Sip Empowering Enterprise Screen

Business White Paper

Genesys SIP –
Empowering Enterprise-wide Customer Service

I
n order to win customer loyalty, organizations need to continually improve their
customer service operations and be more cost effective. The bottom line is that
Table of Contents customer retention, cost control, and business continuity are vital to business success,
Customer Service in Evolution .......... 2
particularly in a competitive market.
SIP — Enabling IP Customer Service
Transformation..................................... 6 In the contact center, voice over IP (VoIP) as enabled by the SIP (Session Initial Protocol)
Unified Communications and standard unlocks the constraints of traditional solutions to fundamentally alter the way
Collaborations Improve the Customer organizations across industries can deliver customer service, offer new and better ways of
Experience............................................ 6
providing sales and service, and expand options for creating better customer relationships.
Genesys SIP ―— Supporting a Unified
Customer Service Operation ............. 7 With SIP-enabled VoIP solutions, contact centers are empowered to drive greater business
Deploying Customer-Winning Services value by providing the foundation for virtualized agent resources, improved agent
for Business Success ......................... 8 productivity, reduced operations and infrastructure costs, and optimized customer
Conclusion .......................................... 11 experiences. In addition, companies are able to enhance their competitive advantage by
offering customer-oriented applications on top of SIP-enabled VoIP architecture.
This white paper provides insights on the key attributes of SIP for customer service; how
businesses can prosper with adoption of SIP; and flexible deployment strategies for migrating
from TDM to VoIP. In addition, this paper will look at the available software, including
relatively new arrivals such as unified communications, which can enhance a distributed
customer sales and service strategy.

February 2009

Business White Paper: Genesys SIP Empowering Enterprise-wide Customer Service | page 2 of 12

Customer Service in Evolution
The global economy has seen more and more products and services introduced into the marketplace.
Demand for consumer attention is higher than ever, and yet consumers are already bombarded with all
types of advertisements, promotions, and marketing campaigns. As a result, advertizing alone, no matter
how revolutionary, isn’t enough by itself to create a consistent and reliable revenue stream.
In order to meet revenue goals, enterprises must use the power of customer loyalty to turn their first time
customers into company advocates. Therefore, companies must address their customer service performance in
order to generate brand recognition, competitive differentiation, customer acquisition, and customer retention.
Due in part to the historical limitations of technology, many organizations approached customer service
and sales by implementing a contact center. This specialized communications department began, in
many cases, as a cost center with strong emphasis on cost control and little awareness of how the sales
or service levels impact customer relationships and, ultimately, the bottom line. This method of customer
communication, which began in earnest about 35 years ago with the creation of the ACD (automatic
call distributor), is beginning to change dramatically as many companies recognize that customer service
is a key strategic link for business growth. It doesn’t hurt that technology and software advances have
reached a point where more effective options are available and cost significantly less than traditional
contact center solutions.
While awareness of the importance of providing an excellent customer experience is now on the rise,
companies must still provide that experience at a reasonable cost to the business. For a business to successfully
meet this goal, it must provide quality service that is convenient, responsive, personalized, and effective.
SIP technology can help deliver customer service with these attributes, resulting in higher customer
satisfaction and increased customer retention, which directly leads to the generation of new revenue.

The Role of SIP in Unlocking New Potential in Customer Service
For the last eight years, enterprises and some contact centers have been replacing their legacy voice infra-
structures and combining voice with other data traffic — in other words, adopting Voice over IP (VoIP).
This has resulted in cost savings for those organizations that have made that move while also implementing
standards-based SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which enables more effective customer service delivery.
There are two major attributes of SIP-based VoIP that fundamentally change the ways that customer
service can be delivered: Virtualization and Presence.

Virtualization
Unlike legacy call centers where traditional ACD and PBX hardware must be located near the agents who
perform the customer service, the next generation IP contact center infrastructure can be aggregated and
the infrastructure capacities virtualized.
With software-driven IP technology, the contact center equipment, software, and applications can be
located in a data center separated from agent locations, and it becomes feasible for organizations to virtually
centralize multiple contact centers from main site, branch office, and even home agents to effectively
manage all the resources. This dramatically streamlines the customer service operation and simplifies
infrastructure requirements at agent locations, which greatly enhances an organization’s flexibility to
dynamically manage contact center operations — including branch office expansion, expert contact in the
enterprise, home agents, service hosting, outsourcing, and disaster recovery.


