A Business White Paper

Taking a SIP:
What Executives Should Know
About IP Transformation in
the Contact Center

August 2008
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center

Table of Contents

3 Executive Summary
3 IP Transformation within the Contact Center
4 SIP: The Protocol of Choice
5 Enabling the Next-Generation Dynamic Contact Center
Creating a Breakthrough Customer Experience
Improving Agent Experience and Contact Center Performance
Comprehensive Operational Improvements with SIP-Enabled IP

10 The Freedom to Migrate Instead of Rip-and-Replace

11 Conclusion
12 About the Genesys IP Contact Center Solution
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 3 of 12

Executive Summary
As contact centers consider migrating from traditional digital switching platforms to
IP-based solutions, there’s an exciting development that is simplifying IP communications
and extending the benefits beyond telephony network cost savings. The emergence of the
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) open standard is speeding the adoption of IP-based solutions
and simultaneously delivering compelling business benefits and opportunities for innovation.

With SIP, contact centers are empowered to join the IP transformation — shifting from a
closed, proprietary communications infrastructure to an open, standards-based environment.
This IP transformation drives greater business value for contact centers by providing the
foundation for improving agent productivity, virtualizing agent resources, reducing infra-
structure costs and, above all, improving the customer’s experience. Through the power and
flexibility of SIP-enabled IP solutions, companies can now fully realize a customer-centric
strategy with innovative, multimedia customer service offerings as the centerpiece.

This white paper is intended for executives who are seeking to understand why SIP is a
must-have technology for the contact center today, and how SIP-enabled IP solutions can
help contact centers strategically align with the goals of the enterprise through an easily
integrated, open standards-based software approach.

IP Transformation within the Contact Center

While momentum has been building for IP-based solutions in contact centers, the floodgates
of opportunity have now been flung open with the widespread vendor adoption of open
standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Now, it’s more efficient, cost-effective,
and beneficial than ever before to move to an IP solution. Contact centers that are poised to
replace aging time-division multiplexing (TDM) systems or deploy new systems for branch
offices or enterprise departments can now embrace the transformation to IP with greater
confidence. The resulting benefits include these powerful capabilities:

• Universal access enabling any employee, located either within the walls
of the contact center or outside (such as mobile applications for field
service, home agents, subject matter experts, or branch offices), to interact
efficiently with the company’s customers.
• Leveraging Multimedia interaction, such as instant messages, video,
presence, and Web collaboration to enhance the customer experience in
innovative ways.
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 4 of 12

• Virtual Centralized Contact Center, for multi-site and remote-site

operations hosted in the corporate data center or by a managed service
provider, to increase productivity and speed deployment of new capabilities.
• Consistent application of business rules through application software
— not embedded in proprietary hardware —
­ that controls interaction
management for voice and other communications

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Source: Gartner - “Forecast: Contact Centers,Worldwide, 2002-2011” (by Drew Kraus, December 2007)

Figure 1. Total TDM vs. IP Agents Shipments, Worldwide, 2002-2011

The rise of SIP-enabled solutions brings an additional transforming benefit: the
opportunity to migrate gradually to IP by retiring the legacy ACD (automatic call
distributor) — literally unlocking it from the physical PBX and reshaping it as a flexible,
software-based application able to leverage all the capabilities of IP.

SIP: The Protocol of Choice

Why is SIP so important for IP transformation? By moving to a SIP-enabled software
solution, contact centers can begin to free themselves from proprietary hardware
constraints and costs.

When the move to IP began with digital PBXs, vendors created systems that essentially
duplicated the features traditional PBXs offered. To do this, vendors developed
proprietary protocols to address missing functionality in open standards. Then along
came SIP.

SIP (based on IETF RFC 3261) — now the protocol of choice for IP communications
— provides the richness needed to replace proprietary protocols and create a more
efficient and collaborative means of communication. With the SIP open standard,
organizations are now becoming unlocked from the constraining proprietary IP solutions.
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 5 of 12

The beauty of SIP is its simplicity: it can be used for any type of communication session,
from voice to instant messaging to video or any combination of these — a session can
even be a collaborative multimedia conference call. Independent of the application
and channel, SIP is also flexible and scalable — making it perfect for deployment
in a future-proof application environment. SIP also works well with other Internet
applications because it was designed to closely resemble the HTTP and SMTP Internet
protocols, (the ones that power the Internet and e-mail).

GSN Uses SIP for PBX Migration

Global Speech Networks (GSN), based in Melbourne, Australia, works with
companies to centralize multi-site IVR operations. When the company decided
to offer a hosted contact center agent solution, it determined that SIP-enabled IP
technology was the most effective way to go.

