IP telephony case Study

Nirvana Business Solutions take the IP route

Nirvana Business Solutions (NBS), a Bangalore-based BPO provider, is one of the few BPO companies that has gone in for IP telephony deployment in a big way. It chose Network Solutions and Cisco Systems for deploying IP telephony at its facility. Before setting up its IT infrastructure, NBS had the choice of adopting TDM or IP for its telephone system. After thoroughly evaluating both the technologies it went in for the latter and has started reaping the benefits of this deployment in a short span of time. The Bangalore headquartered company has operations in the US and European markets.

Why IP telephony?

The reasons for choosing IP were manifold. The technical team at NBS believes that IP is the technology of the future. It was easy for the company as it had set up a new facility and there was no legacy telephony system to worry about. M S Rangaraj, chief technology officer of Nirvana Business Solutions says, “I have worked in an IP environment for many years since I am from a networking background. I understand the numerous advantages that IP telephony has to offer, so it was a natural choice for me.”

An IP network is more resilient

The technology team at NBS was drawn towards IP due to its resiliency. After a thorough evaluation the team concluded that if one path in an IP network goes down, calls are automatically routed to other paths, which may not be true in the case of a TDM network. Rangaraj says, “In a TDM network, if the IPLC network is down, all voice calls are dropped. In BPO if voice calls are dropped, it directly affects customer service satisfaction levels, which can mean a huge loss for the company.”

Easily scalable

BPO requires the ability to ramp up headcount as and when there is an increase in customer requirements. For this, NBS was looking for an easily scalable technology that could scale without too much of spending on additional infrastructure. “Say tomorrow I want to scale up the number of seats at a single location, I can scale it easily, unlike with a TDM network where scalability involving a change in the core infrastructure entails very high costs”.

Capacity for Web-enablement

NBS needs to work towards higher customer satisfaction levels. The team felt that most overseas clients preferred a Web-enabled system and by going for IP, NBS hopes to rope in more customers.

Smooth customer interaction management system

NBS wanted to a have in place a flexible customer interaction management system running as it wanted to record each and every call with the customer in order to bring in more quality in its customer interactions. The technical team concluded that this would work out very smoothly in an IP environment as multiple telephones could be connected to a single call capture engine. A TDM phone requires different recording instruments for different phones. Rangaraj points out, “IP allows you to capture whatever you want and wherever you want.”

Evaluating different IP telephone vendors

The evaluation exercise was conducted in December 2002 and lasted for three months. Three vendors, including Cisco Systems, were evaluated. As part of the evaluation exercise NBS conducted a one-day workshop where all vendors made presentations on their technology and solutions. Weeks of intense discussions with senior engineers representing the vendors and also with some customers using solutions from the said vendors led the company to finally choose Cisco Systems for the IP telephony deployment.

Why Cisco Systems?

“Cisco’s commitment—both by their Indian office and the US one—was significantly higher than the other vendors. When you are making investments on such a large scale this type of commitment is required on the part of the vendor,” says Rangaraj. The technology team at NBS also found Cisco products to be highly scalable and also felt that they lent themselves to building redundancies. Issues like call flows, cost of support, and all kinds of user interfaces were well supported by Cisco’s IP telephony solutions. “During the evaluation stage we looked at TCO over a three-year timeframe on the technology, product, service cost, maintenance cost and scalability costs and decided upon Cisco for our IP deployment,” adds Rangaraj.

Pre-implementation exercise and implementation

After the evaluation was completed, NBS chose Network Solutions as the systems integrator for the project. The pre-implementation exercise started in March 2003 with the development of a complete detailed design of the network. It took three weeks to come out with design documents and the implementation details for every single function and component that was required for the deployment. A team of six people was involved in framing the design document, two each from Cisco, Network Solutions and NBS. During the pre-implementation stage each and every detail was worked out, with regard to what had to be configured, which modules to be tested and so on. After this detailed pre-implementation exercise the implementation process was smooth. It was kicked off in May 2003 and the network went live with 150 IP phones (Cisco 7940) in June 2003. Ten people were involved in the final implementation programme, with three from NBS and the rest from Cisco Systems and Network Solutions. Presently, NBS has been using 4 Mbps bandwidth that is provided by SingTel, Bharti, MCI, BSNL and VSNL. Its Bangalore facility is connected to Newark on the US East Coast and plans are underway to connect it to a European location.

Benefits

Six months later, NBS has started reaping benefits from the implementation. “All the assumptions that we had made before the implementation have proved correct, we are very satisfied with the quality of voice, which is extremely good,” says Rangaraj. Since the system is Web-enabled, the company’s clients are able to track calls being processed by NBS on a regular basis, thereby leading to greater customer satisfaction levels. NBS has been successful in leveraging the scalability factor of the IP telephony network. It started off with 150 IP phones. It is now in the process of doubling its network by adding another 150, going live in six weeks from now. Rangaraj says, “The IP phone deployment has been able to give us a 10-15 percent cost savings advantage over a TDM phone network, which can be very beneficial to the company in saving costs in the long run.”

Future plans

NBS plans to ramp up its headcount and the number of IP phones at NBS is expected to touch the 1,500 mark by the end of 2004. The company intends to have 1,500 seats across two different Indian locations.