Why SIP?
Guest Author: Mike Ely
Hello Aspect blog readers. I’m Mike Ely, Director of Systems Architecture for Aspect Software. I’d like to thank the three luminaries for letting me be their first guest “blogger,” and for giving me the chance to talk about something I’ve been working on for more than eight years – Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and specifically Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).
SIP is opening up a whole new world of possibilities for contact centers. It is giving companies the control to route and re-route calls to anywhere within their extended network, providing home agents with tremendous flexibility, and enabling Unified Communications and presence to extend contact center capabilities throughout the entire enterprise.
You’re probably thinking, “Wow! That’s great. But, what exactly does it mean for my business?”
The answer: there are a number of compelling reasons why SIP may be the perfect solution for your contact center. Some of these are:
- Pre-call routing can become a thing of the past. With SIP, a call comes into your VoIP-enabled contact center and is directed to a centralized voice portal site via the IP network. Then, based on the type of inquiry and your specific business rules, the call is automatically redirected through your corporate network to the right agent for the inquiry, regardless of where in the world that agent is located. No more ‘take back and transfer’ charges or pre-routing CTI integrations are required to determine the best place to route a call. Your company has complete control. And, load balancing becomes a simple SIP Proxy to distribute calls to various contact centers according to your rules.
- You can leverage centralized voice portals so that every call, no matter where it originates or which contact center it comes into, can receive the same treatment, giving your customers a single corporate view. TDM ‘tie lines’ are no longer required – you can simply place your voice portal components on your corporate network at the best data center to manage them.
- Using SIP trunking from service providers, you can have access to a worldwide public switched telephone network (PSTN) interface that allows seamless call routing using SIP between your corporate sites, without additional on-premise gateway equipment. This not only reduces hardware costs and eliminates potential points of failure, but allows expansion of your voice network without complex TDM connections.
While there are many convincing reasons to use SIP, there is one main reason you may not being using SIP – your vendors. SIP is a great option if all of your vendors are on board with creating and implementing SIP-based solutions. Interoperability is the real key to a successful SIP deployment. And, I am excited about the possibilities that SIP can bring to applications in the future. Maybe more about this later…
What do you think?
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