Now GSN can offer a compelling story for prospective customers. With many digital
PBXs approaching “end of life,” GSN’s customers can use the company’s hosted
contact center solution for a phased approach to migrate away from the PBX. GSN
replaces legacy call center functionality with its SIP-enabled software-based contact
center from the “cloud.” By using SIP-enabled IP, GSN was able to dramatically
expand its market with an entirely new service.

SIP provides two overwhelming “SIP enables the power of open systems to be
advantages that contact center decision brought to the world of telecommunications,
makers need to understand. The first
particularly in the contact center. Due to the rich
is the freedom of choice in hardware
multimedia requirements, open systems allow
and software — resulting in greater
flexibility, easier integration, faster
customers to select non-proprietary hardware
deployment, and cost efficiencies. and software for queuing, routing, and applying
treatments to interactions. For these reasons, we
Second, the flexibility of SIP to handle expect SIP to emerge as the de facto standard for
much more than only voice makes enterprise IP communications.”
it a game-changing technology for — Art Schoeller, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group
contact centers. Using SIP, companies
can move beyond simply doing things
better to providing new services that
drive customer satisfaction and agent
effectiveness to entirely new levels.
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 6 of 12

Enabling the Next-Generation Dynamic Contact Center

Organizations can harness the powerful multimedia, multi-channel capabilities of
SIP-enabled IP to realize a revitalized, next-generation dynamic contact center — a
contact center fully-enabled with real-time intelligence, flexibility, open applications,
and the ability to proactively respond to and take advantage of customer behavior.

Most contact centers today must manually react to external conditions, making it
difficult to respond to fluctuating traffic. For example, traffic may surge one moment,
putting great strain on resources, and then drop unpredictably the next, forcing customer
service agents to sit idle. This model puts a great burden on operations, as businesses
struggle to simultaneously optimize agent availability and task allocation, control costs,
generate revenue, and drive customer satisfaction.

A dynamic contact center is a more advanced model with built-in processes to make
proactive adjustments in real time to automatically manage fluctuating variables by
optimizing and balancing traffic, resources, and call outcomes.

IP transformation is a critical foundation for creating a dynamic contact center, allowing

companies to achieve unprecedented optimization of cost, quality, and revenue. With a
spectrum of exceptional customer services, a well-managed distributed/remote agent
workforce, and enhanced agent productivity, the SIP-enabled contact center delivers on
the customer-centric strategy central to organizations today.

Creating a Breakthrough Customer Experience

By enabling contact centers to leverage multimedia interactions as never before,
SIP-enabled IP solutions can literally transform the customer experience to improve
customer retention and set the stage for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

78% 82% 44%

Say contact center agents have Would do business with a Of defecting customers cite a
a significant influence on their company based on a great poor contact center experience
opinion of a company contact center experience as the sole reason
Source: Genesys Research

Figure 2. The Customer Experience is Central to Your Business

Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 7 of 12

GRAA Experiences Seamless Integration of Multimedia

and New Agents
Groupama Rhone Alpes Auvergne (GRAA), a division of the French insurance
conglomerate Groupama, decided to leverage SIP to incorporate multimedia
capabilities so that customers could use devices such as smartphones to interact in a
more productive manner with the contact center. The company envisioned customers
sending a picture of a car accident to their carrier from the scene or receiving an
SMS message with insurance adjuster appointment details.

At the same time, GRAA needed to incorporate 200 additional agents working
in eight new locations. Using a SIP-enabled software solution, GRAA was able
to add new agents and capabilities and begin migrating agents to an IP environment
at a significantly lower cost than if it had to purchase PBX hard phones and a
CTI-enabled PBX license. Now, GRAA plans to completely migrate to SIP-enabled
IP for all its agents.

With a SIP-enabled IP solution, contact centers can transform every customer touch-point
into an opportunity to deliver on a company’s brand promise. Multi-channel integration
means that contact centers gain the flexibility to respond to and interact with customers in
a multitude of ways, regardless of the channel in which the interaction was started. Imagine
the ability to detect the multimedia capabilities of a customer’s phone or device at the point
of contact. The agent then has the widest range of response choices available to assist the
customer: for instance, an instructional video could be sent to a video-enabled device, or
a menu of options could appear on a mobile phone as an alternative to traditional IVR.
Contact centers can use “co-browsing” or “page push” technologies to guide customers to
the information they need or to suggest a relevant product or service.

