sip IS hip

Locating agents away from your main contact centre can be a powerful advantage in the CRM market. You can locate agents where facility costs are lower, while at the same time attract and retain skilled agents by providing them the flexibility of working remotely either at home or in a branch office.

Remote agent facility becomes one of the very important feature for a modern contact centre.  Aastra’s Solidus eCare multimedia contact centre is one of them that supports this facility.

While there are many ways to implement remote agents, one way to achieve this is via deploying SIP agent.  IP/SIP extension-based terminals, such as IP/SIP phones or the IP /SIP soft phone, function via the agents’ PCs and connect directly to the LAN without having to route calls differently. This enables agents to work from any PC, anywhere as long as they can connect to the corporate network.

Peer-to-peer switching (or Direct Media Routing) ensures that the voice signal finds its way through the IP network, thereby maintaining optimal speech quality, while still being controlled by the utilized PBX (such as Aastra MX-ONE™) and with the full support of services. The IP agent is assured the same service, whether logged on at the main site, at a branch office or at home.

Among the benefits of using IP extensions is the capability for agents to work be locally (on a LAN), in the branch-office (on a WAN) or remotely (via VPN) and to use either an IP/SIP phone or the soft phone.

Voice quality is always a major concern while implementing a VoIP solution and there is no exception for IP / SIP agent as call centre manager will always demand high quality services.  When deploying a IP / SIP agent, one has to ensure there is QoS from PBX all the way to agent.  And this will require QoS support from PBX, switches, router and IP phones (or the soft phone).  Without giving attention to QoS issues, an IP / SIP agent implementation could fail.

Many will enjoy working remotely fom home, an IP / SIP agent solution could be a big help to achieve the goal and not losing quality of service.