With this virtual, centralized architecture, all the provisioning and maintenance tasks are performed at
the data center, which is able to directly push applications and software upgrades to agent desktops in
multiple remote locations. This brings significant cost saving opportunities to organizations, which no
longer require a dedicated technical team to maintain the hardware-based legacy equipment at each
contact center. Additionally, with VoIP adoption throughout the organization, companies realize big
savings by combining voice and data traffic onto a single, converged IP network.

Legacy Contact Center Data Center

ACD IVR WFM VMail PBX CRM Database

IVRs

PBX
IP Based Architechture
ACD

Call
Recording Mail Call center IP/SIP Phone Outsourcer

Digital Set

Remote Center
Digital Set Branch Office Home Expert

Figure-1 Next Generation Customer Service Architecture

Presence
Presence tracks the availability of an employee across different communication channels, and notes
whether they are available for a call, not available, in-a-meeting, out-of-office, etc. Presence can also
offer additional information, such as the next time they will be available, their multi-channel avail-
ability status, and an indication of their preferred channel for communication. For example, presence
can note when a person is busy on a call, yet is still available for an IM (instant message) chat at the
same time.
Presence can be displayed in a directory or a personalized buddy list with multi-channel status. It can
also be embedded in applications such as e-mail, Web pages, and calendars. Here is an example:
1. John, a branch office employee, logs a trouble ticket for IT support and receives an e-mail
response from Sue, a member of the IT support team.
2. After reading the e-mail, John still needs help and, using the presence status icon shown next to
the e-mail header, he finds that Sue is available at that moment for an IM chat.
3. John right-clicks Sue’s presence icon and launches an IM chat session with Sue.
4. After chatting for a minute, they decide to talk to each other via telephone to resolve the trouble
ticket. Sue then right-clicks John’s presence icon on her IM chat window to initiate a direct
phone call to John.
Further escalation is possible as well, including white board sharing, file sharing, or even video
conferencing.


The presence capabilities are utilized by Unified Communications (UC) programs in order to increase
worker productivity and collaboration. This paper will discuss UC a little later.
The impact of presence on customer service
In the contact center, the concept of presence has been utilized for some time, although it is usually
In a SIP world, all a referred to as agent readiness. The combination of virtualization and SIP-based presence together
makes it feasible to interconnect agents from any physical location in the customer service operation.
resource needs in
order to play a role in The virtualization minimizes the resources required to receive customer contact. In a SIP world, all a
resource needs in order to play a role in customer service and sales is a computer, a desktop application
customer service and
with information about the customer, a broadband connection, and a telephone — either a soft or
sales is a computer, hard SIP phone or a TDM-based phone.
a desktop application
With presence, a company is able to track the availability of a resource (expert, etc.) even beyond the
with information contact center without specialized software on that resource’s desktop. This enables the organization
about the customer, a to support its customer service operation with a large variable pool of resources that have a wide range
broadband connection, of skills and capabilities.
and a telephone —
The Phases of IP Migration and Adoption
either a soft or hard
SIP phone or a Many large organizations adopt VoIP gradually, with the contact center being migrated to VoIP at a
later stage. This gradual move results in a period of time during which the organization operates with
TDM-based phone.
a hybrid environment — where both the legacy and IP infrastructure co-exist for multiple years until
the legacy equipment is fully depreciated and replaced.
Unlike the rip-and-replace approach, this not only prolongs the return on investment of the legacy
equipment, but also makes the migration smooth and manageable. Such migration typically starts with
an expansion beyond the existing contact center or with the replacement of legacy hardware-based
infrastructure near the end of its life cycle. In this case, the challenge for the organization is to manage
both legacy and IP customer service operations simultaneously on different networks. In contrast,
green field, small, and medium-sized businesses usually switch to IP directly.
As companies are migrating to VoIP at their own pace, the customer service SIP market is maturing,
with the broad adoption of SIP standards by vendors for a variety of product offerings and services
taking place through three distinct phases.


