Technology Briefing. From IVR Legacy Support to Standards-Based Technology: Transitioning Strategies for the Contact Center

Transcription

1 Technology Briefing From IVR Legacy Support to Standards-Based Technology: Transitioning Strategies for the Contact Center

2 From IVR Legacy Support to Standards-Based Technology: Transitioning Strategies for the Contact Center In part two of this series, titled My IVR System is End of Life: Now What? we looked at the technical problems and increasing demand for a better customer experience that are challenging IT leaders and call center managers. Among the factors driving demand for a better customer experience are frustration with poorly designed IVR systems, shifts in customer expectations and new technology adoption amongst consumers. That industry briefing detailed how end of life IVR systems can be maintained, supported and updated to meet changing business requirements such as increasing customer loyalty and driving revenue. This briefing is focused on the tools, technologies and service solutions that can be leveraged to support, enhance and modernize legacy systems that often exist within a technologically heterogeneous contact center environment. These solutions sets can also provide significant return on investment to enterprises that have made the decision to budget for migration to one or more next generation capabilities and platforms. First, this briefing details how PSS utilizes their purpose-built, vendor agnostic software tools sets to help contact centers move to open standards such as VoiceXML, SIP, VoIP and web services in general. Secondly, how PSS uses their application development and systems integration capabilities to provide seamless integration between heterogeneous system components. Lastly, how PSS Help s industry proven conversion and system upgrade processes enhance ROI and significantly mitigate risk. Many contact centers have older system components (platforms and applications) from different vendors that were deployed at different times to meet a variety of business requirements. As business requirements changed over time, contact center leaders often struggled to update older systems. For example, legacy IVR systems were developed in proprietary code, have little documentation and are no longer supported by vendors. Compounding the technology challenges, IT leaders and call center managers are tasked with delivering a superior customer experience and often specific metrics required by various business stakeholders. In addition, many contact centers are facing the challenges of transitioning from traditional TDM-based telephony to a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) service using Voice over IP (VoIP). VoIP is an important first step toward comprehen-sive IP-based interactive communications. SIP enables a universal approach that spans enterprise, service provider as well as wired and wireless networks. Along with CTI, these technologies provide contact centers with the ability to do more with less, simplify network architecture, reduce operating costs and deliver new applications and services via IP. However, moving to open standards such as VoiceXML for IVR and SIP using VoIP for communications involve time, cost and a variety of risk profiles. PSS Help provides a set of software tool sets and specialty development and integration services designed to address time to deployment, cost reduction and most importantly, risk mitigation across multiple risk profiles. 2 P a g e

3 PSS Development PSS has developed a process and a set of tools to help contact centers migrate to VoiceXML. The traditional path to VoiceXML was to completely re-write the application code through reverse engineering. The other very expensive and very time consuming option was replacing the entire platform and developing all new applications. However, if a contact center invests in a complete re-write of the proprietary code, they end up with the same functionality as the old system had. In essence, they have achieved the goal of moving to a standards-based IVR system, but they have achieved no ROI whatsoever. In addition, the cost of re-writing the old code through reverse engineering is more expensive than a new platform. Reverse engineering source code is tedious, time consuming and highly prone to error. Under a typical waterfall model (completing the entire re-write and then deploying), when the cut-over to the new system is made, those errors are almost certain to hamper a smooth deployment. App Centre App Centre is a conversion and analysis tool from PSS which converts the legacy IVR application development source code to JSPs running on the VXML platform. App Centre auto-generates approximately 90% of the call flows of an IVR application. Conversions are completed on a state by state basis based on well defined business priorities, thus mitigating the risk of a big bang cut-over. The process allows the legacy applications and platforms to run concurrently with next gen applications, allowing new functionality to be introduced more rapidly and with less risk. The process also allows contact centers to realize ROI because in many cases, no platform replacement is required and new next gen functionality can be introduced much earlier. Another obvious benefit is that the contact center s IVR system is now running on the VoiceXML standard, providing significant freedom of choice and vendor independence. While App Center is a powerful conversion tool, it also serves a second, equally important function. Prior to conversion, App Centre analyzes the application development source code and generates a report showing the total number of call flows, business logic and data access integration points and other code elements. This report provides all the information required to create highly accurate time and cost estimates for completing each conversion. Using App Centre, the contact center staff do not have to produce an updated functional specification with the precise call flow running in the IVR. When converting a large number of applications it is critical to know the desired end point but also from a source code perspective, the starting point. App Centre provides a precise picture of the state of the source code allowing PSS s application development team to know exactly how much of the code will need to be re-written, how much will convert automatically and where user interface elements can and should be changed. App Centre reduces the development time by an average of 40% and creates both time and cost certainty in generating a statement of work and proposal. App Centre also identifies all the possible paths a caller could take, which is used to create a highly accurate test plan, further mitigating risk. 3 P a g e

