All technology investment, at a philosophical level, is about enhancing productivity, whether you are buying a sledgehammer, a can opener, or a softswitch. But if you are buying a softswitch, chances are your productivity philosophy is also linked to a bigger picture: IT and telecom productivity means scale, and that means getting more out of a network and finding ways to make more connections with others on that network. This line of reasoning is not going to win a Nobel Prize in tele-economics, but it does help explain the enduring value of call centers because the business functions that surround remote customer management are defined by this equation.

Put another way, if productivity is the mother of technology, and scale is the mother of telecom productivity, then call centers (with all apologies to the psychedelic funk pioneers George Clinton and Parliament) turn that mother out. This is because no other part of the tele-economy benefits from the leveraging of technology to build profitable scale as contact centers. By contrast, no other industry or business operation function depends on technology advancement to continue to survive–from escalating costs, to the globalization of the outsourcing industry, to regulatory setbacks like “do-not-call” lists. There is a ceaseless stream of environmental issues with which call center operators must contend, and only cost-efficient enabling technology allows these operations to endure profitably.

The operational efficiency proposition that propels the industry first and foremost, and always has, is that call centers harness a firm’s technology and people in a unique way that no other process-based, revenuegenerating business function does. “Improving customer service and reducing costs usually pull in opposite directions,” says Terry Atwood, Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Care for PIKA Technologies (www.pikatechnologies.com), a developer of boards and media-processing technologies for IVR, PBX, and contact center solutions. “Technology today allows a contact center to build cost-effective applications on an agent’s desktop for not much more than getting voice out of a PBX. And this functionality is now accessible to a larger number of call center operators. There are many companies that would benefit from the enhanced functionality of call queuing, call statistics, and routing, which used to be too expensive. Now you can have these features and functionality even if you are small.”

And much of these enhanced features and functionally comes from IP and SIP. “SIP-based contact center solutions will allow best-of-breed vendor interoperability enabling flexible IP migration and deployments,” says Bill Bryant, Director of Marketing for Dialogic Corporation (www.dialogic.com), a Montreal,Canada-based developer of open-systems platforms. “IP-based contact centers developed around open standards will eliminate the need for enterprises to migrate to a single-sourced solution–any phone, any vendor is right around the corner.” Bryant believes that IP call centers have benefited from some of the ground that has been broken elsewhere in the enterprise space. “The majority of interoperability issues around SIP ‘standards’ have been worked out in the PBX space, so I believe that SIP is truly ready for mainstream contact center deployments.”

Paul Demopoulos, an Applications Marketing Manager at Siemens (www.siemens.com), notes the nature of open technology standards like SIP allow for technology developers to deliver good ol’ time-to-market advantages to call center operators. “With a software overlay model, cost-effective solutions can be provisioned quickly and robustly with a SIP client on a minimal number of PCs.”

If managing growth is a problem (which, Demopoulos notes, it usually is for successful centers), new seats can be configured quickly “and new operators can be trained and put into operation faster, which is critical in an industry where a sizable percentage of new recruits ‘wash out.’” And the benefits of IP are only just beginning. In Demopoulos’ view, “increased availability equals better customer service, and SIP is absolutely critical to get to the next critical path, where true multimedia morphing”–switching an instant message conversation to a voice call, for instance–“or multiple agent collaboration are possible.”

“With contact centers, the migration to IP enables compelling value [for two reasons]: the ability to leverage employees distributed across the enterprise network into a single, cohesive agent pool, and the simplification of business-process integration,” says Jeff Ridley, Director of Product Management at ShoreTel (www.shoretel.com), an IP PBX vendor and developer of technologies for virtual contact centers. Integration continues to be a significant operational hurdle for operators, but “increasing unified contact center solutions are helping to mitigate the need for integration and therefore the risk of integration challenges.” This is done, in effect, through bundling. “When [a developer] combines features such as call scripting, IVR, or multimedia delivery with call routing, a solution is enabled that is easier to deploy.”