ment has other priorities, and when you need several third-party partners to go along with you?
The answer: Realize VoIP pilots will take more time than most other pilot tests.
Mike Benson wishes he were done with the VoIP installation going on at his company’s 30 call centers. Benson, executive vice president and CIO of Direc TV, hoped to be saving millions of dollars a month in phone bills with VoIP by mid-2006. Instead, he’s still working toward a second-quarter 2007 finish date.
Benson wants VoIP because it costs Direc TV 1 to 2 cents to transfer a call from one call center to another. That doesn’t sound like much money until you realize that DirecTV spends about $60 million a year on telecom, about 75 percent of which Benson estimates comes from connecting calls between centers. VoIP could eliminate those transfers, saving Direc TV several million dollars a month on its phone bill.
The good news when Benson’s pilot began: Direc TV had been planning an upgrade to MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) networking infrastructure and was upgrading its Avaya equipment already. So Vo IP’s cost would be inconsequential.
Benson piloted VoIP in one of the company-owned centers and found that it was “pretty straightforward” to implement. VoIP did require making sure switches at the center and outside of the network were IP-capable and had appropriate software in them.
The bad news: Benson controlled only four of the call centers Direc TV uses. The other 26 were outsourced to three companies, primarily Convergys. Planning talks with his third-party providers went slowly. Convergys was also moving to an MPLS network, and the two companies planned similar network architectures and used similar equipment. But that wasn’t true for his other providers, which didn’t necessarily have the same priorities for IT, either. And Benson would get no cost savings if VoIP weren’t in place at both ends of the network.
Today, Benson has learned some lessons about managing the multiple vendor issues. While it does take time to nudge a service provider in a direction it might not want to go, there are things that help, Benson says. In his case, having one large service provider and two smaller ones meant he could play them off against each other, to a point. The smaller providers wanted to get more of his business, so they acted more cooperative, which put pressure on Convergys to come around. (It helped that Convergys started to miss its service-level targets, which meant Benson could legitimately threaten to pull contracts.)
Another lesson learned: VoIP may be at the top of your to-do list, but it’s probably not at the top of your organization’s. Chances are, a CIO will be pulled in unexpected directions during a VoIP pilot. Benson, who of course has to respond to other, competing needs from within Direc TV,
is no exception. If customer service wants a new call center built, Benson needs to pull people from the VoIP project for the duration of the call center project. This year he’s had to build a new call center for Direc TV and help his third-party providers open two other call centers.
Such dilemmas and diversions don’t dull Benson’s ardor for what he thinks will be hefty telecom savings. His centers stand completed, and he thinks by the end of 2007 all the third-party call centers will also be done, though since some of Direc TV’s outsourced call centers use Nortel equipment, Direc TV still needs to test IP calls between Avaya equipment and Nortel equipment.
Once this project is done, he’s got another VoIP pilot in mind, examining IP-enabled phones. He’s learned, though, to expect significantly longer planning time for VoIP projects, especially in a company where keeping the phones ringing is paramount.
Despite the issues that come with VoIP, Forrester’s Pierce says companies do want to adopt it. “The percentage of companies that believe they will stay on old technology indefinitely goes down and down and down,” Pierce says. For smart rollouts, she recommends the “chocolate layer-cake” approach.
By that, she means implementing VoIP in phases. Use new sites or places where aging equipment or a growing workforce create opportunities for upgrading equipment. That gives staffs a chance to gain experience with what remains an emerging technology.
And makes it more likely that if the phones don’t ring, you’ll know why.
michael fitzgerald is a freelance writer based in millis, mass. he can be reached at michael@mffitzgerald.com
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