The VoIP Advantage - Page 2

By making it easy and efficient to support call center agents working from home, the Siemens IP-based communications system that Unison is using has not only helped Unison save on employee seating costs, but it’s opened up new opportunities. Currently about 80 employees work from home in an organization hat had never before embraced a work from home situation; about 60% of them are call center agents.

“The customers cannot tell the difference, and the added benefits are that our call center managers and supervisors can remotely monitor those calls to see exactly what is going on, what their queue statistics are," he says.

The VoIP infrastructure extends to workers outside the call center, too, which is important for Unison, given its location.

“Pittsburgh is not an insurance town,” says Bugajski. With only so much expertise in the sector available in this area, this gives the organization the ability to recruit from outside the area when necessary, and give them immediate access to the same communications applications as their colleagues.

Business continuity plus savings

There have also been business continuity benefits. Previously Unison would have to go with redundant carriers because of concerns about one carrier losing connectivity. Not anymore. Now, with a 10-gig fiber link and survivable Siemens shelves, it can route calls as IP traffic over the network to a remote data center in case of a problem.

“It’s nice for us because we were afforded the budget to put enough bandwidth at both sites to handle 100% of our capacity and then some,” he says. “So we have business continuity plus savings, because with one carrier you get a lot more leverage on monthly commitments and discounts on toll-free charges.”

The Siemens system includes the HiPath 4000, HiPath ProCenter Enterprise and HiPath Xpressions. The deployment includes 200 IP phones and so far Unison has retained about 700 digital phones.

Bugajski’s biggest advice for call centers and enterprises that want to follow in these footsteps? “Spend a lot of time planning, then execute, ….and make sure you have a rollback plan in case it doesn’t work.”

Luckily, that wasn’t a problem for Unison, and next up on its agenda is putting in a phone mail system by the second quarter that also has unified messaging capabilities, though those wn’t rol out right away.