Session descriptions.

Developing Voice IVR Applications Using Host Processing

Most of us have heard the term "host media processing" used as a possible alternative to DSPs; but have all developers of voice IVR established what this technological shift could mean for them? This session is intended to share some of the key decision-making points, technical considerations and business benefits that are in the melting pot when looking at this new alternative. A structured review of features, development environments and deployment scenarios will help delegates identify the main points that will lead to a host media processing selection, rather than DSP hardware. Reference will be made to practical learning points gleaned from working with early adopter customers of host media processing technology.

How To Save Money On Your Speech-Enabled Solutions By Being A Smart Customer

This session is all about being a smart customer. When sourcing a speech enabled solution, whether from a solution provider or via an in-house development team, a huge amount of money and effort can be saved by asking the right questions at the beginning of the process. Far better to think about them at the start, than when it becomes too late to change the foundations on which the solution is built. This session will investigate the key components of speech-enabled solutions and come up with the valuable questions that anyone with an eye on budgets and timescales should be asking.

Text-To-Speech 101

What is text-to-speech? How does it work? How do I deploy it? This presentation looks to answer these questions by explaining how the written word can be rendered into synthetic speech, which can be delivered to a telephone. We'll compare and contrast some of the different technologies, such as formant synthesis and concatenative synthesis. We'll then look at the processes involved and pitfalls to be wary of, and finally we'll examine telephony hardware requirements and explain how to connect your chosen text-to-speech engine to the outside world.

New Economics Of Speech In The Enterprise: Driving Down Operating Costs And Increasing ROI 

Call centers today are looking for ways to automate, streamline and improve their customer care programs through voice-enabled technology. Given the ubiquity of the phone, 92 percent of today's repetitive service transactions are directed to call centers. Hiring customer service representatives (CSRs) to handle basic and repetitive requests is expensive and inefficient for many customer programs. While touch-tone systems do overcome some of the inherent agent issues, these systems are still inflexible and unnatural, have menu limitations, are limited in functionality and leave most customers frustrated and unwilling to complete their calls. Today, speech recognition technology offers a more compelling solution for customer self-service and business ROI. Speech has been proven to efficiently handle both basic and complex transactions at lower costs and higher customer service levels.

How "Natural" Should A Voice Interface Be?

Since the inception of natural language processing (NLP) technology, its proponents have promised a revolution in voice interfaces for call centers, predicting a future in which callers will interact with IVR systems as if the systems were human agents. Exciting stuff, but is this really what you or your callers want? There's a reason why customers sometimes seek that human touch: because there's a real live person on the other end. Regardless of how lifelike an NLP-enabled IVR interface may be, it's still a machine and will never be as equipped to handle the more complex issues as a live agent. Plus, callers may become angry if they feel they've been tricked and the "person" they've been talking to is, in fact, a machine. But when a caller does have a simple request or transaction to complete, the less-than-human interface typically offered by today's IVR systems may be just the ticket. There are advantages to interacting with a machine: hold times are generally shorter; the caller doesn't have to make small talk with a live agent; and simple transactions can be handled quickly and easily. NLP does, in fact, have a definite place in the call center--companies simply need to learn how to leverage the advantages and sidestep the pitfalls.

Technical Aspects Of Deploying A Hosted Speech Solution

When deploying a hosted speech solution, VoiceXML developers need to keep several tips and tricks in mind. In this talk, we'll focus on how to get started, what to do during development and what steps to take after deployment. Content will include how to set up the development environment, including choosing VoiceXML development tools, dynamic programming language and an application server. Once set up, developers will learn how to record professional prompts, debug application functionality and measure application success/task completion rates. Finally, we'll review how to improve performance after deployment, including caching and application server tuning.

