Genesys Releases IP Contact Center Study

Genesys has released a survey entitled Contact Center Outlook on IP Technology: A Detailed Report Examining the Deployment of Internet Protocol Telephony in Contact Centers.

The report opens by stating that “…Internet Protocol Telephony — also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) — has quickly become one of the most important technology considerations for contact centers…”

Genesys’ vice president of IP business development Rob Winder told me that the company has been very interested in gaining greater insight into the market, and they saw some interest from the user community so they decided now was the right time to commission such a study.

Genesys contacted 500 contact center technology managers from 20 industries and 53 countries. Respondents hailed from a variety of industries and were responsible for managing contact centers ranging from five seats in a single site deployment to 30,000 seats across 300 sites.

Some of the key findings from the survey:

• 19 percent have already deployed IP telephony in at least one contact center

• 24 percent are currently planning or deploying IP telephony in at least one contact center

• 41 percent are currently investigating deployment of IP telephony in at least one contact center

• 16 percent are not currently investigating or planning to deploy IP telephony

• 60 percent of all respondents expect to deploy IP telephony in at least one contact center within a year, rising to 82 percent within two years.

• Most organizations expect to have a mixture of traditional circuit-switched and IP-packet switching telephony across their operations for years to come.

As it turns out, the decision to deploy IP telephony in the contact center is being driven by a number of factors that executives are considering as they build the business rationale. To whit, organizations consider the following reasons significant drivers for adoption of IP telephony:

67%.....Reduce Costs

61%.....Deploy New Applications

47%.....Backup & Disaster Recovery

43%.....Whole Organization Migrating to IP Telephony

39%.....Infrastructure Reached End of Life

33%.....Needed Interface for Managed Services

25%.....Needed Interface to Outsourcer

Still, while cost is often cited as the primary driver to embrace IP telephony, the survey revealed a trend towards a broader set of benefits being realized, at least in the experience of early adopters.

These benefits include:

• The ability to extend call center operations across the enterprise;

• Business improvements resulting from centralized, consolidated operations management;

• Improved ease of integrating applications; and

• Easy virtualizations of resources — providing a single point of enterprise-wide call control and routing.

The report’s authors posit that these benefits… “which are already being considered by some organizations planning or investigating IP telephony, can help build stronger business cases for organizations whose recent investment in telephony infrastructure is holding them back.”

In the end, the report found that the fact that early adopters have discovered broad business benefits by choosing IP telephony, “lends credibility to business cases that look further than simple cost savings — especially those that take into account opportunities to deploy new business applications and features, and extend contact center capabilities into and across the enterprise.”

The report concludes, “These benefits are likely to be highly valuable to contact center technology managers that find the business case for deploying IP telephony does not stand up on cost savings alone, because of the value that remains in their existing investments and the cost of migrating to and implementing IP telephony.”