VoIP pioneer Ryla finds pay-off

When Mark Wilson decided in 2001 to use Internet telephony to improve his company’s call center services, he didn’t have any role models. Yet he decided to take Ryla Teleservices in that direction because the economics were just too compelling.

“In the call center business, the two biggest variables are the cost of labor and telephony,” said Wilson, who is founder, president and CEO of the Kennesaw, Ga., based company. “When it came to our telephony, we looked at all the options, and at the time, there weren’t really that many call center companies that had migrated over to VoIP. No one was willing to take a chance on what at the time was not so proven. But from a financial and economic point of view, it made the most sense. I was willing to take the chance and the risk to try and launch my business.”

It was a risk that paid off. Wilson has grown his company from a 40-seat operation to more than 200 seats with plans to fill 900 seats by mid-2007. Ryla’s revenues went from $4 million in 2003 to $8 million in 2004. Wilson now has a $20 million revenue number in sight, with a major expansion that includes new operations in Nairobi, Kenya.

Ryla chose a network-based VoIP service from AT&T that has become a critical part of the company’s growth strategy, Wilson said. Using a common IP network, AT&T was able to provide Ryla with fixed call pricing that delivered significant savings and the ability to plan based on foreseeable costs. In an industry that is forced to compete with low-cost overseas labor, Ryla has been able to use that cost savings to provide better benefits and higher wages for employees, producing high retention rates.

“Everyone is trying to have a lower cost model,” Wilson said. “There again, VoIP and the economics that it brings are important if we are going to compete.”

Ryla also was able to expand, opening a second location in Providence, R.I., and operating its two call centers on a virtual basis without duplication of data and information, he said.

“In Rhode Island--using VoIP--we set up a virtual call center,” Wilson said. “If you used traditional ways of going about things, the centers aren’t really virtual. They are premises based--two sets of data and branches as opposed to one company where data flows pretty freely without having to aggregate everything in two different places.”

Because the company is set up virtually, he added, it enables Ryla to do dynamic call allocation to route calls to where agents aren’t busy.

“It’s more efficient, which is another cost savings,” he said. “We don’t have underutilized people in one area and people who are too busy in another. We don’t have a work-at-home program now that can route calls to agents in their homes, but we have that model in place. If we aren’t operating in silos, we are much more efficient as a business and we can service customers with multiple locations and multiple functionality and do that in a real seamless way.”

The call center company’s experience is typical of customers who find core benefits from convergence onto a single network, said Rick Stein, executive director of AT&T's VoIP services for business customers.

“Our basic capability was to enable customers who use our data and network services--Internet access and virtual private network--to also make phone calls over that, both site-to-site as well as using that network to hop off to public switched telephone network,” he said. “They get the benefits of convergence in that they can use their IP access and network to do both voice and data--it’s dynamic, and all IP.”

Typically, Stein said, customers start with VoIP for the cost savings and later recognize the additional functionality.

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