Call center products are among the fastest growing segments of telecommunications. In this market, IP Telephony has found its first profitable niche, and likely cash cow. The primary and most expensive piece of any call center is the ACD (automatic call distributor).

The ACD sets up rules to route calls in a logical manner to the least busy agent, or the agent with the most appropriate skill set. At the end of the day, the call center manager can also use ACD to generate a report of what times and agents were busiest in order to make intelligent and cost saving staffing decisions.

Because every IP Telephony station has either an IP or MAC address, it becomes a simple task to write software that will direct calls to the most appropriate station. Instead of trying to deal with complex sets of proprietary signaling formats to indicate which agent is available and for how long, the entire process can be performed over the data network much more easily.

The reporting process also becomes stream lined, as it becomes no more difficult than basic network administration. Productivity improvement from implementing converged applications During the past few years, major communications applications have been transformed from “Voice-only” to “Converged”. This transformation has enabled these converged multimedia applications to deliver significant productivity improvements.

Unified messaging provides a universal mailbox for each user, containing voice messages, e-mail and faxes. Users can browse voice mail headers as easily as they do e-mail headers today, without having to listen to each voice message sequentially. Employees that are on the road can access their mailbox by phone to determine what messages they have received. Using text-to-speech technology, they can select and play important e-mail messages over the phone. Contact centers enable businesses to be more responsive to their customers by allowing the customers to choose how they want to communicate: by phone, by e-mail, by fax or by text chat. Whichever method is chosen, the contact center uses intelligent routing to assure that the call or message is routed to the representative best suited to respond to that customer’s needs. In the case of e-mail, the system can analyze the message prior to routing to determine if it matches Frequently Asked Questions. If it does, the system responds automatically with the appropriate answer. This not only increases the productivity of contact center agents, but also provides significant cost savings by reducing the number of agents and expensive phone lines that are required.