The Contact Center Blog

Technology To Uninvent

A few weeks ago, MSN.ca published the satirical article 12 bits of technology we would uninvent to outline the technologies they could simply do without.

One of them was Automated Phone Systems and that couldn’t be truer! There is nothing worse than calling a company, hoping to speak to someone as quickly as possible and then having to go through the touch-tone motions of pressing numbers to finally get the answer you want. And, even then, don’t you find yourself just jabbing at the “0” to get to customer service quickly? That’s definitely something we all do.

A human voice can go a long way in making the customer experience easier and contact centers are there for that very reason. Helping a customer get their issue sorted out is their number one priority and they do it all without the help of an automated system!

Virtualization in the Contact Center

Virtualization is a software-based platform that allows a single physical host machine to create and run one or more virtual machines at the same time. Virtualization software is used to emulate a complete computer system in order to allow a guest operating system to run; for example, allowing Linux to run as a guest on top of a PC that is natively running a Microsoft Windows Operating System. Over the past few years virtualization has been creating a buzz around the contact center and information technology industry. Names like Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Citrix, VMware and Hyper-V should sound familiar to those with a technological background.

There was a time when you needed separate physical hardware for each operating system (Unix, Linux, Windows) and separate physical hardware for ACD/CTI packages and network services (E-mail, Database, CRM, Windows Active Directory, Novell NetWare, File/print sharing and custom line of business applications).  Rather than pay for many under-utilized server machines, each dedicated to a specific workload, server virtualization allows those workloads to be consolidated into a small number of fully-used machines. 

With virtualization readily available today, this is a battle we no longer fight. There are many benefits to consolidating the number of physical servers in your environment by taking advantage of the many different server virtualization products (i.e. VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V) on the market. These benefits include:

• Lower number of physical servers: Reduce many under-utilized server machines, reduce point of hardware failures, maintenance costs and power consumption.
• Server consolidation: Increase space in the telecom/data center.
• Testing fixes/upgrades: Before going ‘live’ in a production environment with software upgrades or hot-fixes, your data center now has the capability to create an exact replica of the production machine (Virtual-to-Virtual or Physical-to-Virtual) and test the hot-fix or software patch which determines if it works or if it impacts another application.
• Reduce Costs: No longer worry about buying new server hardware due to life-cycle/performance issues, make a Physical-to-Virtual migration to your virtual server with ease.
• Failover/Backup: Make fully redundant hosts or backups of ‘live’ servers with the click of a mouse, restoring services with ease.
• Operating System Flexibility: Being able to deploy multiple operating system technologies on a single hardware platform (i.e. Windows Server 2000/2003/2008, Unix and Linux. 

Have you virtualized your contact center? If so, please share how you did it and if it has made a positive impact on your business.