Verizon Business today said it has IP-enabled its hosted call center services to include routing incoming calls over toll-free IP links, and offering IP-based hosted interactive voice response capabilities. In addition, the company announced new IP trunking interoperability with Avaya VoIP systems.

The new options for Verizon’s Contact Center Services are intended to help businesses use VoIP to improve their customer service, said Michael Barnes, director, Contact Center Solutions Product Marketing at Verizon Business.

“Our customers have told us they need to be able to manage multiple sites because today call center agents can be anywhere,” Barnes said. “IP is perfect for that because it is location agnostic and media agnostic. “This isn’t IP on the doorstep – we are bringing IP services all the way to the customer from the network.”

Verizon IP Tollfree routes incoming calls over IP for improved efficiency and also to support email and instant messaging, in addition to phone calls. Using Session Initiation Protocol, the service enables real-time Internet-based communication on a global basis while lowering the total cost of ownership and eliminating the need for CPE-based gateways.

The Verizon IP IVR processes calls in a pure IP environment, taking advantage of voice compression and dynamic bandwidth allocation to offer greater efficiencies and also offering multiple choice for call-routing and processing for both IP and TDM-based location end points.

“The big news here is that now we can support hybrid terminals, as well as IP termination,” Barnes said. “That helps facilitate the migration of our customers into an IP environment. One of the things we’ve heard very clearly from our customers is that the move to IP is a journey, and we need to be able to support them as they make that trip, recognizing that there will still be infrastructure on their site and in their entire network or business that will both be TDM and IP for some time.”

Both the IP Tollfree and IP IVR services are compatible with Avaya’s
Communication Manager with SIP enable services (SES) 3.1 software and other SIP-enabled end points so that Verizon Business customers can use the VoIP service for both inbound and outbound calling. In the past, Verizon Business has announced compatibility with Cisco Call Manager, said James Tyrrell, executive director, Advanced Voice Services Product Management for Verizon Business. The company is also doing interoperability with two other vendors.

The Verizon IP Trunking allows customers with Avaya IP phones to connect on a single converged access line for internal and external traffic. It provides greater flexibility to large organizations with between 200 and 1000 endpoints on a network.

“We offer feature parity with our Verizon Business tollfree network, which is important part of our portfolio,” Tyrrell said. “All of that is still there, just like our inbound customers use today, but now we can support not only terminations to SIP end points but also call transfers via SIP. Using the inherent capabilities of SIP standard, we can provide call center capabilities.”

The new services are part of Verizon Business’ strategy to continually build on its VoIP foundation and extend the benefits to customers of what VoIP can do, Tyrrell added.

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