Phase III • Customer Focus
Service App
Applications • Best of Breed
Business Value

Phase II • SIP Interop
Open IP • Network SIP Trunking
• Unified
Communications

Phase I
Infrastructure • ACD Consolidation
Replacement • PBX Retirement

Figure-2 IP Maturity Cycle

The first phase is currently well underway and is marked by the rise of hybrid customer service
operations. In this first phase, SIP-based VoIP solutions are deployed in specific areas of the
customer service operation — usually those that contained the aged technology, or in new areas
that bring remote resources into the customer service operation. The legacy hardware equipment,
such as ACDs and PBXs, is upgraded or replaced with software-based SIP applications. One
common goal of organizations in this first phase is to attain the cost savings associated with
consolidating contact center solutions into a data center and combining the voice and data onto a
single consistent infrastructure.
The second phase of IP adoption is focused on an open IP environment based on the SIP standard.
Due to the distributed and disaggregated nature of IP architecture, full interoperability among IP
applications and equipment is essential to ensure reliable, robust, and secure interworking operations.
In this open IP environment, SIP plays a key role in enabling interoperability, not only for existing
operations, but also for new applications to be introduced in the future. SIP is a widely recognized
signaling protocol and is broadly supported for VoIP communications, including IP telephony, IP
video, Instant Messaging, and unified communications within and beyond contact centers. From
the network perspective, SIP also enables direct IP traffic flow from carriers to contact centers
through SIP trunking and SIP Connect (a SIP-based standard to support network traffic). This saves
organizations the cost of the inter-connection charge through the PSTN network.
In the open IP environment, SIP, with standard extension supporting presence, also enables UC
beyond contact centers throughout the organization. With UC, contact centers are able to improve
customer service performance by providing multimedia customer interactions and seamlessly enabling
the collaboration of experts and other resources in the rest of the organization.
Ultimately, in the third phase, SIP interoperability will become ubiquitous, enabling organizations to
deploy customer service applications based on the specific capabilities they require. Unlike traditional,
hardware-based communications equipment that is only supported by proprietary software, in this final
phase, the SIP-based open IP environment brings organizations the freedom to implement best-of-breed
products with lower cost and better innovations without getting stuck with a particular supplier.


SIP ―— Enabling IP Customer Service Transformation
SIP is the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF’s) standard for multimedia communications over IP.
Over the years, SIP has gained significant market share and become the common protocol for IP
communications.
Several key factors contribute to wide SIP support. SIP is a lightweight peer-to-peer signaling protocol
to establish and tear down communication sessions between parties. The beauty of SIP is its simplicity
and flexibility. Its signaling transaction model, separated from the media traffic, not only manages the
communication sessions efficiently, but also supports multi-channel communications, including voice,
video, instant messaging, and conferencing. In addition, SIP has proven reliable for large scale deployment.
All these characteristics make SIP perfect for deployment in a future-proofed application environment.
SIP also supports presence with SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions)
standard. As discussed, real-time presence is the key element to enabling instant messaging and unified
communications within and beyond contact centers.
As broad support for SIP from communications equipment and applications vendors increases, SIP
offers a common ground for seamless interoperability. With a SIP-enabled customer service operation,
enterprises obtain several major benefits:
> Freedom to deploy the best-of-breed applications from multiple vendors
> Flexibility to support virtual, centralized customer service operations that are involved with
branch offices, work-at-home agents, hosting providers, and outsourcers in distributed locations
> Ability to offer multimedia interactions beyond voice to enhance the customer experience
> Capacity to support unified communications beyond contact centers throughout the entire
organization
> Cost savings from lower infrastructure maintenance and interconnection charges

Unified Communications and Collaborations Improve the
Customer Experience
Unified Communications improves how individuals and groups communicate, increases employee
productivity, and reduces “human latency” in business processes. UC commonly covers voice, video,
e-mail, messaging, instant messaging (IM), conferencing, and mobility. It supports an environment
where multimedia communications occur in orchestration with the presence status of each party.
UC enables better customer service by increasing the ease of communication between front line
customer service employees and back office experts. In addition to improving communication efficiency,
UC enhances the customer experience by providing a common desktop from which employees
outside the contact center can play a dynamic multi-modal role in customer sales and service. This
presents a number of benefits, such as:
1. Experts in areas of high complexity are able to communicate directly with customers and manage
customer situations effectively. This not only increases customer satisfaction because it solves
customers’ issues faster, but also reduces training costs for front line agents because they will no
longer be required to be experts on all aspects of the company’s operations.
2. Workers in the enterprise can be organized to dynamically support customer service operations
when extra high customer call volumes saturate its contact center capacity.
These will be further detailed in the next section.


