Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 08/22/06

As I’ve followed the progress of VoIP for the past 12 years (yeah, it’s been that long now), one of the most compelling types of investments in the technology comes from organizations that leverage VoIP to extend their contact centers.

By making the location of contact-center agents irrelevant, numerous companies have been able to reduce employee turnover, avoid closing and opening contact centers to follow the talent pool to different geographies, and better serve their customers.

How? They let agents work from their homes or from small branch offices that are located close to their homes - eliminating long commutes and extending the number of hours per day that live agents are available to field customer or prospect calls.

By equipping agents with a laptop, IP softphone, and VPN link into the nearest full-service contact center, the agents simply appear as another onsite agent. With a more dispersed workforce, companies are able to integrate CRM, presence, and chat into a remote agent’s laptop.

The IT challenge, of course, is managing the connectivity and the contact-center applications for numerous locations. Sprint is coming out with an appealing service that addresses that challenge.

Through a partnership with Avaya, Sprint will combine its toll-free service, MPLS network, and Avaya contact-center products to offer a hosted service. Basically, Sprint will host the contact-center gear in its own data centers, removing some of the start-up costs from IP-enabling contact centers.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been critical of the carrier’s efforts - or lack thereof - in the VoIP-hosted-services space. Sprint is starting to see the light with this offering, which responds to increasingly frustrated IT executives who have grown tired of asking the carriers to offer enterprise-grade, hosted services.

Another added benefit: Sprint is integrating e-mail, instant messaging and fax capabilities into the agent’s tool set. And to help remote managers track their employees’ progress, the service also records calls.

Organizations that want the benefits of a dispersed contact-center community without the hassle of IP-enabling and managing the infrastructure should check this one out.