Telecom Management for Call Centers offers a practical guide to addressing the most common issues faced by telecom management in large call-centers. This handbook was written primarily for the telecom manager; the techniques described here are practical and easily applicable, focusing on the issues the telecom manager faces in his or her daily operational work. The lessons learned by the professionals in this growing field are not often documented and shared. This guide provides documentation of this practical knowledge in a single volume, presented by telecom professionals Luiz Augusto de Carvalho and Olavo Alves Jr. It offers a general view of how telecom infrastructures in large call-centers should be planned, priced, negotiated and managed. It examines call-center operations and provides guidelines for cost management; traffic management; call-center infrastructure; transport networks; GSM gateways deployment; billing systems and auditing; dialer deployment. Carvalho and Alves also explore how to do the necessary calculations, prepare and use traffic matrixes, and map and analyze call-center traffic, including relevant case studies for all issues. Put your call center on the path to success using the advice and methods offered in Telecom Management for Call Centers.

Telecom Management for Call Centers

A Practical GuideBy Luiz Augusto de Carvalho Olavo Alves Jr.

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Luiz Augusto de Carvalho and Olavo Alves Jr.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5682-8

Contents

Introduction...............................................................................1Chapter 1: Cost Management.................................................................3Chapter 2: Traffic Management..............................................................16Chapter 3: Guidelines for Planning a Call-Center Infrastructure............................42Chapter 4: Methodology to Map and Analyze the Traffic in a Call Center.....................59Chapter 5: Planning a Transport Structure..................................................108Chapter 6: Cases...........................................................................121Chapter 7: GSM Gateways....................................................................132Chapter 8: Billing Systems.................................................................136Chapter 9: Billing Auditing................................................................146Chapter 10: Dialers........................................................................151Chapter 11: Calculations...................................................................179Chapter 12: Closing Words..................................................................205Bibliography...............................................................................207

Chapter One

Cost Management

The management of telecom in a call center has as its main goal to guarantee connectivity between the users and the attendance sites with the desired quality of service for the least cost possible. Therefore, cost management is a fundamental part of managing telecom in call centers. Traditionally, there are four main general strategies to keep the telecom cost down:

? Pressure the service providers and hardware vendors, trying to guarantee low prices—for example, bargaining and negotiating hard.

? Enhance the internal control over usage of the services available—for example, by using billing systems.

? Increase the control over the service providers to make sure that the organization is paying only for what was really used at the agreed price for each service and is not being overcharged—for example, by using telephone bills auditing.

? Carefully manage traffic and network design, emphasizing aspects such as standardization and simplification of the technical environments.

Considering that telecom usually represents a significant chunk of the operational cost of a typical call-center operation, the telecom manager has to be cost conscious and has to understand that part of his or her job is to find ways to get more for less from the infrastructure that he or she is responsible for. It is not only matter of making things work but making things work for less.

In summary, it is fundamental to know the actual expenditures of your organization for telecommunications, including telco expenditures, hardware, and services. It is also important to be able to separate the expenditures by identifying not only the services themselves but also things such as penalties for overdue payments, penalties for not achieving minimum-committed traffic, and one-time installation services.

A very common misleading factor when identifying the monthly expenditures of telecom is that very often the telco invoice (bill) encompasses calls from several months (in some countries there is a legal limitation on the time to charge for the calls); therefore, when comparing volumes and costs you should make sure that you separate the calls correctly by time span. In addition, you may also have situations in which the billing cycles of the several providers are not consistent—that means in a given month you may be paying for calls made from different periods. This fact also can generate some distortion when identifying the monthly volume and cost.

Here it is worth mentioning that when verifying the expenditures you should not use as reference the values actually charged but the values that were supposed to be charged. This is necessary because, if you don't, you risk creating the wrong reference for the real expenses. It happens because telcos are well known for their charging mistakes (for and against their clients), and sometimes these mistakes can be very misleading regards having a clear view about how much and on what your organization spends on telecom.

You can generally divide the telecom costs of a call center into three groups:

? Hardware costs

? Personnel costs

? Transport costs

1.1 The hardware costs

The hardware costs encompass all costs associated with the hardware deployed by the call center. Usually, these costs are partially hidden, because some equipment is bought and not rented or leased. This hides the total expenditure and cost of the hardware because part of this cost isn't expended and accounted for monthly.

The telecom manager must keep a careful inventory of the resources used, in which the monthly costs of each device is clearly identified, including the rent/leasing, maintenance, and support costs. When the equipment is owned by the organization, it still has a "cost," which is represented by the total paid (capital invested) or financed monthly by a given rate—usually the WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital) of the organization. Knowing exactly how much your hardware costs monthly is very important not only to define your operating baseline properly but also because there is a delicate balance act between investment in hardware and ability to manage traffic.

1.2 The personnel costs

The personnel costs encompass the costs associated with the people directly involved in managing the telecom infrastructure. It includes regular employees, contractors, and expenses for providers of services such as external NOC (Network Operation Center), help desk, network security, and mantainnance.

This cost has to be very well understood, because, as in the cost of the hardware, there is a trade-off between the cost of the control (and the people involved to execute it) and the gains attainable by controlling. The cost of the people may not be an expensive item in some countries; however, it is always important to know it well and to do the math.

1.3 The transport costs

One important aspect of the infrastructure costs, which very often is overlooked, is the transport cost. These costs encompass all the costs involved in transporting the calls between the call center and the user (or vice versa). There are two main reasons these costs very often are not carefully verified:

1) The call-center services very often are outsourced, and in these situations, usually the company contracting the service pays the bills directly, which obscures the visibility of this particular cost item. This situation is common in both inbound and outbound operations.

2) Other very typical situation is when the caller pays for the call (totally or partially). This scenario also tends to obscure the responsibility of the call-center operator in the transport costs.

Although both scenarios are common, keeping track of the transport costs is very important even when you don't actually pay for them directly. Firstly, the transport costs usually...