By embracing SIP/IP, contact centers can dramatically improve customer satisfaction by:

• Communicating with customers via the channel that each most prefers:
voice, e-mail, IM, chat, or video
• Leveraging presence technology to help agents resolve a customer’s issue
by instantly determining status, location, and availability of subject matter
experts
• Incorporating agents, branch employees, and experts anytime, anywhere —
irrespective of location and telephony infrastructure, enabling a dynamic
customer-centric experience
• Fully exploiting multimedia to create a blended, consistent, multi-channel
experience that better resolves customer queries and issues
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 8 of 12

Improving Agent Experience and Contact Center Performance

Not only is the customer experience elevated to an all-time high, the SIP-enabled IP
solutions also give agent productivity and satisfaction a powerful boost.

For example, SIP enables contact centers to leverage universal employee access — the
ability to extend the resource pool to encompass any agent or expert. This means that
contact centers can enable branch employees, home offices, and expert agents — regard-
less of their location — to efficiently manage their time and resources, gain greater con-
trol of their ability to assist with customer service, and improve first-call resolution rates.

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Figure 3 Universal Access through a SIP-Enabled Solution

Universal access also allows contact centers to more effectively manage spikes in volume
by routing certain customer calls to remote sites, which prevents customers from waiting
on hold, or even being blocked, due to single contact center saturation during the peak
hours, and results in better customer service performance.

In addition, through presence technology in SIP-enabled solutions, subject matter

experts can make themselves more available for customer contact and issue resolution,
while leveraging home-based agents lowers costs, decreases agent turnover, and ensures
greater flexibility to quickly meet fluctuations in volume.

Due to routing rules based upon criteria such as customer priority, agent skill set,
availability of experts, and other business rules that ensure intelligent use of valuable
resources, the customer is quickly put in touch with the best resource — expert, home,
or branch agent — for their specific need.
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 9 of 12

Comprehensive Operational Improvements with SIP-Enabled IP

While customer service is a central benefit, deploying a SIP-enabled open IP solution
also delivers a gamut of operational improvements for the contact center due to the
creation of a simplified, flexible environment that is extensible and scalable to support
future business needs.

Companies can now consolidate contact center environments to ensure centralized

administration and improved resource virtualization. Contact centers with multiple sites
can be managed as one virtual pool of agents, which better utilizes resources, strengthens
customer service, and reduces maintenance costs. Remote agent management in such a
virtual environment also allows changes to a single agent or agent group allocation to be
made in real time without having to reprogram the switch. In addition, small remote sites
can be brought online much faster.

SIP-enabled IP also reduces the total cost of ownership as contact centers gain a greater
choice of vendors and simplified upgrades. As customer service software is separated
from proprietary communications devices, contact centers can further reduce costs by
eliminating hardware-based ACDs altogether.

Finally, SIP-enabled solutions can provide contact In cases where the entire contact
centers with more flexible, cost-effective approaches center is disrupted, software-based
to business continuity by delivering uninterrupted SIP solutions enable companies to
service levels through capabilities such as quickly reroute calls to other centers or
emergency default routing, backup and recovery
branch employees as part of a business
of established sessions, and hot standby. In the
continuity response.
event that a system goes down, the software-based
SIP solution can ensure high availability through a
back-up system that saves any calls that might be impacted. In a disaster situation where
the entire contact center is disrupted, companies have the ability to quickly reroute calls
to other centers or branch employees.
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 10 of 12

The Freedom to Migrate Instead of Rip-and-Replace

The power and simplicity of the SIP open standard mean that contact centers can begin
to reap the benefits of an open IP solution without ripping out and replacing current
infrastructure — and instead migrating at a pace that suits their unique requirements. A
SIP-enabled IP contact center solution makes IP transformation feasible by integrating
with a contact center’s existing PBX infrastructure. This allows organizations to introduce
innovative contact center functions by separating the ACD from the PBX and replacing
it with a SIP-enabled solution. For contact centers not requiring advanced enterprise
telephony (such as personal voice mail), they have the option of replacing the hardware
switch entirely with a software-based switch for call
As customer service software is separated from control, routing, and management functionality. In this
proprietary communications devices, contact centers case, contact centers save costs on hardware and main-
can further reduce costs by eliminating hardware- tenance by eliminating the proprietary hardware and
based ACDs altogether. simplifying the management of the environment.

