In today’s global change in technology, a lot depend on how to make everything possible and easily done in a fastest and effective way of communication. Choosing good equipment tool in a call center industry is something that will be given a top priority. If you want your call center business to be on top of the competition then you have to check the kind of tools for you to stay on this business.
This article will discuss about VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol), its importance and how its work to your contact center industry. Many are still do not have sufficient idea how this technology help you in maintaining quality calls overseas. I have to say that the company I work for is known to be expert in providing pieces of information to any form of services like in an off-shore business. Based on the article wrote by Beau Rudd, chief executive officer of Unique Interaction, he outlined the straight definition of VoIP. Mr. Rudd is a wizard in a call center arena since he had been working in call center at the age of 17. I admit that I am not pretty much “knowledgeable” about this technology nor how is this work but Mr. Rudd’s idea helps me a lot to fully understand this technology.
It is no doubt that the Philippines is one of the leaders in using VoIP services, as the country is known to be the key leaders in outsourcing. Call center owners are very particular when it comes to the money they spent for their business to succeed. Venturing to call center is a serious matter. This is not just spending money and losing it in such a careless way. Better solutions to the concerns of the customers is a way of proving to your clients that they are important.
WHAT IS VoIP?
Let me start first defining VoIP – it is the ability of an IP network to carry telephone voice signals as IP packets in compliance with International Telecommunications Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) specification H.323. VoIP enables a router to transmit telephone calls and faxes over the Internet with no loss in functionality, reliability, or voice quality. Another translation of this term is a category of hardware and software that enables people to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls. Voice data is sent in packets using rather than by traditional POTS circuits. One advantage of VoIP is that the telephone calls over the Internet do not incur a surcharge beyond what the user is paying for Internet access, much in the same way that the user doesn’t pay for sending individual e-mails over the Internet.
HOW IT WORKS?
Majority of the telecommunication companies in the Philippines are using VoIP to streamline their networks through routing the phone calls from a circuit switch and into an IP gateway. Once the call is received by a gateway on the other side of the call, it is decompressed, reassembled and routed to a local circuit switch. Today, more and more companies particularly call centers are installing VoIP system. IP telephony just makes sense, in terms of both economics and infrastructure requirements. With VoIP, you can make a call from anywhere you have broadband connectivity. Since the IP phones broadcast their info over the Internet, they can be administered by the provider anywhere there is a connection.
Mr. Rudd, on the other hand, disclosed that his company offers attractive package to any of the interested investors who will venture in a call center. He said that VoIP is one of the backbone for the contact centers industry because it is guaranteed that many software developers believe that this service have a great future in helping the industry survive from any possible changes of the technologies in the future. He stressed that with his predictive dialer, you have to capability to:
Do real time monitoring of your agents Do Outbound, Inbound and Blended campaigns Do predictive, progressive and power dialing Do Remote monitoring Do full and/or on demand recording Do call barging, conference and internal/external call transfer CRM IVR Voicemail Call Conferencing Your own phone extension Your own toll free number for your account
The effect of having quality service increase their sales and no complains from the clients who became his business partners when the company starts to outsource up to now. VoIP will help you save a lot of money particularly in telephoning to the mainland US. The benefits of this service is that international and long distance VoIP charges are much cheaper. Depending on the package or service that you select, you will either get unlimited or a set number of minutes for North America (US & Canada) long distance calling. It simply means, that any international calls are significantly lower from VoIP providers than traditional phone companies, although the differences between the providers are vast.
It is expected that within the next following years this technologies will continue to provide a great impact to the off-shore business in the Philippines and the rest of the world.
By: Roberto Bacasong
Posts Tagged ‘Spending Money’
VoIP Technologies in the Philippines
March 7th, 2010Voip New Wave Of Internet Telephony
March 5th, 2010
Since the last few decades the field of technology has seen an incredible development. Talking about the technology, the latest technology nowadays is the VoIP (voice over internet protocol). It provides you a combination of conventional phone services and high speed internet. A single broadband connection through the Speakeasy along with an adapter is all that required for enjoying the services provided by the VoIP. In other words VoIP has quiet a simple setup and thus it makes VoIP worth spending money on. The VoIP phones are well known for their excellent features and qualities.
VoIP allows you to make and receive all your calls without any hurdle once you have setup your VoIP services. Tackling problems of VoIP is quiet easy as the customer service is incredibly good, as nowadays one has to go to many people to get the problems related to their gadgets solved. This is one advantage that VoIP has over other similar services. Voip has generated much publicity with its application in the ITES industry. Quality of voice on this platform is much better especially in the case of long distance or international calls, where the routing of the call through sattelite infected the call with delays.
The feature of VoIP wifi phones.
The technological advancement has introduced a new dimension in the field of communication. For instance the WirelessIP5000 wifi VoIP phone is one of the most popular among the wireless IP phones. It provides an IEEE 802.11b wireless IP network which gives the user access to clear voice communication. Call center industry catering to the consumer based markets, have found this tool as very useful. The ease of interacting with the person sitting at different part of the world, without compromising on the quality, has generated new markets for it.
Along with the various features and functions of a regular phone, the VoIP wifi phone also has the capability to put together the various qualities and features of an analog IP phone over the data communication system.
ZyXEL Prestige 2000W v2 WiFi VoIP phone is another most sought after VoIP wifi phones. Like the former one mentioned above this phone also has great features and benefits. It provides a low cost of the calls made and received along with high voice quality. It also provides mobility with IEEE 802.11b wireless standard compliance. For its easy use it also provides Support Auto Provisioning. As mentioned above earlier its communication costs are low as compared to the others and also have an excellent mobility. In order to increase the accessibility for the mobile users, there is also a travel charger design which proves to be of great help.
