CloudquestionsContinuing the series of questions coming out of our webinar, “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“, let’s ask the question:

#5 Can you get IP communications (ex. SIP) for rich integration into your infrastructure?

This is a key question to ask any cloud communications service – can you interact with the platform entirely over IP communications? Typically using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) or another VOIP protocol.

Here’s an example of why this is important… say you have a contact center and when people are finished talking to an agent you want to offer them the chance to take a customer survey. If they agree, they will be transferred over to the application running the survey. In the old legacy way of doing transfers, the contact center would just do a basic transfer over the PSTN to the phone number of the application….

WITHOUT any real context

No information about what the caller was talking to the contact center about… or what path they took through the contact center software… or how long they waited… or who they spoke with…

With the PSTN, there’s no real way to provide any of that rich context information – unless the contact center software perhaps appends a few extra digits… or calls a separate application for each possible work flow. Sure, there are creative ways to compensate… but they require a good bit of extra work and potential duplication… all to make up for the fact that the PSTN has no way to pass more than just basic information.

On the other hand, over in the IP communications space you can pass all sorts of headers rich in contextual information from the contact center software over to the application running in the cloud. The app can then deliver a very customized experience that, in the case of a survey, can really ask about the experience the person had. It’s personalized… customized… all because the application can get the rich headers from the original software.

What’s even better, the app running in the cloud can send all that information very easily back to the originating software so that that info can be passed back into the systems there.

So can the cloud talk SIP? If it can pass SIP headers back and forth, there’s an amazing amount of deep integration you can do. If the cloud can’t do SIP? Well, better let that one drift on by…

Interested in learning more about how Voxeo’s cloud can help you?

Originally from Voxeo Blogs<