Adoption Of Speech Into Mainstream Business Applications

With the emergence of VoiceXML and SALT, businesses can quickly and easily add speech as a new interface to their business applications. In the past, voice applications were proprietary and required a large amount of customization and integration. Today, enterprise customers can buy packaged applications or develop their own speech-enabled applications. These new standardized interactive voice response (IVR) systems can be built with off-the-shelf hardware and software that can lower the acquisition and operation costs. However, there are trade-offs to be made regarding centralized versus distributed design, hardware versus host-based handling of media processing and call controls as well as TDM versus IP interconnections. This presentation will address the adoption of VoiceXML and SALT development platforms along with examples of where businesses are deploying speech-enabled applications to improve their business processes.

Speech-Enabled Self Service Applications: Adding Value To The Customer Interaction Network

Network convergence over Internet Protocol (IP) has brought significant change in customer contact. Today, customer contact is not restricted to "centers." Customer contact takes place across an entire network of customer service resources--a customer interaction network. Within the customer interaction network, self-service applications play a vital role by allowing enterprises to take a new view of deploying IVR and speech solutions as simply new services on the network. In this session, you'll see how new, Web-based architectures and standards such as VXML, SALT and MRCP are changing the way self-service speech-enabled applications are deployed.

Bringing Speech Technologies To The Enterprise

Speech creates many new opportunities for improved customer contact and improved efficiency. Rather than treat speech as an upgrade to an existing IVR system, companies can increase their ROI and improve customer satisfaction by treating speech as an enterprise initiative. By bringing in speech at an enterprise level, companies can provide their customers with a unified view of the company and eliminate the appearance of disconnected departments or "silos." This presentation will explain how companies can improve current automation, automate a new range of tasks, consolidate toll-free numbers and call routing systems to get the customer to the right contact quickly and efficiently, reinforce their brand, and improve customer satisfaction and, therefore, retention.

Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Speech Application Rollouts Through Testing And Product Management

Speech self-service applications can truly become the "voice of a company." Unfortunately, it only takes one bad experience for a customer to stop using self-service applications. As a result, application performance can have a significant effect on customer loyalty and a company's image and bottom line.

Integrating Voice Self-Service With IVR For Improved Customer Experiences

Businesses want the best contact center solution available, but they also want the flexibility of a pay-per-use system that is both scalable and reliable. With managed services, companies can achieve this goal and provide a higher level of customer experience. Attendees will learn how open-standard voice self-service technologies can work with, or instead of, traditional hardware-based, touch-tone IVR systems to improve ROI and improve overall service operations. Attendees will also learn how providing customers with self-service applications tied to live agent assistance can increase customer satisfaction and significantly reduce operational costs.

Improved Call Completion With Natural Language Processing

The session will emphasize the benefits of natural language speech application developments with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for easier implementation of answering callers' questions, executing transactions with implicit correction opportunities. With the use of AI, users need very little business application customization and grammar development for higher caller transaction completion rates. The tool set to be discussed automatically generates, from a small corpus, robust speech grammars capable of supporting the natural conversational capabilities of the system. An added benefit, significant cost savings in the total cost of ownership can be attained using a natural language processing application.

Unifying Customer Contact Channels: The Business Value Of Voice And Web Convergence

Since the advent of the Web. IT organizations have invested heavily in building new Web infrastructures and integrating them with enterprise applications. Now customer care organizations are being challenged to improve customer satisfaction while cutting costs. Additionally, marketing departments need to ensure that company branding and messaging is consistent across customer communication channels. Customer loyalty, satisfaction and retention are key to maintaining a successful business in commodity markets where customers have many product and service choices. However, while the telephone is still the primary customer interface for many companies, interactive voice response (IVR) systems that handle these calls have not received the same level of investment and/or attention as the Web. By centralizing control over customer contact channels, organizations can achieve brand consistency, can reduce the time it takes to affect business change at the customer contact level and, as a result, can improve customer retention, satisfaction and loyalty while reducing costs and increasing customer agent efficiency. This presentation will examine the challenges that exist in many organizations using Web and telephone customer contact channels, the negative impact these challenges have on business, why these problems exist and recommendations on how they can be corrected.

