Verizon Business has added VoIP to its Contact Center service, enabling more flexible and scaleable services that will save money for its enterprise services, the company said Tuesday.

By IP-enabling its network-based call center services, Verizon can allow customers to use inbound VoIP calls with local number assignments to replace toll-free calling for customer service, as well as enable them to more easily support a distributed work force and to add or subtract calling resources as needed, based on spikes in business calling.

“What we have done is bring together the best of two products and two platforms – our Contact Center service and our VoIP service -- to be able to provide a complete VoIP hosted contact solution,” said Michael Barnes, director of Contact Center Solution product marketing. “This combination makes our product even more appropriate for remote agents because IP is perfect for tying together remote agents and small office-home office locations, and also for the traditional contact center.”

Verizon’s IP Web Center solution can now support a full range of customer contact options including inbound/outbound telephony, web call-back, scheduled call back, web chat, collaboration, e-mail, and fax.

“We support seven different contact channels because we know these are somewhat generational – some people are phone-centric and others are PC-centric,” Barnes said. “We allow you to support all of those on a single network-hosted platform.”

The network-based product can also allow enterprises to rapidly scale up their contact center resources to support a special promotion, or to handle business continuity issues in the event of an outage or other crisis, and then cut those back when they are not needed.

“This platform is fully integrated into our network – it’s not just hosted, but fully integrated on a geographically redundant basis,” he said. “We handle all upgrades, and all software. All the customer needs is a PC and a browser. We allow them to pay on an ‘as you go’ basis, per-agent, as they are needed.”

Companies can avoid the cost of an 800 number, if they choose, by assigning local numbers to their contact centers, thereby also gaining a local presence, Barnes said.