Planning Is Essential For An OCS Deployment

Author:  Jamie Ryan, CIO at ASpect

I’m happy to report that we’ve now deployed Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS) across 100 percent of Aspect – that’s for approx. 1,800 employees across 20 locations spanning 18 countries. I’m proud of my IT team for a job well done, and appreciate Aspect Professional Services’ collaboration and expertise.

I’m very enthusiastic about this deployment for a number of reasons. Aspect has now replaced all 18 of our PBXs with OCS and reduced associated maintenance costs by $176,000 annually. We’ve cut conferencing costs by about $1 million annually, and reduced long distance circuit costs by $20,000 per month. Not to mention, it’s so much easier for me to do my job. I’ve heard this comment from many of my colleagues as well, and an annual user productivity savings of $810,772 backs it up.  I can tell you, however, that these results didn’t just appear magically overnight. They were the culmination of stringent planning and careful implementation.

Our first step, and one that I strongly recommend for anyone looking to deploy Office Communications Server, is to define the scope of your deployment. What functionality are you introducing, and why – and what are you replacing?  For us, that meant completing a current state assessment of our Microsoft Exchange environment, on which OCS is dependent, and conducting a thorough assessment of our LAN and WAN infrastructure from both a business and technology perspective. It’s extremely important to take the time to understand what is running on your network, how it is running, and why it is running, so that you can identify potential utilization problems. Then, you’ll need to determine whether you’re going to protect integrity on your WAN, your LAN or both. In our case, we decided to run quality of service (QoS) on both our LAN and WAN environments to ensure the integrity of each call across our infrastructure.

You also need to think through your deployment methodology as it relates to scalability and survivability. We chose to use the hub and spoke model with hubs at our corporate headquarters and at our EMEA headquarters in the UK.  North American and EMEA locations act as spokes that connect back to these hubs for services.  We could have built out OCS deployments in all locations, but decided against it because of the added cost and complexity.  However, in APAC, we deployed a hybrid approach due to regulatory requirements and limitations of SIP trunking in the region.

It’s important to take some time to decide whether you want to deploy Office Communications Server 100 percent standalone, integrate into existing PBXs, or deploy in conjunction with new PBXs. And, whether or not you’d rather use SIP trunking to preserve or not preserve local phone numbers – a choice largely based on your cost structure and how you’re routing calls.

In my next blog, I’ll talk a bit more about functionality and some of the non-technical considerations for an OCS deployment. In the meantime, please send me any questions you may have about our deployment. I’m happy to answer them.  Or, check out www.UCWorld.com where you can hear more detail on rollout considerations.

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Sharing UC Lessons Learned

Author: Kevin Schwartz, Executive Vice President of Global Professional Services, Aspect

In the unified communications (UC) services practices at Aspect, we get a lot of questions from customers, partners and analysts about our UC deployment. After all, we just completed a global rollout of Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 across 1,800 employees in 20 offices.

The questions really range across a number of topics.
• What was your strategy for emergency 911 calls?
• Are there security issues to take into consideration with the rollout?
• What kind of end-point devices are you using?
• Where is Aspect seeing the most substantial ROI numbers from implementing UC?
• What are the considerations for deploying Office Communications Server in different countries? Are there restrictions?
• How did you prepare your employee base for the changes? What was the adoption process like?

It’s been really satisfying to share our insight and knowledge with other UC professionals in the market. But sharing our lessons learned from the implementation is something that we think the entire industry can benefit from. That’s why the company is hosting UC World Live Day.

All the questions above and many other topics will be covered during the live day, through interactive chats and webinars. As more companies deploy UC across different regions, I think we can all learn from each other’s implementation experiences. That’s why asking the right questions is so important.

What questions do you have about unified communications, deployment, and how it can affect business processes?

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Regulation Sometimes Leads to Improved Processes

Author:  Lynne Levy, Senior Business Process Product Manager at Aspect

A few weeks ago, the final piece of the 2008 amendments to the federal telemarketing rule took effect. As a result, telemarketers no longer are able to make calls that deliver pre-recorded messages (robocalls) without a previously obtained signed, written agreement from the recipient. In instances where the consumer has provided written consent, the pre-recorded message must provide the consumer with the ability to opt-out either through a toll free number or through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or key pad entry. This is no joking matter as the fines can be quite steep – up to $16,000 per call. It is important to note that this regulation applies to business-to-consumer calling vs. business-to-business interactions.

Believe it or not, I actually think this change is good for the telemarketing industry. This new amendment will compel companies to really get to know their customers and give them the chance to show their customers that they are good organizations with which they’ll want to do business. It will also force companies to run more targeted calling campaigns to the consumers who are most likely to be interested in their offers. By reaching out to key segments of customers with live agents, there is more of an opportunity for companies to explore their customers’ pain points, increase their sales through solutions-based selling, and strengthen customer relationships. When used correctly, this type of personalized approach results in positive brand building – again, the kind that makes people actually want to interact with a company.

I also think that companies using the right tools in their contact centers – tools with telemarketing compliance capabilities – will see that their compliance process will be largely automated. Centers should be using capabilities like high accuracy answering machine detection (AMD) to identify when a consumer, answering machine or voicemail service has answered the call. And by taking advantage of extensive list management capabilities that allow for highly segmented lists that can be updated automatically. Or high transfer speeds to quickly move answered calls from the predictive dialer to a live sales person. According to the new amendment, 97 percent of telesales calls that are answered by a live person must be connected to a live sales person within two seconds. In addition, there needs to be a way for a call, when being handled through a voice portal, to enable the consumer to add his/her number to the Do-Not-Call Registry.

Other technologies are designed to help companies increase the effectiveness of their campaigns while ensuring regulatory compliance. For instance, advanced pacing algorithms allow companies to track call result history over time and predict the best phone number and hour of day to place calls. With some solutions, such as Advanced List Management within Aspect Unified IP, that information is automatically used to create optimized calling strategies that are based on campaign objectives and prioritized by user-defined criteria. Then, those optimized accounts are fed to the predictive dialer for execution, and record levels are dynamically adjusted as agents log in. The automatic adjustment ensures that enough agents are available to handle successful outbound contacts as they are made so that abandonment rates remain acceptable.

Success in this new paradigm will not be based on technology alone. Agent training will also be key. Companies will need to provide agents with in-depth sales and product knowledge so they can up-sell and cross-sell products that customers actually want. Relying on canned scripts could result in constantly trying to sell consumers something they don’t need, which negatively impacts brand perception and a customers’ desire to conduct business with a company.

This new amendment will definitely impact the way contact centers conduct business. Has it affected you? If so, how?

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