Fully Mobile Office Evolution: Technology Drivers And Solutions

As IP infrastructure and wireless access are driven into the enterprise and are coupled with smarter, faster wireless devices and access, the truly mobile office will come into its own. With "always on" data connectivity (at much higher bandwidth provided by 3G and Wi-Fi wireless networks, DSL and Cable wireline networks) and fully featured endpoints (wireless and wireline), the gap between desk and airport will be truly minimized. This presentation will focus on the technology and messaging infrastructure that allow this evolution.

Targeting Speech To Midmarket Companies

Typically, the focus of speech recognition vendors has been on Fortune 500 companies, which have been instrumental in allowing the general public to interact and familiarize themselves with speech technology. The current issue is about the smaller companies that want to incorporate speech into their business model yet can't afford to or don't have the technical know-how the Fortune 500 companies do. Speech vendors continue to ignore the market segment of mid-sized companies, though within the U.S. market alone, they number in the tens of thousands. Obviously, the business models of speech vendors must be altered to meet the needs of this fertile market. Not only must the price of speech technologies become affordable, but the actual development and implementation costs must also be within the scope of these companies' budgets and technical abilities. This session will focus on how speech vendors can address the needs and pricing obstacles that mid-sized companies currently face.

Usability Surveys To Test Speech Applications

Usability testing is an evaluation of a customer touch point from a user experience perspective. This session will compare many ways to test usability of speech applications and will show the benefits of the usability survey approach. This process involves thoroughly evaluating usability with several hundred unbiased panelists before deployment to reveal and fix problems large or small. Information will be presented on how usability surveys can provide valuable diagnostic information on voice recognition performance, and on user opinions of overall task completion and satisfaction, voice recognition, call flow options and voice prompt quality. The author will demonstrate how this information can lead to clear improvements to prompts, call flow and recognition performance.

Developing Speech Dialogs--A Designer's Perspective

Changing technology allows for the development of innovative ways to build new man-machine interfaces. In particular, adding speech to the mix opens up a host of new possibilities. However, the fast-changing technologies also create a lot of confusion with respect to where and how speech can be applied and what technologies and tools are needed to build effective applications. This presentation will attempt to answer some of these questions from an application development perspective.

Beyond Call Recording: Speech Improves Quality Assurance

Due to the highly competitive nature of the contact center industry, contact center operators need to deliver top-quality service to their clients. Best-practices dictate that a true quality assurance program requires reviewing 100 percent of all calls--a costly endeavor due to the requirement of a large, dedicated monitoring staff. Instead, most quality assurance programs rely on the bare minimum method of sampling a small percentage of total calls and manually reviewing the calls to determine the overall quality of a campaign. This is a risky proposition due to its hit-or-miss approach. By leveraging speech recognition technology, reviewing and analyzing 100 percent of calls is now feasible. During this session, we'll review current quality assurance processes, the limitations of those processes and how, by applying speech recognition technology, contact centers can increase quality assurance coverage. The session will compare and contrast simple call mining technologies with more sophisticated solutions that combine business rules with unrestricted, natural speech recognition to monitor conversations in a customer interaction environment.

The Real Value Of A Speech Solution

Now that the speech solutions market has survived its first decade, a dramatic but predictable shift is taking place. The arrival on the scene of open standards (VXML) and Microsoft-backed specifications (SALT) has had a major effect on the speech market: downward price pressure on voice platforms and infrastructure. As the market matures, the value of speech solutions will continue to move upward into the application layer, and anything below will be relegated to commoditized "plumbing." This curve eventually occurs in all layered technology industries and has been seen in personal computing, data networking, telephony systems and many other industries. Companies are in a unique position to capitalize on this trend, and vendors that deliver enterprise software built to be 100 percent standards-compliant and platform-independent can establish market leadership. Today's enterprise speech software provides a superior caller experience through sophisticated speech applications that are fast to develop and easy to deploy and maintain.

