VoIP Toll-Free: Preserve Margins, Explore New Apps
by Alan Burke, VP of Product Management
Global Crossing
7/29/2004
Unleashed by 800-number portability and powered by
falling rates for underlying long distance service, the toll-free market
has expanded many-fold over the past decade.
As usage has increased, uses have diversified.
Vanity-number branding -- the telephonic ‘URL’ -- has long been a must for
sales and customer service. Toll-free numbers let businesses create
high-level funnels for nationwide inbound traffic and help them aggregate
service connections and contracts, contact-center infrastructure,
facilities and personnel, thereby achieving great economies of scale. And
toll-free numbers provide easy access to a host of telephonic enhanced
services.
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Sponsor of
Blueprint: Circuit-to-Packet
Today’s contact-center customers want more than simple
inbound aggregation. True, they want the benefits of aggregation (lower
cost, greater simplicity, easier management, continuity of services,
single points of contact). But they also want the flexibility to
disaggregate, decouple, partner, outsource and globalize -- routing calls
and data across multiple contact centers, bouncing them off non-local
infrastructure and resources, and sending them on to diverse endpoints.
The network requirements for contact centers are growing
to include the following:
To support multifunction, multimedia, converged agent
desktops with telephony and other applications. Today’s contact center
agent is increasingly a PC-based, LAN-connected knowledge worker, equipped
with display-based call control, wrap-up, help desk, call and interaction
recording, agent monitoring and training, workforce management, Customer
Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and
other applications, including (in an increasing number of cases)
screenphone-based IP telephony.
To take advantage of geographic arbitrage,
outsourcing, part-time, contractual, decentralized and home-based labor,
while providing a continuum of voice and data services at all points
subject to strict security controls.
To decouple agents and infrastructure, aggregating both
intelligently to support operational resiliency and efficient global
business.
To exploit hosted services and functionality, from
hosted IP ACD to VoiceXML-based hosted IVR, hosted help desk, agent
training, workforce management and other application services.
To build secure extranet communities, tying together
outsourced vendors, the supply chain, partner contact centers and other
stakeholders into coherent customer-facing entities while protecting
private information and resources.
To integrate contact center operations with CRM, ERP and
other business-process and interaction-management tools, improving overall
efficiency, squeezing out costs, pulling executive management into the
customer-contact loop, and ultimately, turning the contact center from a
cost-center into a profit-center.
Naturally, they want to do all of this securely and in
compliance with laws, regulations, and industry standards for auditability
and privacy of customer data. And they want to do it at large-scale,
business-class performance levels: perfect telephonic voice quality,
flawless integration of resources, crisp application response.
