VOICE over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the less elegant of the many abbreviations beloved by the telecommunications business but it is a concept that anybody specifying a new business communications system needs to master if they are to understand the subtleties of the technology choices available to organisations.
Internet Protocol (IP) is the communications language that enables a network of computers to talk to each other, to send e-mails, to share documents and other files.
It is the underlying mechanism of the worldwide network of computers that make up the internet and the language that a browser’s software uses to access websites. VoIP is the convergence of voice and data across networks.
As a technology, VoIP has many potential uses that go beyond the ability to make and receive phone calls over computer links. It lets organisations build private networks as opposed to the public internet and then interface these with their customers.
In recent years there has been much rethinking about the role of call centres; not only have they evolved to encompass other forms of communication, and so become contact centres, but smaller, more informal groups of people are now able to work remotely from home or smaller outposts.
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The advantages of using VoIP compared with a network of conventional telephony and data are listed in the box (right). But there is a price to be paid for this convenience. Conventional telephony might be cumbersome in comparison but it hardly ever goes wrong.
Any organisation putting all its telephone links on a computer system raises the risks of losing all communications, which makes security and back-up systems far more important and they must be thought about in greater detail. But the benefits outweigh the risks, if the implementation is right.
Newcastle Building Society is one of the smaller beasts in the financial services jungle. It had a vision of being a flexible, fast- moving virtual organisation able to compete by employing people who can communicate equally effectively regardless of location or the time of day.
In the unrelentingly competitive climate of the financial services market companies are constantly vying for new business with offers, new products and better deals. Newcastle ranks 13 by size in the league table of building societies.
As it discovered, bad call handling can scupper the most innovative campaign. A few years ago the society’s service standards were falling and it was in danger of losing business, says Colin Greaves, Newcastle’s general manager.
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So it decided to install an internet protocol virtual private network (IP VPN) over its 55 UK sites in a way that would allow offices to contact homeworkers, enabling work to flow between them. It added IP telephony, a customer-relations management call centre and skills-based routing.
The result is a virtual call centre that automatically directs callers to the person best able to answer them, wherever that person is sited, balancing the workload between head office and the branches.
The head office is at its most busy early in the mornings and late in the afternoon, times when branches are quiet. Now branch staff can log on the system as call-centre agents. The hope was that fewer calls would be abandoned and more converted into sales.
The branches are spread out geographically — good for attracting lots of customers but a nightmare to co-ordinate. The results have been remarkable, says Greaves. The society can now handle 50 per cent more calls with the same number of people, 83 per cent of which are dealt with by the person answering the call. He says: “Location is not important now because we can move work to people with spare capacity.”
An unexpected bonus has been that because the society knows exactly how its new system is configured and the precise cost of each element, it has been able to bid for, and win, new business processing third-party work, including a contract from Bradford & Bingley. The infrastructure gives opportunities for the future, such as interactive voice response, computer telephony integration and video conferencing.
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VoIP ADVANTAGES