Integrating Voice-Enabled Services And Voice Mail: A Step Closer To Universal Speech Availability

If there is a "killer app" in the telco space, it has to be voice mail. But as technology advances, customers cease to be satisfied by a single application, instead seeking access to a broad spectrum of voice-enabled services. This session will describe the process of enhancing an existing, highly successful voice mail system (serving 100 million mailboxes worldwide) to support open-ended speech-enabled services. The essential roles of standards--VoiceXML, MRCP, LDAP, SIP--and their influence on selection of architectural components will be presented, and a design strategy in which the proven capabilities of a high-end legacy platform are smoothly integrated with a markup-language-based speech infrastructure will be summarized. Key issues will include supporting multiple speech recognition and TTS engines through MRCP; achieving enhanced call management flexibility using SIP and RTP; streamlining the management of message store through LDAP; exploiting component reuse; managing precompiled grammars; and training users to move from simple voice mail to a broad spectrum of integrated speech applications as an essential step on the path to universal availability of multimodality.

Fighting Fraud And Identity Theft Using Voice Authentication 

Identity theft cost U.S. businesses and consumers nearly $60 billion in 2003, and the problem is increasing exponentially. Keeping data networks secure is an important step in stopping this crime, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem: bad customer authentication. Relying on only personal information such as a mother's maiden name or social security number for authentication is tantamount to allowing any thief with a credit report to access accounts and open fraudulent new accounts. Voice authentication battles identity theft by tackling it at the source of the problem. In this session, learn how voice authentication helps stop fraud and identity theft where it has the most impact. Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of voice print technology and what can be done to boost accuracy and customer convenience.

Multimodality: Next-Generation Applications For Mobile Devices

Today's handheld devices allow rich applications to be used while on the go, but often these devices possess a physical interface that makes text input difficult and tedious. Speech applications make user input easy and natural, but audio prompts cannot provide the rich output that is possible with a visual display. Multimodal applications allow the user to interact with a device using multiple modalities, such as text and speech. These applications allow developers to use the advantages of one modality to make up for the shortcomings of other modalities, bringing the best of both worlds to the handheld device.

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Voice Middleware: A Strategic Component For Future Voice Success

A recent quote of Datamonitor, backed up by its recent "Voice Business Value Chain II" voice business report, stated, "Voice applications will increasingly consist of reusable components and modules. In tandem with this trend, voice middleware will grow in prominence and facilitate the development and spread of voice applications, just as today's Web application servers enabled the broad use of Web applications" (Katherine Lam, Technology Analyst, Datamonitor). The emergence of reusable components, templates and packaged applications creates a natural market for toolkits and specialized voice middleware that will aid in development, integration and performance-testing activities. In particular, the tools market will be strong due to demand from small and medium-sized enterprises for which voice solutions (in the form of packages and modules) have only recently become affordable. In spite of this growing demand for tools and managed environments, the market can sustain more than a few pure tools providers in the long run. There is a definite opportunity for engine providers (ASR, TTS, VoiceXML or SALT gateways, etc.) and application developers to partner with voice application management system providers, thus concentrating on their core competencies of creating better engines and new applications.

Architecture Of The Speech-Enabled Web

The Web is a global information space of interrelated resources. Central to the architecture of the Web are the orthogonal principles of identification, interaction and representation. Identification refers to the URI mechanism by which resources are identified in this information space. Interaction refers to protocols that define the syntax and semantics of messages exchanged by agents over a network (e.g., HTTP). Finally, representation refers to the formats for which data are encoded (e.g., HTML). The modern speech-enabled Web exploits the underlying orthogonality within the architecture of the Web by allowing new representation and interactions formats and protocols to be developed independent of each other. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is active in defining new representation formats for the speech-enabled Web, including VoiceXML, SRGS, SSML, SISR and CCXML. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is active in defining new interaction protocols that are powering the new speech-enabled Web, including MRCP and SIP. This presentation will help attendees understand the basic ideas behind the latest technologies powering the speech-enabled Web. We'll discuss the "bigger picture" of how, why and where different specifications and technologies are being developed. The major concepts behind each specification will be introduced briefly before discussing how these different technologies interoperate, resulting in exceptionally powerful speech solutions.