It is without any doubt the most reliable, it is fun to use and also is cost effective. Your search for the best phone will now become easier as these kind of phones are easily accessible and can be found in any of the electronic outlets or retails.
By: David Faulkner
Where Is Business VoIP Headed Technology And Applications?
October 1st, 2009
Just where is the business community headed for VoIP technology and applications? The answer is not that simple as it can vary greatly by region of the world. The difference in scale and application between small business networks and enterprise VoIP for larger organizations is also a factor in the equation.
What seems to be the practice in the US is that businesses adopt VOIP because it is budget friendly. Most companies deploy VOIP in new offices because it is cheaper than a new digital phone system. Existing offices are migrated to VOIP as leases on digital equipment expired. Interoffice voice communication occurrs without long distance costs as VOIP traffic travels the corporate WAN (VPN/MPLS/etc.) alongside or parallel to data traffic. I see this trend continuing domestically until digital phone systems are phased out completely.
The next challenge is replacing small business (analog) phone systems because they generally keep pace with consumer technology instead of larger businesses. You currently see VOIP for small business and personal use independent of the ISP. A combined offering of Internet data and voice could easily induce universal acceptance of VOIP in even the smallest business (as well as households).
The only thing left behind is conference equipment in businesses of all sizes. Your desktop phone provider rarely provides your digital/analog tripod conference phone and associated equipment. I expect technology advances for VOIP to be in the conference room as opposed to the desktop. When I hear convergence, I think of the unification of voice and data. The conference room is where you can really take advantage of this union.
Today in India especially; many small, medium & large enterprises are looking forward to VoIP technology as companies become more conscious about spending money on PSTN. With recent changes taking place in VoIP technology, and as it becomes more and more affordable, most organisations are coming forward to adapt these newer technologies to fulfill there communication requirements. To tap the growing requirements and market potential, not only the small phone companies but even the PBX manufacturing giants like Nortel, Avaya, Alcatel and Panasonic are continuously working on providing more advanced features and facilities utilizing the maximum possible technical advancements of VoIP. The current trend of unified communication concept is an example for this.
Australia/New Zealand were early adopters of IP telephony particularly in large enterprise and Government sites. The most likely reason to deploy IP Telephony was office relocation, and large enterprise customers replacing their aging legacy PBX with IP Telephony on the basis of future proofing, Toll-Bypass, and lower maintence cost compared to legacy pbx.
Cisco has sold something like over 5 million IP Phones worldwide. Australia & New Zealand combined sold over 500,000 IP Phones.
VoIP Technology is no longer about making cheaper calls in Australia/New Zealand. Its about optimizing business processes with fully integrated communication options. IM, Video Conferencing, Presence, Unified Messaging, and Mobility. I anticpate Australia and New Zealand to be early adopters to Unified Communication in Asia Pac.
Malaysia is an interesting place because, despite the lack of large “enterprise” sale of IP Telephony compared to Australia, there appears to be a large acceptance of VoIP Technology from open source such as SIPX, Asterisk and OpenSER. In fact, a lot of VoIP innovation coming from Malaysia is based on Open Source (ie. Free to download but you have to put long man hours to get it working). A fascinating application is one where you use your 3G mobile phone’s camera to capture a video stream that sends automatically to your blogsite. This application is used also in Insurance companies where members are encouraged to record the “car accident” video clip as part of the process in submitting a claim. Also, the same VoIP technology is used in legal proceedings, in court, where lawyers can access the judge via 3G Mobile phone and IP Video Phone. These applications all use VoIP technology as the foundation.
On another note….the convenience of using the same cable infrastructure, manageability, cost involved maintaining Public Switching Telephone Lines, and quick and easy deployment are just a few parameters which attract most companies to buy the voice communication systems which support VoIP. That’s a cottage industry in itself which will only grow as acceptance and deployment of VoIP takes a firmer hold in the business world.
For example, several Soft PBX softwares can be found on the Internet which are freely available for download and usage. This develpoment implies that the requirement for Hardware PBX is decreasing day by day. This also is an early indication that most of the voice communication techniques and products emerging in the future will be based on VoIP……and software aspects.
Lots of improvements are still needed in VoIP no matter where you are in the world…..but they are in the pipeline. For example, SMEs require simple to setup aid rather then technically rich products. An example of an improvement here would be products like the iSpeedBump from Interworking Labs. This goes outside your firewall and looks at your traffic. If it sees VoIP, it prioritizes that traffic over things that can go slower like e-mail. The device has four main settings to match 99% of cases and you just plug it in, set the switch and go. No more. Cleans up garbled VoIP yielding a better quality voice exchange.
Personally I think VoIP still has a long way to go to really compete with the landlines for business customers….particularly for small businesses. Not so much for large enterprises. For most VOIP installations, especially in a small company, though it is significantly cheaper VoIP doesn’t work anywhere near as well as a landline. Nor are all the security concerns alleviated. At least yet.
The trick, and VoIP companies seem to have done a pretty good job of this, is to convince people that phone service doesn’t always have to be perfect. Sounding like a cell phone is fine, and probably the other end of the conversation will think it is their end anyway. So don’t waste your money on a landline. However, as VoIP quality and reliability catches up…no one will really notice a difference (or really care about what little difference there may be). Then the answer will be narrowed down simply to cost….and the most cost effective communication will win out.
By: Michael Lemm