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Figure 4 Genesys SIP/IP Enables Flexible Migration

As shown in Figure 4, the Genesys solution supports TDM, IP, or hybrid IP/TDM
environments and thus enables flexible migration from TDM to IP. Contact centers that
have already invested in PBX can still leverage the existing PBX infrastructure while also
implementing open standards-based IP components. In all cases, the Genesys solution
enables a single, centralized virtual contact center environment for the optimal utilization
and management of all agents as well as other resources.
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 11 of 12

Replacing Acds With Better Routing

After moving the company’s internal voice traffic to IP, a leading financial services
firm has been replacing its legacy ACDs with SIP/IP technology. In addition to
eliminating its dependency on proprietary hardware, the company needed the
ability to perform intelligent skills-based routing at the agent level — the legacy
ACD used a complicated scheme of multiple groups instead of true agent-level
skills-based routing.
By taking a pure software approach using a SIP-enabled IP solution, the company
was able to meet all of its objectives for the complete replacement of its legacy
ACD hardware. Now, instead of hardware that needs to be maintained at multiple
locations all over the country, the company relies upon a centrally-located,
SIP-enabled software solution to intelligently route calls to the best agent.

Therefore, contact centers have the following flexible options for SIP/IP adoption:
• Keep existing PBX in current site while expanding new branch offices
with SIP/IP
• Keep existing PBX in current site while provisioning remote agents in
SOHO (Small-Office-Home-Office) with SIP/IP
• Keep existing PBX in current site while adding new agents with SIP/IP at
the same site
• Keep existing PBX in current site while gradually converting some agents
with SIP/IP at the same site. Re-provision the newly idle PBX ports for
other staff in the organization
• Re-deploy PBX for internal organizational usage, while converting the
contact center into SIP/IP environment

Conclusion
With the emergence of the SIP protocol as the open standard that frees organizations
from proprietary hardware, contact centers are finally able to safely reap the extensive
business benefits of implementing open standards-based SIP/IP solutions. By leveraging
the dynamic multimedia capabilities of SIP, contact centers can seamlessly deliver
exceptional customer service and increase satisfaction, while also optimizing agent and
resource efficiency. With a dynamic contact center model, contact centers can react
faster to external conditions and respond more quickly to fluctuating variables by better
balancing traffic, resources, and call outcomes.
Companies that actively migrate toward SIP-enabled IP solutions are better prepared to
ensure universal access, allowing any employee to assist with customer service for faster
issue resolution and better business continuity through a more flexible, cost-effective,
multi-channel approach.
Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center 12 of 12

SIP offers a way for contact centers to migrate to IP-based solutions while continuing to
leverage current investments in the contact center infrastructure. By selecting SIP-enabled
IP solutions that don’t require an expensive rip-and-replace, organizations can begin to
transform their contact centers at a pace that best suits their needs and future-proofs their
environment against technology and business changes. SIP-enabled IP also reduces the total
cost of ownership as contact centers gain a greater choice of vendors, simplify upgrades, and
reduce costs on hardware and maintenance.

Organizations that embrace SIP-enabled IP solutions in their contact centers especially gain
a distinct competitive advantage in customer service, flexibility, and operational efficiency.
By leveraging the power and flexibility of SIP-enabled IP solutions, enterprises will be best
positioned to deliver the types of new services required in an increasingly customer-centric
business environment.

About the Genesys IP Contact Center Solution

The Genesys IP Contact Center Solution, including the Genesys SIP Server, provides the
freedom to select the hardware infrastructure and contact center applications that best meet
an organization’s business needs today, while future proofing the environment for tomorrow.
The Genesys SIP Server provides open and flexible multimedia, and agent monitoring
functions that integrate the Genesys suite with any SIP-enabled IP infrastructure.

The Genesys IP offering is SIP-enabled and provides:

• Integration with leading SIP-based applications provides more vender

choices, simplified upgrades, and reduced maintenance costs
• Migration to IP at an organization’s own pace while maintaining the
current system functionality; no need to rip-and-replace
• Support for multiple customer service communication channels, including
voice, e-mail, chat, IM, and video

Genesys Worldwide Americas Europe, Middle East, Africa Asia Pacific

Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the world’s leading Corporate Headquarters EMEA Headquarters APAC Headquarters
provider of contact center and customer service management
Genesys Genesys House Genesys Laboratories
software — with more than 4,000 customers in 80 countries.
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every day, dynamically connecting customers with the Daly City, CA 94014 Frimley Level 17, 124 Walker Street
right resources — self-service or assisted-service — to USA Camberley North Sydney NSW 2060
fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and Surrey GU16 7SG Australia
efficiently use agent resources. Genesys helps organizations Tel: +1 650 466 1100 United Kingdom
drive contact center efficiency, stop customer frustration Fax: +1 650 466 1260 Tel: +61 2 9463 8500
and accelerate business innovation. E-mail: info@genesyslab.com Tel: +44 1276 45 7000
www.genesyslab.com Fax: +44 1276 45 7001
For more information visit: www.genesyslab.com, or call
+1 888 GENESYS or 1-650-466-1100.
Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All other company names
and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby recognized. © 2008 Genesys
2833.v2-08/08-U.S. Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.