Genesys SIP — Supporting a Unified Customer Service Operation
With Genesys in a UC-enabled environment, enterprises are able to provide extremely dynamic
customer service operations and leverage various skill sets from across the organization, thereby
supporting customers in a more timely manner by rallying its employee community.
By applying the Genesys core competencies of capacity modeling, abstraction of resources, and routing,
enterprises are able to orchestrate the customer experience by blending contact center functions with
the rest of the organization. Genesys technology further enhances the efficiency of Unified
Communications by incorporating company-specific routing rules based on service type, availability,
skill category, working schedule, resource capacity, and preferred communications channel.
As Unified Communications is established throughout
the enterprise, each agent is able to serve any customers,
which enables the organization to handle extra customer
calls even when the contact centers are saturated during
volume spikes. In other cases, agents are able to escalate
specific customer requests to enterprise experts. Multiple
experts can even collaborate concurrently across different
media channels. All of this not only improves customer
service performance, but also increases the satisfaction for
both customers and agents and enhances the organiza-
tion’s competitive differentiation.
In addition to the interoperation of basic presence with
leading UC platforms, Genesys SIP can provide rich
status information on both IP and TDM telephony
presence, skills, and the real-time multi-channel capacity
of enterprise employees and contact center agents.

Figure-3 Genesys Integrating Enterprise Expert Presence

G E N ESYS SI P
Presence Subscriptions Enterprise Connection Routing Transactions
• Integrate presence from • Deliver communication or • Notification/transfer/
leading UC platforms work items across contact consult via multi-channels
center and enterprise sessions

Presence Enrichment Media Extension Universal Routing
• Telephony presence from IP, • Multi-channel capabliities • Skills-based routing
hybrid, and TDM PBXs • Call and multimedia blending
• Agent skill and capacity • Capacity rules

Figure-4 Genesys SIP — Empowering UC Efficiency


Deploying Customer-Winning Services for Business Success
As contact centers migrate from traditional TDM hardware-based infrastructure toward IP solutions, it
is a challenge for many organizations to design and execute a proper IP adoption strategy that will have
minimum impact on the customer service operation and contact center agent team. A suitable strategy
should address the organization’s various objectives, including enhancing customer satisfaction,
increasing productivity, improving flexibility, and saving costs — and it should occur without disrup-
tion to business continuity in order to make the IP migration appear seamless to customers.
With market leadership of Computer Telephony Interface (CTI) and SIP in the customer service
industry, Genesys solutions provide great flexibility for organizations seeking to adopt an IP-based
customer service operation. With Genesys, contact centers are able to serve customers with resources
in a mix of IP and TDM environments. Having a single blended routing strategy helps organizations
migrate smoothly to IP, and by starting the migration before the end of the life cycle for the existing
contact center hardware, enterprises are able to move agents over to the solution at a pace that allows
for agent acclimatization. This approach maximizes the earlier investment and puts the contact center
in control of the operation, helping to minimize disruptions to the customer service operation.
With distributed IP technology, Genesys SIP supports a virtual contact center (or customer service
operation) that can use resources from multiple locations as a single, logical agent pool. Control of
the customer operation can be centralized in a corporate data center or hosted service provider. Many
customers with Genesys SIP expand their customer service operations beyond the main contact
center into branch offices, outsourcing sites, and/or work-at-home agents. This provides organiza-
tions great flexibility to better manage and balance such things as unexpected call volumes, agent
workloads, and disaster recovery operations.

PSTN Media
Server
SIP Server
Contact Center

SoHo

SIP Contact Center Agents Branch Office Agents Home Agent

Figure-5 Genesys SIP Enables a Virtual Centralized Contact Center


There are several approaches to deploying Genesys SIP that will meet contact center specific situations
and needs. For pure customer service operations, contact centers can deploy Genesys SIP as a stand-
alone communications server. As shown in Figure-6, Genesys SIP has a direct SIP interface with the
IP phone on the agent desktop, or the IP soft client on the agent computer. In this case, Genesys SIP
provides call control and switching functions to and from the agent IP phone. The incoming customer
call routing logistics are performed by a Universal Routing Server (URS) located in the main Genesys
Customer Interaction Management (CIM) platform, with intelligent routing rules based on agent skills,
customer categories, service types, and so on. Genesys SIP also includes call queuing and treatment
capabilities to support agent-related media services such as music/media on hold, call recording,
conferencing, and supervisory features.

