Virtual Call Centres – Part 2 - Technology

By Jonty Pearce

In the second part of our look at virtual call centres we take a look at some of the technology driving virtual call centres.

Up until recently virtual call centres had been held back by three main concerns - voice quality, security and reliability. But in the past 12 months there has been a significant shift in the take-up rate of virtual call centres.

According to Jim Davies, Contact Centre Analyst of Gartner, “We have been told for years that IP has been coming in the next 12 months, but we now predict that next year shipments of IP contact centres will overtake that of traditional TDM based contact centres”.

But are people really deploying virtual call centres, or are they just hedging their bets and buying a technology that is more future proof? “I think that many people are deploying IP Contact Centres in the way that they have deployed traditional TDM systems,” says Mike Thomas, Group Contact Centre Architect for the power company Centrica. “The cabling is often completely separate from the data network”.

There is no doubt that there has recently been an increase in confidence in IP technology that has fuelled the take-up in IP contact centres. But what has come of the three main concerns - voice quality, reliability and security ?

Voice quality

As more people have started to implement IP-based voice systems they have discovered that the voice quality is not as big an issue for end users as they had originally expected. “IP voice systems can now deliver full quality business telephony audio, but ironically, if you look at GSM, for example, people have become very tolerant of poor voice quality in business when using mobile phones,” says Nigel Jones, Marketing and Business Development Manager of Alcatel. Conventional 64 kbs PCM voice systems will limit audio bandwidth to approximately 3.4KHz, however some new IP voice systems can support larger bandwidth - if it is available on the network, giving virtually HiFi quality. This means that a better range of voice frequencies can be heard. “Providing the IP network can support these increased bandwidths, this will start to offer new improved levels of voice quality services for end users,” says Nigel Jones.

In fact, the voice quality is so good that many of the new generation of SIP (Ethernet) IP phones are having to inject a low level 'comfort noise'. This background noise is used purely so that during pauses in the conversation, callers know that they are still connected.

Reliability

The other issue that has now largely been resolved is that of reliability. Servers and PCs have become much more reliable in the past three years. Server technology and processor power has increased by leaps and bounds and so has the reliability of the operating systems. It is now possible to buy highly redundant and highly scalable Linux servers which can be backed up across the WAN.

Also the general perception of reliability has changed as desktop PCs have become more reliable. It was not uncommon for a Windows 95 or 98 PC to lock up on you - often several times a week. With the higher power PCs and Microsoft's XP operating system - it is rare for a PC to completely lock up. This improvement has tended to lessen the overall perception of reliability as an issue.

Linux is also used by some telephony vendors for communications voice servers which can provide proven 99.999% availability - comparable with legacy PBXs. Another advantage of Linux based systems is their resistance to worms and viruses which can often infect Windows based operating systems if the appropriate anti-virus measures are not in place.
The reliability of voice quality has also improved as more companies have built IP networks that support Quality of Service (QoS). QoS based networks allow business data and real time critical voice IP packets to co-exist on the same network, but ensure high priority voice packets get to their destination first - so there are no glitches in audio quality. “People were trying to cut corners by running IP voice on the existing non QoS data network - which caused the bad voice quality problems, even though the basic IP telephony system worked fine,” says Nigel Jones. “Now they have built a complete new IP network and have upgraded it to include Quality of Service”.

The network is now typically segmented so that both voice and data are carried on separate VLANs.

Security

Security of IP systems has also improved considerably over the past few years. Companies that are concerned about security are using encryption systems such as Talis. For those companies that need security in their network, “There is nothing to fear anymore,” says Dave Thomson, Marketing Manager for Cisco.

But simply adding encryption onto a network is not all plain sailing. “It makes things such as voice recording much more difficult,” says Nathan George of Witness Systems. “You can’t just put a pair of crocodile clips across two wires and start recording any more”. When the voice traffic is encrypted you have to be able to either record at the gateway level, as calls come into the call centre, or you have to be passed the key. This need for multiple vendors to have the security key is causing its own security problems. Obviously the more people who have the key, the less the secure it becomes. This has led to the IP system providers like Avaya and Nortel acting as the security systems’ integrator and managing the deployment of the voice recording systems.

Where next for the Virtual Call Centre?

There is one area where the virtual call centre has yet to go – and this is in the field of presence enabled applications using SIP technology.

In the next issue we will be exploring SIP and finding out where this will take the virtual call centre.