Introduction To VoiceXML 2.0 (half-day tutorial)

There are ten times as many telephones as PCs in the world. The rate of cell phone usage is growing exponentially. It is natural for users to want to use these devices to access Web information. Voice is replacing the use of touch-tone in telephony applications, enabling a rich user interface in which the user can "speak and listen" rather than "listen and press buttons." This tutorial will introduce the standardized languages used to develop speech user interfaces, and will present guidelines for how to use each language to create world-class speech user interfaces. Review the W3C process for establishing standards and the Speech User Interface Framework and its languages for developing speech applications. Learn how to use menus and forms in VoiceXML 2.0, how to write simple grammars using the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) and how to provide instructions to a speech synthesizer using the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). Learn how to extract semantics from text returned from the speech recognizer using the Semantic Interpretation language. Summarize other languages under development by the W3C for developing speech and multimodal user interfaces. As a bonus, learn how to embed Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) into (X)HTML to develop speech-enabled Web pages. Attendees will be asked to complete short paper-and-pencil exercises during the tutorial. After completing this tutorial, attendees should be able to develop simple VoiceXML applications.

IP Breathes New Life Into The Virtual Contact Center

The concept of a virtual contact center linking agents anywhere--from home, from satellite offices, across time zones and geographies--is nothing new, but has this vision become a reality? Yes and no. While a selection of larger companies has effectively networked multiple contact sites and remote agents with beneficial results, many other businesses have not, due in part to an economic climate that has put the brakes on all types of investments, including the purchase of expensive PSTN lines. But as the technology landscape has evolved, the promise of Voice over IP breathes new life into the virtual vision--enabling businesses to take advantage of a centrally managed, "agents-anywhere" environment by leveraging the cost savings afforded by an IP-enabled contact network.

The Business Case For VoIP In The Contact Center

Most companies understand the cost savings associated with making phone calls over the Internet. However, almost all companies miss the more important benefits entirely--increased productivity. VoIP technologies are allowing today's early adopters to do things they've never been able to do before. Regardless of size, businesses stand to reap great benefits from a communications system that delivers a host of integrated IP functionality. New technologies are linking contact centers across the Internet. Modern VoIP products are able to provide complete connectivity to multiple sites at any location. Users in call centers around the world can now benefit from the kind of seamless connectivity that was previously only available to those residing in a single location. This presentation will discuss the VoIP technologies that are available to today's contact centers and the distinct advantages they can bring to the organization. It will also address the concerns of customers making the leap from legacy to IP systems (security, voice quality, management costs, overhauling the existing infrastructure, etc.) and how organizations should assess VoIP's business benefits based on their goals, operations and size.

Building The Right IP Call Center Strategy

IP has been coined the "Pac-Man" of protocols. It's poised to gobble up or transform everything in its path; yet, IP call center deployments have been slow to catch on in the U.S. for economic and other reasons. There is understandably a lot of uncertainty about the right IP platform approach and selecting the right technology, but the bottom line is that IP adoption is growing, and it can deliver significant benefits to your customer service initiatives and positively impact your entire organization, if it's done right. This session will enable attendees to learn what IP can do for their own organizations, and it will quash some pre-conceived notions by shedding light on the technology itself.

Training, Hiring And Motivating At-Home Agents

Remote and outsourced agents. Remote call center management. Integration with distributed networks and databases. Many companies are realizing these benefits of adding VoIP to the contact center. Regardless of the size or complexity of call centers, IP telephony eliminates boundaries and creates more opportunities for revenue and growth by adding applications such as CRM and multimedia. The technology also lends itself to the training and retaining of agents. Increasingly, agents are trained via the Web using the contact center technologies, and as more companies provide opportunities for agents to work from home or a remote site, employee turnover can decrease.

