Riding the Bleeding Edge of VOIP
Business, Disaster Recovery, Infrastructure, Trucking January 9th. 2008, 12:17am
I am normally a moderately conservative implementer of new technology into production environments at work. There is one decision we made back in 2005 however that was a little before the mainstream, but has worked out rather well. I recently read this article from eweek regarding the cost savings and growing number of VOIP implementations.  Being a relatively early adopter of VOIP, I can attest that it is a worthwhile venture…and a little less risky now.
I get asked from time to time about our phone system and why I like it so much and why I’m so eagerly awaiting the next release of it in 2008 which we’ve got plans to upgrade to.
The System
We ended up moving from a traditional PBX based device (a Toshiba CTX100) to a system that allowed us full call center functionality, a rich client experience and ease of administration to boot. The system is a Microsoft / Intel powered system developed by Interactive Intelligence which is headquartered here in Indianapolis. We opted to go with their Vonexus (EIC) solution which is a subset of features offered in their flagship CIC product. It is geared toward small to medium sized businesses and offers tons of features and flexibility.Â
We did a brief evaluation of some different solutions and settled on the benefits of VOIP. We worked with our communication partners G3 Technology Partners who ended up putting together a nice case study of our solution which can be read here.
The Benefits
- Windows Based Client - The system works with VOIP network phones, but also comes with a windows based application that is loaded onto a users desktop (pictured below). There are actually various flavors of this client available. They have a Microsoft Outlook version, Great Plains add in, web based client, etc. The client is nice because it shows some advanced call capabilities on your screen. It is windows based, which means it is intuitive and easy to use. So now to transfer a call, you can click the call on your screen and drag it to a person you want to transfer it to rather than entering some cryptic # + transfer code + station + yada yada yada.Â
- Easy Configuration - Not only is there a windows based client, but the administration is all done through traditional windows type applications. Creating users, manipulating auto attendant configurations, setting up call queues and all other aspects of phone programming couldn’t be easier. I was used to the confusing programming methods of the Toshiba, so going to a point and click windows application was great!
Soft Phones - While we originally went live with Polycom VOIP phones, most people in the company have converted over to use the soft phone. The windows client doubles as a soft phone. Instead of having a physical phone at your desk, you just do all of your call control using the windows client and a headset connected to your machine. This works great because the computer headsets cover both ears and you’re not having to mess with a third device on your desk, you’re just operating the mouse and keyboard for everything including call control!- Virtual Connectivity - This is my second favorite feature of the system. You can work virtually anywhere so long as you have a high speed VPN connection back to the phone server. Since we leverage VOIP, you can have your voice traffic routed back through to the server from a remote machine using the soft phone. Or, if you prefer to use your home phone or another land line as your station, the system has the ability to dynamically create remote stations so when you sign into the system from home, you put whatever number you want as your phone and calls are directed to and from your phone. When you call through the system, it appears as if you are calling from the office. You can work anywhere, just as you would at work and nobody knows any different. This worked out great when we had a snow emergency last February. Nobody was at the office, but we didn’t miss a beat since most of the office was signed in remotely operating business as usual.
- Unified Messaging - My favorite feature is the unified messaging. This has actually been a huge time saver across the company. Being able to interact with faxes and voice mails as emails is huge. Faxes come across as TIFF images and your voice mails are WAV files. You can forward these around, store them, etc. Rewinding and doing whatever you want to with a voice mail file is now a breeze.  You don’t have to dial into an automated system punching keys on a phone to listen to a message. You can simply double click the wav, continue reading some emails while listening to your message, then forward it on if you need to, all in a few seconds compared to minutes with traditional voice mail!
- One Number - The system is intelligent enough to assign a single direct dial number to each user of the system. When a call comes in, it listens for fax tones at the front of the ring tone, if it detects them, it will automatically not ring the recipient and receive the fax. Each user has their own dedicated fax line and voice line that is the same number and the faxes they receive go directly to their inbox. This is a great convenience, no running to a machine and losing your fax in the shuffle.
- Easy Call Control - The great thing about the client is that complex call control features are very easy to execute. Take for instance a transfer. You have the option of parking, speaking to the person you are transferring to, sending to voice mail, blind transferring, etc. To do all this with a traditional system involves a bunch of digits you’d have to enter in the right sequence on a phone. Using the client, you are using a wizard and just clicking some intuitive buttons to make it work. How about conferencing? Just click the conference button and drag your calls into the conference. Then you have the option of muting certain parties, putting parties on hold, etc. Try doing that with a traditional phone system! You also can easily record calls which end up as wav files in your inbox. You’d have to see the client in action to give it justice on the power and ease of use, I can’t do it justice here trying to explain it with words.