4 In stark contrast, even an experienced team poring over out-dated functional specifications yields only best guess estimates for the elapsed time and project cost. Since this analysis is by definition a guess, the proposal must be bounded by assumptions. The inevitable under-estimations will cause time and cost over-runs. This puts IT leaders and contact center managers in the uncomfortable position of requesting additional project funding, usually late in the project and pushing back go-live dates. FlexxGate In order to address the move from older TDM networks to VoIP networks, PSS Help has developed FlexxGate, a media gateway that allows the legacy and VoIP networks to coexist so companies can keep legacy equipment in service longer by maintaining compatibility with new equipment. Since most next-generation IVR systems only support SIP, they require a media gateway to connect them to a TDM or analog network. FlexxGate features a highly extensible architecture which allows additional protocols, features and extension to be added as required. FlexxGate media gateways can be deployed in multiple-server configurations to support higher capacities and high availability requirements. FlexxGate gives contact centers the ability to complete the transition to VoIP networks at their own pace, which helps lower overall cost, complexity and all the risk associated with a previously mentioned big bang cut-over. Two real world examples will serve to illustrate how FlexxGate has been utilized to solve very different business problems. In the first example, a major municipality had budgeted for a migration to a new Unified Communications platform. Their business priorities and budget were focused on rolling out the UC platform as quickly as possible. However, the contact center had an end-of-life IVR system that needed to be sustained over the course of the project and beyond. PSS helped provide the solution by combining a FlexxGate implementation and professional services to provide a seamless integration from the legacy, TDM-based IVR system to the new SIP-based UC platform. This solution provided significant cost savings for the municipality. It also extended the life of their legacy IVR system and allowed them to maintain focus on migrating to the UC platform. In the second example, a cable television company needed to replace their end-of-life IVR system since it no longer met business requirements. In order to meet the new requirements, they invested in a new SIP-based IVR system with speech recognition capability. However, they did not want to simultaneously take on the challenge of migrating their TDM telephony and ACD. For that customer, PSS helped by utilizing FlexxGate as the gateway from the older TDM switches to the new SIP-based IVR system. PSS was able to help both customers move forward with their high priority, high value business projects, while providing a transitioning strategy that allowed them to extend the life of existing technologies. The transitioning strategies, tools and professional services gave the customers the freedom to proceed with their projects as budget and time allowed. 4 P a g e

5 FlexxBridge Since both CTI and IVR applications require seamless integration with a variety of back-end data sources, PSS has developed the FlexxBridge Integration Server. The software is designed to help simplify this integration by providing an SOA-friendly integration point that can be used by multiple IVR, CTI and web applications. The solution can integrate to virtually any host or data source that provides API access to the integration point. The modular and extensible architecture of FlexxBridge allows it to evolve as the surrounding environment changes. As new applications and integration requirements arise, FlexxBridge integration modules can be added or changed without forcing changes to the applications that rely on them. FlexxBridge isolates the CTI engine from the applications which allows changes to be made without having to re-write and re-test the applications. Glenn Hackemer, Executive Vice President at PSS noted that Historically, IVR has used a broad set of integration techniques to access data sources. For many organizations today, the objective is to simplify and move to web services. By having the FlexxBridge technology in place an enterprise can proceed at their own pace until all their interfaces have been converted to web services. In essence, they can de-couple their IVR projects and their web services interface projects. This is important if the two development teams are proceeding at different paces. So if the web services interface team is behind the IVR team, they can use the FlexxBridge server to do traditional data integrations with IVR that only support web services. FlexxBridge is a transition tool, so if one project completes before another there is a transition strategy in place and FlexxBridge can be removed whenever the customer chooses. The reason we built these tools is that from an architectural perspective, we can de-couple an enterprise s IVR project from their PBX project using FlexxGate and with FlexxBridge we can remove the timing dependencies of IT teams working on web services interfaces from other contact center projects Hackemer explains. From a broader development perspective, our approach to creating a cost effective transitioning process is to use our automated tools to quickly and methodically get to open standards. Then we are building out next gen applications that can run concurrently with a well understood, stable platform to maximize ROI for the customer. At the same time, we are providing business as usual development support services to minimize project disruptions and mitigate risk. 5 P a g e

6 About PSS PSS has developed a complete range of CTI IVR application solutions, all developed in open standards which can run on any platform. Some vendors provide only off the shelf solutions that address one or two elements of CTI IVR. PSS has the breadth of experience to provide a complete, end to end solution. This reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as providing complete choice and flexibility. PSS understands what can and can t be automated. They understand where speech can add value and where it is an unnecessary and costly complication. Their focus is on driving long term business value. PSS can initially assess the performance of an existing call center solution and then create a strategic plan and technology roadmap that leads to dramatically improving the customer experience while also maximizing the return on investment for the applications and technologies. As highly specialized systems integrators and IVR solutions experts, PSS can design and deliver fully integrated communication solutions. Those solutions help contact centers become true multi-media centers to meet the rapidly accelerating customer demand for a superior customer experience, across all channels. PSS can also optimize and support both platform and applications until the time comes to move to next gen solutions. All of the platforms and solutions PSS works with are backed by the ProPSS 24/7/365 support to keep systems operating smoothly. PSS is the choice of some of the world s most admired enterprises working with 150 corporations, across 5 continents, in 19 countries. PSS solves problems that matter to customers, keeps promises and makes it easy to renew service contracts. PSS s customer repeat business rate is 99%. PSS - Product Support Solutions Inc. Corporate Headquarters 7172 Regional Street #431, Dublin, CA T: or Fax: UK Headquarters The Old Saw Mill, Harvest Hill Lane, Coventry, CV5 9DD 6 P a g e