Seven Reasons Why SIP Will Improve Your Customer Care Strategy

Seven Reasons Why SIP Will Improve
Your Customer Care Strategy

Seven is more than just a lucky number for companies building customer care strategies. In this document, Opus Research evaluates seven ways that firms can build a customer-centric organization and enhance the customer experience. Customer examples for satellite entertainment, insurance, healthcare, hosted services and electronics illustrate how leading edge companies are using technology to define "best practices" for customer care around the world.
September 2008
Prepared by:
Dan Miller Sr. Analyst
For Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories An Alcatel/Lucent Company
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SIP Answers the Call for Improved Customer Care Mobile working is on the rise, and thanks in part to enabling technology like VoIP and Unified Communications, worker productivity is too. But many businesses have yet to integrate these technologies within the customer care operations. Using these enablers in conjunction with a next generation set of customer care applications can enormously impact customer experience and, in most cases, simultaneously improve efficiency and drive cost savings. Today and historically, remote customer communication is conducted through contact center agents and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. These systems are the front line of marketing programs to promote new products, close sales, and retain customers. Indeed they are critical to the overall success of the enterprise. And yet today these two systems are, for the most part, operating in silos. Further, depending on the nature of the request, call center agents are not always the best resource within your enterprise to communicate with a customer. Limitations in the technology (legacy telephony required that expensive equipment be physically close to the agents using it) and a tendency to view the contact center as a cost center, created a wall between the contact center and the rest of the enterprise. To take customer care to the next level, a new technology was required that didn't impose limitations around the locations of resources involved in customer communication. That new technology is now available in the form of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and it is breaking down the walls of the contact center and enabling new ways of servicing and selling to customers.
What is SIP? SIP is a standard that emerged in the wake of explosive growth of Web services. It marked a change in focus from using VoIP for pure cost avoidance to an approach that encouraged developers to build new services involving a variety of media types: voice, audio, text messages, data or video. SIP acts as a common denominator, encouraging rapid development and deployment of innovative applications for customer communication resulting in a new paradigm for remote customer care. SIP supports presence which allows applications that use it to know if and how a particular resource is available. Further, as alluded to, it is based on enabling Web technologies and places no limitations on where a resource is located, so a branch worker, outsourced agent, or expert resource are all equally viable customer communication resources.
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