1. Contact Center Gap
Bridging the
Using Office 365 & Lync
PULSE ON UCC
A SPECIAL ALL-DIGITAL, GREEN ISSUE
Vol. 4, Issue 18, December 2014 | $15 US
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T H E O F F I C I A L P U B L I C A T I O N O F T H E C H A N N E L P A R T N E R S C O N F E R E N C E & E X P O
IN THIS ISSUE
Contact Center Buying Trends p. 4
Lync and the Contact Center p. 7
Third-Party Lync Contact Center Applications p. 7
Advantages of a Lync-Based Platform p. 8
Implementing Lync Contact Center Applications p. 8
2. > EDITOR'S LETTER <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
MICROSOFT’S PLAY
FOR A VOICE ECOSYSTEM
Art Wittmann
Content Director
@artwittmann
CHANNELPARTNERSONLINE.COMCHANNEL PARTNERS DIGITAL ISSUE UC&C 2
protracted pace of a daytime network
drama. It starts with the story of Skype,
which was bought by Microsoft in
2011 for a cool $8.5 billion. At the time,
Google and Facebook were rumored to
have been interested in Skype for their
own purposes. But the Redmond Horde
showed up with its very big pile of cash
and Skype’s fate was sealed.
To say that Skype has never been a
money maker would be an understate-
ment, but it did generate some reason-
able revenue — $860 million in the year
previous to Microsoft’s purchase. The user base is huge, but
largely exhibitionist millennials and excited grandparents — an
odd combination of users if the goal was to combine Skype
and Lync into one system. Yet that appears to be just what
Microsoft is doing.
It has announced that Lync will be rebranded Skype for
Business in 2015, and earlier this month said that Skype for
Windows now has the necessary H.264 decoder and that
Windows Lync users could now call Skype users and vice versa.
It’s an interesting play by Microsoft from a 50,000-foot view,
but of course the details from closer in will give you pause.
Specifically, Microsoft has said that Skype for Windows will get
Lync compatibility first. Android and iOS will have to wait. How
long they have to wait and the quality of those Skype clients
will bear heavily on Microsoft’s chances for success with its
new strategy.
It seems clear that in Redmond’s view, it’s a VoIP world and
smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops should all be equal
participants in it — but we’re still talking about Microsoft, so
Windows is first among equals. The ecosystem is based on SIP
and Microsoft’s extensions to it. So while Lync has been late in
getting voice support across the product line, it’s now clear that
it will get it in the form of compatibility with Skype.
Skype’s 300 million monthly users are nothing to scoff at,
but that leaves a few billion non-Skype users in the world. In
this soap opera, Google would remind you that over 500 million
people have at least created a Google+ account, although
Hangouts doesn’t see anywhere near that number of monthly
users. Facebook would add that it has 1.25 billion monthly users
who could use voice — though the
users of its Facebook messenger
number more like 500 million. Can
Microsoft make itself the center of
an ecosystem that provides a rich
set of fundamental protocols upon
which third-party developers can
create robust products that will
replace legacy systems, when it is
just one of many messaging / VoIP
players in the market?
That’s been the model for the
company’s success for years.
The dynamics are different now
— Windows is not the cudgel it
once was, but as this Pulse Digital
Issue points out, there are plenty of
companies who see Lync moving
its way into the call center based
on Microsoft’s underpinnings and
application software provided by
third parties.
While Google has schooled
Microsoft in the consumer world of
search and ad networks, it’s been
Microsoft that has done a good job
of keeping its business world clients
happy, and one of the biggest
enabling factors has been Google’s
lack of patience and understanding
of the channel, and Microsoft’s
mastery of it. In the call center world
should the incumbents like Cisco
and Avaya be worried about what
Microsoft is doing? Absolutely.
Underestimating Microsoft has
been fatal for virtually everyone
who’s done it.
If you set out to create a high-tech soap opera, you’d be hard
pressed to come up with a better story line than the Lync,
Skype, Android, iOS saga that’s unfolding at about the
3. Contact Center Gap
Bridging the
Using Office 365 & Lync
CHANNELPARTNERSONLINE.COMCHANNEL PARTNERS DIGITAL ISSUE UC&C 3
AS COMPANIES
MOVE TO UNIFIED
COMMUNICATIONS
AND COLLABORATION
(UCC), OFFICE 365
WITH LYNC ONLINE
IS AN INCREASINGLY
POPULAR OPTION.
That said, one of the well-known complaints is that
it lacks the “communications” component — namely
voice — of UCC. An on-premises or hosted instance
of Lync Server can solve that problem, delivering a
full-blown replacement for an enterprise PBX. Now
organizations are encountering another obstacle with
Lync — lack of support for their contact centers.
“Many companies have significant investments in
Microsoft Lync user licenses and IT support knowl-
edge, and they are looking for ways to leverage these
investments beyond their enterprise UCC deploy-
ments and into their contact center deployments,”
said analysts with Gartner Inc. in the research firm’s
Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure,
published in May 2014.
Today, however, Microsoft does not offer support for full contact
center functionality in Office 365 with Lync Online or Lync Server. Nor is it
planned for the 2015 release of Lync, which will be rebranded as Skype for
Business, Microsoft announced in November 2014.
By Khali Henderson
4. CHANNELPARTNERSONLINE.COMCHANNEL PARTNERS DIGITAL ISSUE UCC 4
The contact center market long has been
dominated by leaders in enterprise telephony.
Avaya, Cisco and Genesys accounted for more
than 60 percent of global agent shipments in 2013,
according to market share data from Gartner. The
research firm concedes, however, that market
barriers are not so high that others could not enter.
