For market research agencies, the telephone is a crucial
instrument in conducting business, and the potential benefits of
adopting voice over IP (VoIP) systems were scrutinised early
on.
For the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), a UK division of
the Millward Brown Group, installing a multimedia converged IP
system became viable last year when it moved to a new building.
Where previously the market research company had identified
shortfalls, the features of integrated telephony have now matured
to the point where, for Millward Brown, it is feasible to begin
rolling the technology out to the business.
"Functions like night-time attendant were not yet there and
there was a limit on the number of calls that could be stacked up
for a particular extension. The operator consoles were also a bit
primitive," said Michael Lord, systems director of Millward
Brown.
So the group's strategy was to migrate to IP telephony those
businesses that were moving to new premises or whose telecoms kit
was obsolete.
At BMRB's new offices, the upgrade brought other economies of
scale. "There was the opportunity to cable throughout with Cat 6,"
said Lord. "IP phones could plug directly into Ethernet and connect
into the desktop, thus rationalising one outlet down to two. That
alone yielded cost savings of at least 30% on cabling."
For the IP telephony upgrade in London, BMRB used a team of five
IT and telecoms staff, and hired network integrator Logicalis as
consultant.
To date, Millward Brown has rolled out IP telephony networks to
offices in London, Chicago, Austin (Texas), and Sydney. But it is
still waiting to fully exploit the integration between voice and
data applications that VoIP promises.
In market research - unlike most call centres, which offer
telephone support to inbound callers - most calls are outbound. For
the moment, BMRB therefore continues to rely on its analogue PABX
telephony system and proprietary call-dialling software.
Millward Brown uses SPSS for predictive dialling, a system that
allocates calls from a prepared list to available operators in a
team. It also delivers a script to the operator's screen by
integrating the PABX with the relevant application on the data
network. At present, a predictive dialling server is needed for
each location.
Bespoke software suppliers to the market research sector have
been slow to support VoIP, said Lord, who looks forward to the day
when these speciality suppliers do, so the company can reap the
huge dividends of running outbound voice calls from the same,
integrated IP network. "Once this happens, we can centrally
allocate calls to researchers spread around the country and even
the world," he said.
Also, projects could be outsourced at short notice to
third-party providers in India in an offshore model, for example.
"The potential for cost savings on resources is huge," he
added.
However, while there is a big, as yet unrealised, advantage in
using VoIP, the business is already enjoying some benefits of
closer integration between voice and data applications. Unified
messaging has been a success and gives staff the option to check
all incoming messages, whether e-mail, voice or fax, from one
inbox. The option to dial into voicemail and hear e-mails from a
synthesised voice is another winner for sales staff on the
road.
A few employees are also experimenting with voice video
integration at the desktop. The IP handsets are video enabled and
users can choose whether to accept a video call. "Our software
developers need to be in touch with colleagues and communication is
easier if you can see each other," said Lord.
The trial involves all departments, including sales and
marketing. Video voice integration has had particularly good
feedback from staff working at home and from managers. "It helps
from a management perspective if you can see your remote staff,"
said Lord.
Since the initial roll-out last April, the company has also
installed wireless IP phones - chiefly to make the open plan
office workable. People who receive confidential calls can roam to
find a private place to talk, and it makes hot-desking even more
flexible.
The most arduous and technically taxing piece of the
installation was mapping the global Active Directory profiles onto
the Cisco Unity server that delivers the unified messaging. Cisco
provides a script to modify the Active Directory schema to include
the Unity server.
Nominating which customer attribute fields within the Active
Directory could be used for populating with Unity data called for
serious discussions with colleagues. A shortage of fields for this
purpose had arisen because of the recent aggregation of different
flavours of Active Directory into a single structure.
For training purposes, the IT team had to get up to speed on
system administration functions. Logicalis provided training on the
basic moves, adds and changes so staff could configure new
extensions and change user profiles. In turn, departmental
administrators were briefed and were then able to offer training to
end-users.
The move to the new building gave end-users time to train on the
system before it went live. Once the system was live, users merely
had to accustom themselves to logging onto the telephony
element.
According to Lord, from a system security point of view, the
advantage of users logging into telephony is that it provides a way
of authenticating calls from a particular handset.
It is still early days, but Millward Brown expects to get a
return on investment two years from installation - and installation
at each site remains dependent on need.
"With any PABX, whether it is analogue, digital or IP telephony,
they are expensive and you have to exploit the investment
completely," said Lord. "You don't just rip them out and replace
them because new technology arrives."
VoIP: The evolutionary approach
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