Security In The IP Telephony Network

The world of IP telephony is a constantly changing environment in next-generation networks. The implementation of IP telephony is being completed at a record rate without the thought of security for the voice communications and the impact of the quality of service. There have been ideas on how to secure the IP telephony transactions and communications with the need to bring this technology into the real-world contact center environments. Adding security to the list of needs in IP telephony is a new concept in many environments, and it is necessary to make sure that there are standards for the process. During this discussion, the focus will be on the integration of features and protocols into the mixture of IP telephony to verify the security of the infrastructure within the IP telephony network. Included in the discussion will be the implementation of quality of service and how this can impact security as well as many other areas within the quality of the voice communications that will be important once IP telephony security is implemented. The focus will be on the methods and procedures for securing the voice communications in an IP telephony environment, as well as on the need for keeping top-level quality of service.

Keeping The Customer Experience Seamless: Interoperability And Next-Generation Endpoints

As interest in advanced endpoints, including IP phones, PDAs and pocket PCs, mobility devices and softphones, continues to escalate, there is an increasing demand that the customer experience remain seamless and consistent, regardless of whether a person is using a SIP-based client, a wireless device or a desktop phone. This session will discuss the issues of interoperability, specifically the delivery of enterprise-specific technologies and applications through traditional, IP and wireless infrastructures, to ensure that the user experience remains consistent. Topics will include the proliferation of SIP in the enterprise, the emergence of SIMPLE and other standards-based technologies.

Enhanced WAN Infrastructure For Large-Scale IP Telephony

Deploying VoIP across a large, distributed enterprise is a challenging effort at best. To minimize performance problems, companies should proactively evaluate and upgrade their WAN infrastructure to provide enough bandwidth for additional VoIP traffic, along with QoS tools to ensure VoIP traffic prioritization. But what looks great on paper during the pre-deployment state may turn out to be inadequate as call volumes change in one part of the network or another, or as new enterprise applications begin to steal capacity from IP voice traffic. This session will both show how IP voice impacts WAN performance and will present the requirements for an enhanced WAN infrastructure that continuously ensures maximum bandwidth and minimum latency for IP voice and other applications.

Maintaining QoS For VoIP In The Contact Center

The market abounds with products that allow enterprise WAN managers to monitor and adjust quality of service on an application basis in order to optimize performance. As contact centers deploy VoIP, they need these tools more than ever. But although these products provide the tools that WAN managers need to monitor and shape application traffic, they force users to play a zero-sum game in which they improve one application's performance at the expense of other applications' performance. As overall WAN traffic continues to rise, it will take more than shifting bandwidth from one application to another to ensure adequate performance for IP voice and other critical WAN services.

Premise-Based Versus Hosted: What Makes Sense For The Contact Center

Customers face innumerable choices when looking for an enterprise communications platform. While both service providers and premise-based manufacturers say their systems deliver identical functionality and feature sets, there remain distinct differences of opinion in which technology offers to call centers the highest return on investment. This session will examine the hosted versus premise debate in terms of technology, applications, service and support and ease of migration.

Using IP Technology To Build A Blended Contact Center Solution

With the emergence of VoIP technology, organizations have the opportunity to build an easy-to-manage, all-encompassing contact center to supplement and enhance existing brick-and-mortar operations. IP technology is helping to make virtual, home-based and offshore connections possible, while at the same time improving brick-and-mortar operations. This session will explore the practical side of those IP contact center options and how they can be integrated into already existing brick-and-mortar solutions for a blended solution and optimal customer service.

Taming IP Telephony Expense Management

IP telephony brings companies a wide range of innovative technologies, compared with traditional telecommunications systems. One area of the older systems that needs to be addressed, however, is expense management. Expense management includes collecting and allocating costs associated with IP telephony assets and usage. This session will explore both technology and methodology differences between traditional and IP telephony expense management. This is especially important as organizations transition to IP telephony because their traditional and IP telephony expense management systems will have to coexist. It will present alternative approaches to collecting information on internal and carrier-based logical assets, physical networks and end-user assets, as well as usage information, in order to manage and allocate costs.

