop (e.g., PC “softphones”) and mobile smart-phones.
Initiating and receiving phone calls through UC will not only exploit more efficient and contextual visual user interfaces, e.g., presence-based “click-to-call,” but will also enable business process automation applications to initiate real-time notifications to people and support self-service transactions in the recipient’s interface of choice. Such flexibility will be particularly important as consumers and business users increasingly adopt personalized, mobile smart-phones for faster, more flexible modes of contact accessibility. All of this new software-based flexibility, however, means greater technology complexity. This will be increasingly difficult and expensive to support with existing in-house IT resources, especially when software applications are constantly changing and evolving.
The biggest challenge for enterprise organizations migrating to such a flexible UC environment will be to change their existing telephony systems and voice applications to integrate seamlessly and device-independently with other UC components such as email, unified messaging (UM), Instant Messaging, presence management, communications enabled business processes (CEBP), social networking, and mobile network services.
How To Get Going Fast With Minimal Cost? - Hosted Services!
As most people will tell you, migrating the enterprise to UC is a “journey.” That means you have to selectively prioritize which business processes and which end users (staff, customers) should be supported first with UC capabilities. Since we are talking about changing existing business processes through new communication facilities, it will be important to “pilot” such redesigned applications first, before going operational across the enterprise.
Fortunately, because IP Telephony is now software-based and accessible over the Internet, it has joined other business applications in becoming “virtualized” and easily available as a hosted or managed service that can be used to replace or supplement legacy CPE-based TDM telephone systems and call center technologies.
The many proven benefits of a hosted service include:
- No capital expense, controllable operational expenses based on actual usage/need, operational management controls over usage
- Selective use of UC application features, including IP Telephony, for either internal users, partners, or customers
- Centralized management and support for multiple site locations without requiring in-house IT expertise to maintain new applications. This will be especially useful where there are different communication technologies being used at different site locations.
- Enabling new contact center applications to be developed and activated within weeks rather than months, depending on the level of integration and customization required, compared to traditional, location-based implementations.
- Integrating with and supplementing existing enterprise communication technologies (e.g., PBXs, Microsoft OCS, Email, IM, mobile and wireless services, etc.)
- Integration with on-site business process applications
- The ability to exploit efficient SIP networking architecture overlay
- Centralized backup survivability for individual locations
- Support of all necessary user application interfaces required by different end users (visual, voice, desktop, mobile)
- The ability to easily and dynamically implement applications and change them as needed
- Flexible payment plans for on-demand usage
- Option to move hosted technology on-premise for either managed support service or for full internal support
The obvious benefits of hosted and managed software applications are driving large technology and service providers to offer such services to supplement or replace their traditional software product and system sales. The question now becomes one of who should be your hosted application service providers?
Which Provider Can Best Support Your Hosted IP Telephony and Contact Center Applications?
Because the IP network has now become critical for multimodal access to all centralized, cloud-based applications, it is easy to fall into the trap of expecting network providers to also support your business process applications as if they were simple phone connections. Network service providers who offer hosted or managed applications are really “resellers,” who themselves can’t directly provide the necessary application support that the original application developers can offer.
When it comes to application developers who might now be directly offering hosted application services, even there you have to look at the level of integration they provide for interoperability between the different applications and the end users involved. In particular, UC just for internal business users doesn’t really do much for priority customer needs, or what I have labeled as “Customer UC.”
“Customer UC” will provide special UC facilities for customer-facing personnel, including agents (in-house, home), subject matter “experts,” mobile sales and field support staff, and customer contact operational management. This will also include all flavors of inbound and outbound contacts for customer self-service applications, automated notifications through Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), and contextual, multimodal access to real-time live assistance (“click-to-call/chat”) from business applications.
The Developers of an application are often the best source for the hosted service (if they offer them) because of the following considerations:
- The Developer already owns the solution and can more rapidly provide/add applications when needed
- The Developer owns the code and can fix bugs more rapidly
- The Developer can provide superior support since they know the products inside and out.
- A telecom service provider relies upon its relationship to the original Developer (Avaya, Nortel, etc.) for updates, bug fixes, troubleshooting, etc.
- A telecom service provider can usually only provide a subset of a product’s feature set, since it typically only wants to support the most common set of features that applies to the broadest possible audience
- The Developer can usually provide the customer with the option to move from a hosted solution to a premise solution with relative ease and at a tremendous cost savings.
- The Developer can deploy the solution using architectures that fit best with the end customer.
The challenge for enterprise organizations is to find a specialized IP Telephony and Contact Center technology developer that can also provide maximum flexibility in its hosted services offerings.
Interactive Intelligence Has A Flexible, “All-in-One” Integration Head-start on Hosted UC
Back in 1997, Interactive Intelligence introduced the first open, “all-in-one” communications software platform that integrated all telephony applications. This platform supplements or replaces traditional PBXs with value-add telephony and voice messaging applications for both business users and for customer interactions.
More recently, Interactive moved up the application food chain with what it calls “Communications-Based Process Automation” (CBPA), through its Interaction Process Automation (IPA) platform built on top of their Customer interaction Center (CIC) software, to easily create business process work flow applications. These integrate tightly with Interactive’s communication applications for initiating contacts with people, and enhances CEBP.
Interactive Intelligence now offers its all-in-one communication software platform as a hosted application service, which will enable enterprise organizations that are looking for a hosted solution to benefit from the tight integration between different communication applications that has already been implemented. Based on its open architecture and ease of integrating its SIP-based Interaction Center Platform for telephony with established applications, (such as Microsoft’s Dynamics GP and CRM, RightNow Technologies CRM, SalesForce.com CRM and Microsoft’s OCS), Interactive Intelligence appears well prepared to quickly and easily support key UC enterprise communication application needs through cost-effective hosted services.
Living With The Past - Telephony Networking Architecture Options
Interactive architects its hosted solutions to fit the specific telephony networking needs of its customers. Three architecture options include: Local Control VoIP, Remote Control VoIP, and Remote Control TDM.
Local Control VoIP uses customer telco trunks, keeps voice and data on customer premises, and lets users employ Polycom SIP phones. With Remote Control VoIP, calls come into Interactive Intelligence’s data center, and IP connections are made to Polycom SIP phones on premise. Lastly, with Remote Control TDM, calls come into Interactive Intelligence’s data center, and calls are made out to agents who can be at home or on a corporate PBX, without requiring any
For the various telephony network management architecture options, you can see details at the Interactive Intelligence Caas website.
With the flexible management choices for Local and Remote Control over VoIP and TDM network connections, Interactive Intelligence enables organizations to migrate business process applications, selectively and efficiently at their own pace, from existing legacy telephony network environments to a more centralized, IP-based UC environment for both their internal users and external customers and partners. However, such flexibility is also complex and will require Professional Services consulting support to evaluate current and future operational needs for both IP Telephony and UC migration and implementation planning.
Hosted service providers will be expected to provide such consulting services to facilitate the benefits of rapid implementation and application “pilots” and traditional sales channels are being upgraded to fill that role, as opposed to being simple “resellers” of hardware, software, or services. It will be interesting to see how this shift will be accomplished by the telephony industry.
This paper is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence.