July 31, 2001

Why is migrating to an IP-contact center important for today's businesses?

Companies today are challenged with improving customer service, increasing productivity, maximizing flexibility and reducing operational costs - all at the same time. IP-contact centers help companies meet that challenge. In an increasingly cluttered landscape, companies that are customer-focused win. An IP-contact center enables an organization to develop closer relationships with their customers and better manage those relations because of the inherent flexibility of IP.

With IP, companies can seamlessly utilize geographically dispersed contact center resources to handle customer calls. This business flexibility consequently reduces the business and opportunity costs associated with customer interactions and opens the door for new innovative ways for companies to conduct business.

Simply put: the customer. Customers have never been more empowered to manage their business relationships. More and more, customers are choosing to communicate with companies through multiple, IP-based channels, such as email, the Web, chat and video. As this trend continues to gain momentum, companies are forced to adapt by finding more efficient ways to manage communications with their customers. An IP-based contact center is a cost-effective way to do exactly that. Through a single interaction center, companies are better equipped to transact with customers and thereby deepen customer relationships, improve customer satisfaction and build loyalty.

Cisco is focused on IP innovation. Our strategy is to introduce new, critical concepts like business flexibility that can only be cost-effectively addressed through an IP-based solution. IP-contact centers are the next generation communications solution. We entered this marketplace for one simple reason: to help Cisco customers gain competitive advantage. The Cisco IP Contact Center solution enables businesses to move towards a converged voice and data IP-based communications network for all customer interactions. While the inherent benefits are clear, we recognize the investments customers have made in legacy, circuit-based technologies. That's why the Cisco IPCC solution provides a smooth migration path for circuit-based ACD's (automatic call distributors) towards an IP-based contact center solution.

The greatest differentiator of the Cisco IPCC solution is its interoperability with both IP and legacy circuit-based technologies. The Cisco IPCC solution also enjoys strong third-party support from systems integrations and various technology vendors to help companies optimize the capabilities of their contact center environment.

Additional capabilities and advantages include increased business flexibility, intelligent call routing, automatic call distribution functionality, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration, interactive voice response integration, call queuing, and consolidated reporting. The open, standards-based architecture of the IP-call center can also potentially support Web-based customer contact, including collaborative browsing, text chat and email response management.