IP telephony enables the consolidation of application infrastructure, centralizes contact center support staff, simplifies the geographic reach of application logic in multi-site call center environments, and creates a virtual single pool of agents working as one center.

Two consolidation approaches are key. First, voice server consolidation reduces capital expenditures and the cost of ongoing maintenance and support. This reduction in complexity makes the contact center more agile when responding to customers. Second, virtual site consolidation increases efficiencies by pooling agent resources across the enterprise. It enables staffing backup strategies between the central contact center and branches.

Consolidating servers optimizes performance and reduces costs. Yet the biggest cost reductions provided by IP telephony come from simplifying the applications and application infrastructure for a call center. By taking advantage of low-cost, high-performance, IP-based Wide Area Networks (WANs), applications are deployed with simplicity throughout the enterprise. Simpler application infrastructure enables the contact center IT support staff to react to changing business needs with increased speed and flexibility. So, the contact center becomes more agile.

When a business has several contact centers, complexity and cost can mar efficiency. Usually a single pool of agents is more efficient than several smaller groups (and the larger the agent pool, the higher the agent occupancy level). When technology supports a single pool, even more efficiency is gained. With IP telephony, fewer trunks, fewer IVR system ports, and fewer Quality Management system ports are needed to support a single virtual call center than to support several smaller call centers.

By using the right call management system, all contact center activities across all sites are collapsed into a single database application, giving consolidated views of call center performance with a wide variety of standard real-time, historical and integrated reports.

Regardless of physical location, contact centers can be logically grouped. Multi-site intelligent call routing can be used to predict and balance the traffic load across the IP WAN. Enterprises that have branch locations can tap into the branch workforce for temporary contact center work and the branch offices can tap into the main call centers for assistance during peak periods. With the right IP telephony applications, less-busy operations can back up other operations with temporary help during the busiest periods.