"One of the biggest challenges for today's corporations with e-commerce applications has been how best to integrate customer phone, email, and Web contacts for a consistent and efficient customer experience. To meet this challenge companies have invested heavily in contact centers, computer telephony integration (CTI), and CRM systems to ensure the quality of every customer interaction.
Although voice calls are still the most popular means of contacting a company, customers in growing numbers are choosing to do business via email or Web collaboration. In recent years companies have struggled to add email and Web sessions into the contact media mix. But contact centers have specific challenges when providing levels of service across all three media channels. These include complex multichannel integration, management of multiple media applications at the agent desktop, and accurate consolidated reporting on service levels by media type.
The integration of these systems has been costly, time-consuming, and complicated. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) promises to simplify the integration of phone, email, and Web for e-business communications. VoIP is the great enabler for the customer service contact center. The appeal of VoIP has been the notion of managing a single, corporate data network for all the customer communication needs of a company."