Carrier
Network

SIP/Public
Network
SIP Server
Media
SIP Server

SIP Universal SDK

Figure-6 Genesys SIP as Stand Alone Deployment


Some other companies blend customer service operations within the enterprise organization’s IP
telephony infrastructure. Some customer service agents often assume additional job functions in the
enterprise. These agents then may need advanced enterprise VoIP features, such as advanced enterprise
call features. In this case, as shown in Figure-7, Genesys SIP can be deployed as an application server
sitting behind a third-party softswitch, which has a direct interface with the agent IP phone. For
incoming customer calls, the softswitch passes call signaling information to Genesys routing through
Genesys SIP, and switches the call to specific agents according to the routing strategy. Like the stand-
alone approach, Genesys SIP offers media on hold, conferencing, and call recording features.

Carrier
Network
Media
Server

Softswitch SIP Server

SIP

SIP

Universal SDK

Figure-7 Genesys SIP as an Application Server


In the contact center, Genesys SIP tracks the real-time availability status of each agent and routes the
incoming customer calls to available agents. Genesys SIP is able to interoperate with enterprise presence
servers and unified communications platforms, such as the Microsoft Office Communication Server
(OCS), to expand customer service operations beyond the contact center agents to other employees
or experts in the enterprise. With such unified presence information integrated, contact center agents
are able to transfer and escalate specific customer service calls to available experts directly. In case of
saturated contact center operations, the Genesys routing engine then routes the calls directly to pre-
assigned enterprise employees based on their availability and skills. Depending on organizational and
business rules, enterprise employees may voluntarily make themselves available via their preferred
communication channel (IM, e-mail, voice, or video) for external customer service support during
certain hours of the day to balance out their regular job functions.

Carrier
Network

SIP/Public
Network

GENESYS
CIM/SIP
Presence
Media
Server SIP

SIP Universal SDK
Presence Presence

Enterprise
Expert
Contact Center
Agent

Figure-8 Genesys SIP Integration with Unified Communications


Conclusion
As IP technology becomes ubiquitous for business communications due to its simplicity and seamless
interoperability, SIP is playing an increasingly essential role in enabling an open, flexible, and unified
communication environment throughout the organization.
SIP has gained significant support from numerous equipment and solution vendors, giving organizations
the freedom to pick the best-of-breed applications independently of the infrastructure and hardware.
Genesys SIP provides contact centers with great flexibility for IP migration, allowing enterprises to maintain
business continuity throughout the adoption of various strategies, including traditional ACD and PBX
replacement, branch office expansion, work-at-home agent operations, service provider hosting, and
customer service outsourcing.
Genesys SIP integrates and enriches the enterprise unified communications environment with the seamless
support for SIP presence and multimedia sessions. As a result, organizations are able to extend their
customer service operations beyond the contact center with dynamic collaboration from experts and other
resources in the enterprise. Ultimately, organizations are enabled to achieve excellent customer service
performance, provide great satisfaction both for customers and agents, boost their business competitive
differentiation, and enhance their bottom line.

Genesys Worldwide Americas Europe, Middle East, Africa Asia Pacific
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the world’s leading Corporate Headquarters EMEA Headquarters APAC Headquarters
provider of contact center and customer service management
Genesys Genesys House Genesys Laboratories
software — with more than 4,000 customers in 80 countries.
Genesys software directs more than 100 million interactions 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd. 100 Frimley Business Park Australasia Pty Ltd
every day, dynamically connecting customers with the right Daly City, CA 94014 Frimley Level 17, 124 Walker Street
resources — self-service or assisted-service — to fulfill USA Camberley North Sydney NSW 2060
customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently Surrey GU16 7SG Australia
use agent resources. Genesys helps organizations drive contact Tel: +1 650 466 1100 United Kingdom
center efficiency, stop customer frustration and accelerate Fax: +1 650 466 1260 Tel: +61 2 9463 8500
business innovation. E-mail: info@genesyslab.com Tel: +44 1276 45 7000
www.genesyslab.com Tel: +44 1276 45 7001
For more information visit us on the Web: www.genesyslab.com,
or call +1 888 GENESYS (1-650-466-1100).
Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All other company names
2959 v1.1-02/09 and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby recognized. © 2009 Genesys
Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.

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