BT IGNITE FORGES NEW GROUND WITH CONTACT CENTER SERVICE

Using the vast expanse of the erstwhile Concert global backbone network and a carrier-grade contact center solution from CosmoCom, BT Ignite is trying to define a market for carrier-hosted call center technology. And it's doing so in the backyard of U.S. carriers.

With more than 1800 contact center customers for its circuit switched-based solutions worldwide, BT has begun to sell an IP-based solution called the Multimedia Contact Center (MCC) to global enterprises wanting to outsource the complex technology while keeping their service representatives in-house. So far, the majority of takers on the new platform have been U.S.-based companies, said Frank Shaffer, director of managed voice services at BT Ignite.

BT Ignite is a CosmoCom customer but it also will act as a sales channel for the company's CosmoCall Universe product through a business unit called Contact Central. The unit packages the call center platform from CosmoCom with Seibel's customer relationship management software. However, as a service provider, BT Ignite is tapping a market that Datamonitor managing analyst Benjamin Farmer said is just inching out of the early adopter phase in the U.S.

“Growth is expected and will exceed any growth in the TDM market,” Farmer said. “Nevertheless, it is going to remain a subset of the [contact center] market as a whole.”

As with many things IP-related, carriers in other markets have already jumped on the managed contact center bandwagon. CosmoCom sold its CosmoCall Universe to Korea Telecom, France Telecom, NTT in Japan, Cable & Wireless and Sonera in Finland. The product provides what CosmoCom's Erik Laurence, vice president of marketing and business development, called the third option in contact center solutions.

“Today, if you want a full multimedia contact center, you can build the whole thing or outsource the whole thing,” Laurence said. “This next generation IP technology allows companies to outsource the technology but keep the agents in-house.”

The question for U.S. service providers is whether their customers are ready for the multimedia contact center. The CosmoCall Universe supports IP-based voice, video and online customer interactions to call centers or remote agents who require only a PC and some client software. It supports what the industry is now calling the “universal queue,” a way of treating customer contacts with consistency no matter the method of communication.

Farmer said many companies are not ready to take advantage of the universal queue and that U.S. service providers are in no hurry to push it. “They already have market share and their bread-and-butter connection services are doing just fine,” he said. Revenues from IP-based automatic call distributors are expected to creep up to 4.4% of the total market in 2003, according to Datamonitor.

However, for carriers looking to move into high-margin services, as all have said they are, the hosted contact center could be one more way to do so. “The call center on demand is a way for telcos to gain access to a whole lot of dollars that for a long time have been the sole province of vendors of premises-based solutions,” Laurence said. The CosmoCall Universe also allows carriers to host many call centers on the same platform and build on connection services such as 800 numbers.

As with any new technology, it takes a little work.

“When we got the software, it wasn't really to the point where we could provide it as a service. However, the architecture was right and the response of the vendor was amazing,” BT Ignite's Shaffer said. “They were the most responsive vendor I have had in twenty-plus years in telecommunications.”

After nine months of trials, BT's service was ready. Shaffer said the market is too. “The U.S. marketplace for call centers is in a slight decline because it is extremely mature and has pushed the envelope as far as it could on existing technology,” he said. “It really needs to do something different.”