As more contact centers switch from TDM to IP environments that are becoming enabled by SIP trunking -- in both employer-and employee provided i.e. home facilities -- the question becomes whether to equip their agents with traditional desktop or hard phones, or replace them with increasingly sophisticated softphones.
For insights, ContactCenterSolutions reached out to Steve Kaish, who is vice president of product management and marketing with CosmoCom, one of the leading IP-based contact center solutions providers.
ContactCenterSolutions: Are you supporting/providing equal, more or less hard (desktop) phones? Softphones? Which ones are you seeing being used at formal contact centers? At agents’ homes?
SK: CosmoCom customers use three primary mechanisms for voice delivery: softphone, hard IP phone and “any phone.” The “any phone” option enables a call to be delivered to any phone number, whether it is on the public network or an extension on a private telephone network. All three delivery mechanisms can be controlled by the CosmoDesk browser-based call control client.
About 50 percent of our agents are using the “any phone” option. Among the rest of the users, we see an equal mix of SIP phone and softphone use. Home agents are predominantly “anyphone” or softphone users, because it eliminates the need to manage special equipment at home.
ContactCenterSolutions: What are the whys behind the trends you are seeing?
SK: The “any phone” solution is a popular way to get started because it can be quickly deployed in a virtual or hosted environment without any dependency on the quality of service on the IP network. The IP delivery options are more popular with customers who have a mature and reliable data network, and adoption is growing as customers get more sophisticated with managing their LAN and WAN infrastructure. Customers have the flexibility to start with an “any phone” solution and migrate some or all of their user bases to IP delivery over time.
ContactCenterSolutions: What recent and what in the pipeline applications do you have to improve hard and/or soft phones and what are the benefits?
SK: Last year we introduced CosmoPhone, a hard phone designed for use by regular agents, Informal agents and back-office personnel. The optional CosmoDesk PC application is fully synchronized with CosmoPhone, enabling each user to perform complete call control from either the phone or the PC, and to switch seamlessly between them. CosmoPhone-compatible devices are available from a number of leading phone manufacturers.