HOT TOPICS

In a fast-changing sector like telecoms it is vital to keep abreast of the latest developments. We will use this page to periodically update our clients with 'Hot Topics'. These may at times be highly technical in their scope - so if there is something you don't understand here - please call and ask.

HOT TOPIC 1 … Advance Speech Recognition

HOT TOPIC 2 … Voice over IP

HOT TOPIC 3 … To use IP Centrex or PBX? (Sept 2006)

Advance Speech Recognition

For most businesses the argument over whether Advance Speech Recognition (ASR) is a viable technology has been won. The technology has proven itself in many organisations all over the world, time and time again, not only improving the customer experience but also significantly reducing cost. The technology has developed significantly over the past five years and can now provide recognition accuracy in excess of 96%!

The dilemma facing most organisations now is “how do we deploy ASR correctly and where will it give us the best return on investment?”

There is a misconception that self fulfilment systems, such as ASR are not conducive to good customer service. As with all customers facing services the customer’s perception is formed by their initial contact experience.

In a recent survey 72% of customers said they would not use a company again if their initial experience was poor, with the main contributory factors being time to answer the call and call filter systems.

Customers quickly become dissatisfied if they are left unanswered for more than 1 minute with added frustration over inane messages such as “we are sorry for the delay but we do really value you as a customer”; if the customer is valued why not provide adequate resources so that the call in answered in a timely fashion and dealt with in a professional way. Indeed some companies provide touch tone filter systems deliberately to delay the call because of inadequate resources!

So let’s dispel the myth that ASR is not good for customers; badly planned and poorly deployed touch tone automated systems expounded by lack of adequate resources are mainly to blame for poor customer experience and dissatisfaction. A well planned system that uses ASR can help polarise customer satisfaction and acceptance, reducing costs and allowing organisation to focus valuable resources in more profitable ways.

ASR is an operational asset and should be considered on its business merits rather than being led from and IT or telecoms perspective. It is introduced on a business case, the return on investment being critical.

For example, a well know train ticket vendor saved in excess of £1 Million in the first year that ASR was introduced and accelerated the business to becoming a market leader rather than a niche player.

So how does an organisation evaluate whether ASR is cost effective and right for their business and as importantly, their customers ?

It is critical that all areas of the business are involved in the evaluation process such as marketing, sales and customer service.

Communications consultants have considerable experience in delivering Speech Solutions and typical would follow this process for the initial evaluation of speech. This would be tailored to the customer’s specific organisation and requirements.

Communications Consultants' advantage

We understand what a powerful business tool speech can be and what a valuable aid a successfully deployed application can be to customer satisfaction. We also know where speech should not be used and where the pitfalls are along the way.

As a truly independent consultancy we can assist and manage your business in evaluating and deploying speech; ensuring it delivers what you want, using the right applications, vendors and technology.

Voice over IP

What follows is a historical and generic guide based upon our experience gained during the delivery of a range of successful services.

Voice over IP (VOIP) is simply the packetisation of voice algorithms into an IP packet.

Once packetised the payload can move over an inherent IP transportation layer in an IP environment.

In a controlled bandwidth or quality of service environment (LAN/WAN) the jitter or delay can be more than acceptable, virtually mirroring the toll quality or traditional TDM call, without any costs of transport and delivery. So you can see that VOIP calls can be free between sites if a leased line or WAN exists, negating the need for traditional multiplexors or ISDN dial-up costs.

Where a public IP is used to deliver the calls (i. e. the Internet or ADSL) the quality cannot be guaranteed due to the fact that it's a contended service and resources are shared between many simultaneous users. Since it's never possible to accurately predict the number of users, an individual's available bandwidth can vary greatly, often resulting in reduced transmission speeds and lower quality of service.

In a local area network environment LAN, the same applies as in the WAN scenario i. e.

• Can you guarantee the bandwidth?
• How many collisions are on your network?
• Do you support layer 2 and 3 switching or do you deploy HUB's?
• Are your PCs up to the job in terms of sound cards and processors for IP softphone?
• If using IP hard phones (not PC's) do you have adequate power?
• Is your cabling system certified to a minimum155 mps standard?
• Do your current switches support quality of service?
• How many simultaneous IP to legacy carrier network calls will be required?

When using VOIP there are a few generic rules to the provision and quality of service. Communication Consultants always consider business continuity is THE priority and not cheap service provision so we recommend the following golden rules:

• Use a media processor to scramble the TDM call into the IP packet.
• Retain some ISDN broadband as opposed to full IP trunking.
• Mix TDM terminals with IP soft or hard phones to ensure QOS in the event of a LAN crash.
• Allocate a significant proportion of your budget to your switch - it is THE key to a successful system.
• Insist on TOIP (Telephony over IP), as you will still need to retain some fundamental PBX facilities (most don't).

Above all-ask Communication Consultants for advice. Let us apply LAN metering equipment and our proven technical know-how to assist with the implementation of your VOIP plans - see "cost reduction" or "Consultancy+" to see why this is so important.

To use IP Centrex or PBX (Customer Premise equipment AKA CPE)?
(Sept 2006)

Dependent upon your business type, we think there are some compelling reasons why you should have your telecoms services under your own roof, as opposed to using Centrex.