The Evolving Contact Center: Protecting Your Organization's Investments While Driving IP-Enabled Efficiencies Into The Future

As today's businesses continue to expand their operations across geographies, channels and partners, the role of the contact center continues to change. Beginning as a voice-only solution for handling customer calls, the contact center has evolved to encompass sophisticated skills-based routing and multichannel contacts that span from voice, e-mail and the Web, to multiple sites located worldwide. In an increasingly complex and global business environment, more organizations are looking to extend the contact center to all parts of the enterprise so that customer needs can be efficiently addressed at any time, in any place and through any channel. It's clear that IP-enabled solutions are fast offering innovative ways for contact centers to scale upwards and outwards--through the creation of "virtual" multisite networks, through enabling cost-effective outsourcing and by linking remote agents, to name a few benefits. But for most contact center managers, keeping costs in check is as important as advancing capabilities--no one likes to have to resort to "forklift" upgrades. What's the best approach to leveraging investments already in place, while also incrementally adding important IP functionality that will prepare your organization for the future?

The Role Of High Availability Software In Quality-of-Service

A key component for consumer satisfaction with VoIP is whether or not the service is always available and continues uninterrupted. In traditional telecom infrastructure products, carrier-grade reliability (service is available all but five minutes per year) is a given to ensure that any failures in the network or equipment are transparent to the users. Yet, in the rush to market, many project teams often neglect to address system uptime requirements. The lack of ultra-dependable services is a frequently overlooked element in overall quality of service. Project teams often believe that high availability (HA) is difficult and too time consuming to include in their design and development schedules. This session addresses this perception and offers a progressive approach to ensuring uptime is considered and architected into VoIP systems from the very beginning. It covers the role of HA in VoIP solutions, outlines key functional requirements and maps a phased approach to implementation.

Establishing Internet Telephony And VoIP Services To Developing Countries

As more contact centers contemplate going off-shore, establishing Internet telephony/VoIP services to call centers in India, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere in the developing world, they must address various issues. In this session, learn about the challenges associated with various types of equipment, quality of service issues, bandwidth constraints and cultural/language issues. The target audience for this session is anyone involved in planning the implementation of IP telephony in call centers, especially those in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. This includes call center technical personnel, consultants, carriers and equipment vendors.

VoIP Regulation: Challenges And Opportunities

The regulatory landscape for VoIP remains unsettled. The FCC has yet to issue its final word on how the burgeoning industry is to be ruled. State and local governments are jockeying for position in the regulatory process. Public safety agencies are worried about E911, and the FBI is lobbying for its view of CALEA. It is folly to think that VoIP will remain largely unregulated, and there is a need for the industry to take a responsible position in regard to fees, regulations and public safety, and the sooner, the better. In fact, VoIP can actually bring tremendous social benefits to society in regard to public safety and less expensive communications, but that story must be told loudly and often.

VoIP Across The Enterprise

The emergence of VoIP presents contact centers with a tough choice when making a long-term phone system purchase decision. For organizations with multiple contact centers and home-based agents, comparing the benefits of bolt-on IP connections with tradition solutions, complete infrastructure overhauls or distributed hybrid approaches can be especially daunting. This analysis is also important for enterprises with contact center needs--enterprises that increasingly must leverage their remote and home-based agents. This session will discuss how implementing a data-driven communications system enables these businesses to unify their phone system and easily administer all agent locations. The session will also discuss how this approach provides contact centers with the flexibility to use the phone system as a traditional PBX, IP-PBX, or a combination of both--with the choice (and timing) completely up to them.

Integrating IP Contact Centers Into A Microsoft-Centric Environment

IP-PBXs have been around for seven years, but they have all generally been the same: standalone systems. In other words, IP-PBXs didn't really change telephony too much; the way we work has stayed the same. To look at the IP PBX in a different way, it can be summarized simply by saying "through Microsoft's eyes." Microsoft quite literally owns small business and IT departments in general. Sure, MIS looks to Linux and other alternatives at times, but today we are living in a Microsoft world. Microsoft is always looking to expand into every area of technology that holds the opportunity for growth. Imagine a world where all IP-PBX servers and devices run on Microsoft software and Intel chips.

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