Part of the problem is that beyond the promise converged networks offer for reduced total cost of ownership, or TCO, there are few quantifiable paths to ROI -- that is, return on investment -- for larger centers.

"Managing a high-performance LAN/WAN infrastructure for VoIP is a challenge for most organizations and largely offsets the advantages over traditional separate voice and data networks," the report says.

True Cost Savings

There are some situations in which VoIP in the enterprise contact center does make sense, though, Yankee Group analyst Art Schoeller, who co-authored the report with Matt Delpercio, tells CRM Daily.

In some cases, saving money is indeed the driving factor for VoIP adoption. The most aggressive adopters of VoIP for larger contact centers have been the outsourcers, such as Convergys, West Corp., TeleTech and ClientLogic.

"They view the technology as giving them a lower cost of managing distributed pools of agents and the associated technology infrastructure," the report says. "VoIP technology enables the routing-and-queuing traffic of these calls to be collapsed into a single data center, which can then be moved across the IP network to any agent in any number of outsourced locations."

Many Centers, Few Agents

Some companies operate many local contact centers, each staffed by just a few agents -- but they still need to talk to each other and manage the agent-status, call-routing and queuing processes, Yankee Group notes.

"VoIP can centralize call queuing and logic with IP endpoints across the network, enabling the local contact centers to take local traffic but route additional traffic back to the central center when it's too busy," suggests the report.

This model is ideal for regional credit unions, banks and enterprises with retail locations, but would require significant business process re-engineering, Schoeller says.

Network Simplification

VoIP can simplify a large contact center's network, eliminating several layers of technology, the report finds.

In the 1990s. enterprise-size contact centers adopted a three-tiered architecture for queuing and routing of calls. The first layer was based on carrier-enhanced 800 services; the second layer was a set of servers typically running Cisco Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) to consolidate agent status and direct calls across the entire network; and the third layer had individual ACDs at each site, the report explains, with each site maintaining its own quality-monitoring, reporting, workforc-management and support systems.

"We now see with VoIP the opportunity to flatten the contact center network and eliminate layers of technology," Yankee Group says. "This calls for a centralized, hardened ACD that may be duplicated across multiple sites. Not only does this decrease the administrative costs and increase the flexibility of the contact center, but it enables the enterprise to rid itself of a large technology expense."