Before we come on to the logistical or financial aspects of this, just a few words of warning on this subject!

IP Centrex of 2006 onwards can be a useful and attractively priced offering, but it’s often completely mis-sold by virtue of the channel route to market that has recently evolved. This refers of course to the fact that IP Centrex is usually sold by the activity of account managers simply used to selling least-cost routing or “minutes” - often with no sense of the actual customer applications that are going to need to be supported. Often it’s just a case of a lowest price sell, tying the customer into a minimum term contract for something they will never own or be able to administrate in-house without additional support costs, It’s an easy sell when compared to the seemingly higher cost of hardware, but not always what it’s hyped up to be.

The most compelling reason to use IP Centex is the seeming avoidance of any capital outlay and the attraction of free VOIP or low cost calls between a carrier’s cluster of sites (i.e. suitable for inter-office VOIP calls), this in itself is excellent news for smaller organisations or for start up businesses. However, if you fall into this category a few words of caution - don’t sign up for anything that has more than a single year term. Otherwise if you expand, the additional licence costs and tie-in call costs could become crippling. Leave your options open.

Before you go down this route bear in mind that all the critical business connectivity depends upon a simple (and often unreliable) broadband connection. A failure or congestion simply stops the calls being made/received by the remote Centrex server. So the chances of failure are still high and the resulting delay or pinpointing of the failures have already got some buyers into serious trouble as its often unclear who is actually responsible for clearing the fault. This is very different to a normal SLA closure of a system malfunction via a PBX maintainer.

Apart from the seemingly tempting lower costs, there are virtually no advantages of IP Centrex over an IP PBX unless the organisation using it is of a smaller less critical applications based nature, say a temporary or remote office. In this case if the Centrex develops a fault the H/O would still receive business critical calls by normal land line.

The questions buyers should really be asking is –
 What revenue does my business actually generate by telephony
 What are the cost implications to the business if the calls fail either way
 What sort of uptime have I been used to prior to this option

Last time we reviewed this comparison the results were –

Cost of ownership: Whilst the initial cost of installing your own voice and data server may appear to be high, the long-term cost of ownership of the alternative becomes prohibitive at over 16-20 extensions and you also must bear in mind that you will never own it so there would be no fixed asset value to the business - its only like the comparison with BT feature line or analogue Centrex 10 years ago.

Analogue or IP conversion? The Centrex extensions presented to your premises are generally analogue or a network based IP phone, which immediately reduces the range of features/functionality. In this scenario there is no fall back to the land-based lines, so it has all got to depend upon the speed and reliability of the ADSL connection and its ISP management capability. As usual some are much better than others - ask yourself the question – how far am I from the exchange & what are my fallback options if it did fail?

Administration: the Network Provider carries out all simple day-to-day programming requests, even simple tasks such as re-directing 0800 Nos or DDI. This means that you have little on-site analysis of traffic and simple system management becomes a frustrating and expensive luxury. Even if you use the web browser link you will still need to configure it all yourself or pay to outsource it.

Call Costs: You are likely to be restricted to all of your outbound calls being carried by a single provider, which raises two issues:
1) You lose the price advantage of Least Cost Routing through different carriers for Local, National and International calls - even savings through time of day routing will be lost.
2) You are connected to single network and therefore have no built in resilience should the provider's network crash.

Voice Mail: A very simplistic version of voice mail is offered with restricted upgrade path to unified messaging being available. Once again all management and storage of your mail will be external which is fine if you love hosted environments, but voice is definitely different to hosted email.

Management Statistics: Call Management Statistics (Call Logging) is usually not available through the off-site solution, which makes easy access to real-time vital call records impossible. With only a limited call record availability it will be difficult to monitor trends and manage the growth of your company's IT requirements. This is particularly relevant in a contact centre environment where real time stats and SNMP are key requirements.

Call Recording: You will not easily be able to implement call recording, which we are sure will become an essential requirement of many businesses - if you do insist upon using network based recording make sure the actual average duration and frequency of recordings is low volume or the price quickly starts to become significant.

E-Mail: It cannot act as your E-Mail server

Voice and Data Integration: No voice and Data integration is available which means that even simple requirements such as CLI/DDI or Screen Popping will not be available to you as easily as a more conventional route. Consider the implications of integration to back office systems using DDE links or common standards are going to be covered from day 1 - or once again you will regret being tied into the rental contract.

Finally: With the current uncertainty surrounding some of the Telecom providers we feel that generally it is better "not to put all of your eggs in one basket".

It may be more appropriate to simply add some IP Centrex extensions to a VOIP enabled PBX to offer the resilience of the PBX style uptime coupled with the lower small site costs of IP Centrex, particularly for remote offices in the same cluster even if using SIP trunking to get the cost advantage of the IP Centrex cluster call offers.

In summary not a lot has changed – it’s just more people selling it than before, so its still the old adage – “how long do I rent a car before I buy my own”?

For more comprehensive drilling down see "Consultancy/Consultancy+" because we would always do a complete analysis before suggesting a tie-in or commitment – apart from all this we are actually happy to recommend it – we think it’s a cool evolution of VOIP – but take heed
… it’s not for everyone!