Customers are everywhere; they walk into stores and branches, surf the internet, and contact your business in the way most convenient to them.  Some may call the contact center; some may call directly into your company’s main number.  This means customer service has to be enterprise wide to allow you to meet the needs of today’s customer, by engaging knowledgeable resources across your enterprise at the right time and at the right cost. 

Have you considered the potential benefits you can gain from Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) solutions in your contact center?   Avaya recently announced Intelligent Customer Routing (ICR), a SIP based contact center solution that enables a high value, end to end personalized customer experience.  ICR can provide your company with competitive differentiation through customer service.   With the advent of new technologies, such as SIP, you can create the optimal experience while simplifying your environment and significantly reducing costs. 

Avaya ICR is an open standards, SIP based, approach to architecting the contact center that provides the ability to segment and treat callers at the point of entry into the network.  By moving routing and self service to the point of call entry, ICR allows more accurate call treatment decisions that can improve call handling accuracy and reduce follow on network requirements and costs. Leveraging SIP, infrastructure elements such as Avaya Voice Portal and Avaya Communication Manager are peered.  This makes applications such as interactive speech available as the first access point to perform initial caller identification, verification of needs, and execute self service applications relevant to those needs without consuming other platform resources unnecessarily. If assisted service is required, Intelligent Customer Routing applies agent selection and segmentation based on real time data to determine the optimal location amongst the set of available enterprise-wide agent resources.  SIP call delivery enables call context integration (CCI) where data is passed with the call and delivered via the SIP header, eliminating the need for a parallel network to deliver data with a call.

Imagine a typical customer environment where self service is handled via a 3rd party, calls are allocated across locations via a load balancing model, and transfers across locations are done via the public network.  All of these elements bring an associated with a cost per transaction, or call.

Now imagine an environment where a call comes in to a central point in the enterprise and is offered service options based on customer profile via automate speech enabled interactive applications.  If that customer need is resolved, the call ends there.  If the customer needs to speak to someone live, ICR enables the optimal selection of that resource.  That resource could be an agent, or maybe an expert at a branch.  Let’s say that resource is an agent, the call is queued to the appropriate ACD but rather than your typical hold music, personalized options are offered.  For example a highly valued customer gets an option to add their name to a waiting list for that next new gadget.  Or, maybe they call in every month to check their balance.  Why not offer to SMS that information.  Think of this as a second chance at self service, or maybe an opportunity to create the wow factor in customer service.  Then, when an agent becomes available, the caller is delivered with information about the caller and the queue experience.

So, what can all this do for you? 

• Reduce Infrastructure Requirements. Calls completed in Self Service (typically 30 to 60%) use no additional network or ACD resources resulting in significant cost reduction and overall lower total cost of ownership.

• Reduce complexity. Leverage SIP for standards based interoperability and information forwarding via the SIP header.

• Simplify Integration. Business rules, real time data, routing information and back end applications are integrated at the application server level via standards.

• Deploy Innovative Services. Employ SIP to design multimodal, presence aware services. Do all of the above, but add video! 

• Reduce Network Costs.  Eliminate or reduce costs associated with pre-route allocation and post-route transfers. 

To learn more about the advantages of SIP in the contact center please visit http://www.avaya.com/usa/solutions/portfolio--contact-centers.