■■ Day of week, holidays, and time of day
■■ Promotions
■■ Service priorities dictated by business decisions
■■ Measuring the agents (response time, handling time, successful
calls, abandoned calls)
■■ Routing to legacy Time Division Multiplex (TDM) systemsWe believe that Internet-enabled customer contact centers have a far greater
commercial potential than just offering “PSTN over IP” services (that is VoIP
that emulates the PSTN).
Traditional telephony call centers can be redesigned from ground up using
the following opportunities:
■■ Replacing the PBX with SIP call routing
■■ Replacing the automatic call distributor (ACD) with SIP presence
■■ Replacing the interactive voice response (IVR) with web choices and
VoiceXML
■■ Having the agent workstation becomes a SIP-enabled user agent, plus
applications
■■ Using web-style search in the customer database for relevant informationConferencing and Collaboration
SIP has its roots in academic collaboration and conferencing over the Internet
during the mid-1990s. Since then, most conferencing and collaboration ven-
dors have been using SIP-based technology for the following activities:
■■ Displaying who is attending and which participant is speaking
■■ Text chatting, including private sidebar conversations
■■ Multimedia, voice and video conferencing
■■ Web page sharing/web page pushing
■■ Desktop displays and whiteboard sharing
■■ File transfer between participantsAs of this writing, though, some public Internet conferencing services are
either not SIP standards–compliant or do not offer the full complement of ser-
vices mentioned here.
Advanced SIP PC software can support the hosting of rich multimedia con-
ferencing on a user’s PC with up to six other participants, depending on the
speed of the PC and the speed of Internet service as implemented commer-
cially [10]. This is illustrated in Figure 2.3.24 Chapter 2