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Call Control: Call centers are dialing up cost-savings and new features made possible by voice over IP technology

When Pete Hainey started his call center business in 1993, few call center agents had computer monitors. Today, fewer and fewer have phones. Hainey is president and founder of Customer Elation, a Bloomington company that manages call center operations for retail, health care, and other organizations. Like most call centers these days, its agents receive calls through their computers—possible with voice over Internet protocol (VOIP), which allows telephone calls to travel over the same connections that carry e-mail and Internet data. During the past five years, VOIP has overtaken traditional telephony infrastructure as the new standard in call centers, bringing with it a flurry of new features for call routing and reporting. VOIP has drastically reduced long-distance fees, enabled easy integration of home agents and remote facilities, and significantly lowered the cost of hardware. “All of these are really huge changes in what was a fairly predictable, staid industry 10 years ago,” says Steve Sokol, marketing director for Asterisk, a free software program that runs on Linux and allows call centers to tap into VOIP, sponsored by Alabama-based Digium.(Continue reading…)