Stats out the Wazoo - There is a SQL server database that all statistics are written to.  Every call is logged. Every interaction and status change is logged. You also get about a hundred canned reports that tell you just about everything you could ever imagine relating to phone traffic and user usage.- User Presence - Traditional phone systems have huge panels with a bunch of lights representing stations. With this system, we have the client which shows directories of users and presence information about these users. You can see when users are on the phone, away from their desk, out of the office, etc., all without having to look anywhere else. The really cool thing is the system will present your presence to your callers. So if I change my status to out of the office until 3:00 PM, callers calling me will hear “Ben Becker is out of the office until 3:00 PM today.” No longer do you need to record personal greetings, let the system do it for you!
- API - We love customizing applications and making applications talk with one another. The phone system is no different. We leverage the programmatic API that is provided to feed call statistics into our Multiplexor tool that displays on a 250″ screen in our operations room, in addition to unlocking the front door of the building programmatically through the phone system. We also built some one click dialing capabilities into one of our custom applications.
- Scalable - Since the system is license driven, to grow, you just add additional licenses for users and resources. We can grow on this system to 300 users no problem.
- Queue & Auto Attendant Capabilities - Phone tree’s and call control programming can be difficult with traditional systems, however with the point and click GUI that is provided to manage the auto attendant, configuring the phone tree is very simple and an intuitive process. Making changes to the steps in the tree is very easy and feature packed. We’ve been able to implement some relatively complex call control into our processes and we periodically review and adapt these to our changing business environment.
- Powerful Remote Access - We don’t use this feature very much to dial into the system remotely since it is all tied into email, but occasionally you may be on the road and need to. Since your voice mail box is your inbox, the system can read your emails to you, play your voice mails and even send you your faxes to a fax number of your choosing. The newer version of the system has some features that you can actually respond to emails and voice mails using speech recognition capabilities.
The client that is loaded onto everyone’s machines is shown in the following screenshot. You can see that we have the user directory which allows the presence of others in the company to be seen. Calls show up in the upper portion of the screen and the buttons for call control become active. There are all kinds of capabilities of this application which is a perfect call companion.
Next Release
The next release is jammed packed with all sorts of new bells and whistles. For starters it’ll be a completely .NET based client and the APIs are completely rewritten in .NET. We also be gaining additional queue features, security and some simple things we have desired which aren’t present today (such as a call log!). I’m sure I’ll have a blog entry after the go live of the upgrade with the latest!
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3 Responses to “Riding the Bleeding Edge of VOIP”
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January 14th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Thank you for this in depth voip review. I’ve been trying to make the switch and your post is very convincing. Have you saved alot of money?
January 14th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Trucker, that is an interesting question. I wish I could say we have saved exactly $X dollars, however much of the ROI is in that gray, hard to quantify area.
Take for example, the seconds shaved off of the act of dealing with a voice mail. As a wav file, it is easy to listen, pause, rewind, forward, store, etc. Typing digits into a voice mail system while tieing up your phone line listening to voice mail from the old system, these few seconds here and there add up quick!
Or how about the fact of having your faxes come into email and being able to fax from the desktop. Now I don’t have to roam around and waste cycles checking some machine.
I guess you could get crazy and invest a lot of time adding all of this up and putting a dollar amount on peoples time, we haven’t spent the time to do this since we know it is there.
We also leverage the statistics in the phone system to make better decisions. We periodically adjust our queues, attendant, etc. based off of data captured by the system. One could argue the opportunity costs of not having this and making these types of decisions based on gut rather than data…that’s surely worth something?
I guess the real payoff is we are operating in a different playing field than we were previously, one that has opened up doors, capabilities and opportunities that didn’t exist before…that is our ROI, sorry it isn’t the financial answer you had hoped which I know makes salty costs easier to swallow, but I think if you look at the purchase what it costs you per business day, it is a no brainer
January 14th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Oh, and one other thought, I know that Langham Logistics just recently went to this same exact system. They are another logistics company in our area, it’d be interesting to see what their thoughts are after the dust settles!