Anyone running remote "roadwarrior" call centers?

[lopes1211]

We have 1 group of remote part time agents all over the country, all different internet providers, BW, SOHO hardware, pc's, etc, etc, etc...... It's about 100 people using IP agent via telecommuter. At some point in time, someone had replaced their home office telecomute POTS lines with Vonage. Now I'm being asked why we're paying for Vonage VOIP and using telecommuter mode, when our CM2 should do it internally and use roadwarrior. Aside from the obvious medpro's required, does this sound like a good idea? Even though Vonage is VOIP, I'm thinking their nationwide network must have some dedicated long-haul cross country links minimizing latency and giving better quality than our home grown cross country VOIP.?.?.? Any opinions on how better, worse, the same....will the call quality become? Doable, or a rediculous idea?

-CL

 

[phoneguy55]

I have a few call center agents running roadwarrior becuase they have no home phone or some flavor of VOIP at home. It's fine, but I prefer them to use telecommuter as I know the call will be perfect. My feeling is that these agents are talking to customers so the quality of the call is really important. Then again most of my softphone, non acd users use roadwarrior without any issues.

 

[lopes1211]

Any recommendation on a codec caonsidering this is all going over the internet?

-CL

 

[BHodgins]

G729ab

 

[gblucas]

Due to licensing restrictions, we have deployed a "beta" project with about 6 or 7 agents, and we used IP Hardphones with a hardware VPN solution back to our data center. We had agents from all different places coming into the PBX with great success. The success was so good, that it helped us get our new PBX proposal pushed through. I am upgrading from 11.3 to CM4.01 in the next 8 weeks. I used 4621SW phones and programmed all the buttons on their phones. Our call center has used queue lights since the beginning of time, so the hardphone solution worked best for us. I have had little trouble with the solution. I used the G.729a codec set and the calls seem to be really good. We programmed the router to give us the best quality of service that we could get over the internet. We throttle the internet at the router so that other data takes a backseat to the voice. It has really been helpful. I plan to test IP agent as soon as I have licensing for it, but I don't expect to roll it out as the default package. I have some part time agents that will login to the call center during our month end to help with the increased call volume, and I see them using IP agent, instead of going with the full hardware solution. If you need more specifics, I would love to share my results.

gblucas