In addition to the roster of telephony vendors serving
this space, there are more than 100 cloud service
providers as well.
“If Microsoft were ever to make the investment
… they could be positioned to really disrupt the
[contact center] marketplace,” said Donna Fluss,
president of DMG Consulting, a research and
consulting firm specializing in contact centers.
That’s because Microsoft already has entrenched
relationships with so many businesses that already
use its products, she said. “Then if they decided to
get really price aggressive, they could really turn this
world upside-down.”
Fluss is not optimistic that this will happen
anytime soon, since Microsoft has been making
various claims about its intentions to support
contact center for nearly two decades. “Microsoft
makes noise in order to be disruptive, but based on
our analysis continues not to offer a full, functionally-
rich ACD [automatic call distribution],” said Fluss.
“They have come out with some functionality, but if
you need anything more than basic capabilities, you
are not getting it from Microsoft.”
Indeed, some providers are encountering this
dilemma with their customers who have moved or
are considering moving to Office 365 and Lync.
Without an answer for contact center, at worst,
partners are risking the enterprise Lync business,
and at best, they are leaving the contact center as a
stranded island on a legacy platform. But it doesn’t
have to be that way. Third-party products are
emerging to bridge the gap.
“Anyone who is looking at Lync to go across their
organization is aware of this conversation [about
supporting the contact center],” said Bill Haskins,
senior analyst and partner - unified communications
for Wainhouse Research. “They are asking the same
questions: Do I need to let my contact center dictate
my larger PBX strategy, my larger UC strategy, or
should I put one of these third parties in there?”
This Pulse Digital Issue will review the methods
for leveraging enterprise Office 365 and Lync
investments in the contact center, the benefits
of moving to a native Lync platform and imple-
mentation options.
CONTACT CENTER
BUYING TRENDS
Contact centers need equipment, software and
services to give their customers and employees
multichannel support, as well as inbound and
outbound telemarketing capabilities, help desk and
more. This includes both assisted and self-service
channels such voice, Web, email, instant messaging,
Web chat, social media, video and mobile devices.
Contact Center Infrastructure includes a
range of technologies, such as:
PULSE ON
CONTACT CENTER CAPABILITIES
Key Contact Center Infrastructure Technologies
TELEPHONY INFRASTRUCTURE
MULTIMEDIA CONTACT ROUTING AND PRIORITIZATION
ENGINES WITH REAL-TIME AND HISTORICAL REPORTING
IVR AND VOICE PORTALS FOR SELF-SERVICE APPLICATIONS,
INCLUDING SPEECH-ENABLED SELF-SERVICE
OUTBOUND DIALING/PROACTIVE CONTACT
VIRTUAL ROUTING APPLICATIONS FOR MULTISITE
AND WORK-AT-HOME SCENARIOS
PRESENCE TOOLS
TOOLS FOR INTEGRATION WITH CRM SOFTWARE
DATA MART AND ANALYTICS SYSTEMS
COMPUTER-TELEPHONY INTEGRATION (CTI)/
WEB SERVICES INTERFACES
EMAIL RESPONSE MANAGEMENT
WEB CHAT
COLLABORATIVE BROWSING
SOCIAL MEDIA
LIVE AND PRERECORDED VIDEO
KNOWLEDGE-BASED SELF-SERVICE
WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT SCHEDULING TOOLS
SESSION RECORDING AND QUALITY MONITORING,
INCLUDING SPEECH ANALYTICS
WORKFLOW ROUTING AND MANAGEMENT
MOBILE CUSTOMER SERVICE APPLICATIONS
Source: Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Contact
Center Infrastructure, May 2014
5.
6. CHANNELPARTNERSONLINE.COMCHANNEL PARTNERS DIGITAL ISSUE UCC 6
Overall, there are at least 45 contact
center applications, according to DMG
Consulting. Which of these capabilities do
contact centers want or need? The short
answer is, “It depends.” Industry analysts
agree that technology priorities vary dramati-
cally among contact centers. That’s because
no two contact centers are exactly alike.
Indeed, there are more than 20 types of call
centers, ranging from sales and customer
service to field service and dispatch to IT
help desk. In addition, their needs vary by
size, type (inbound or outbound) and focus
(internal or external). A customer-facing,
revenue-impacting contact center with
hundreds of agents, for example, is going to
have different requirements than an internal
IT help desk with five or 10 agents.
And the decision-making process for
technology purchases may be quite different
as well. For most businesses, decisions
about enterprise communications and
contact center technology are made concur-
rently and based on the same platform
— as has been the tradition for the past 20
years, said Sheila McGee-Smith, founder,
president and principal analyst for McGee-
Smith Analytics, a communications industry
research and consulting firm. “Anything
under 1,000 agents, 90 percent of the time
the decision is made at the same time as the
enterprise telephony and it’s made by the
CIO or IT manager,” she said.
That’s not true of the larger contact
centers, however. “If you are the contact
center for a major airline, a major financial
institution, typically the decision-making is
separate [from the enterprise communica-
tions decision] because the contact center
is driving revenue and really is an independent
business unit almost,” McGee-Smith said.
In either case, customer-facing contact centers
tend toward a longer sales cycle. “In some compa-
nies, I feel like it is cemented into the architecture of
the building; it’s been there so long and it’s such a
beast to manage,” said Zach Katsof, North American
business manager for Web and UC at Arkadin.
“Because [the contact center] supports customers,
companies are averse to change unless there is a
real business driver to do so.”
A customer service director or call center manager
— although they might not sign the contract — will
be the person that holds up the deal if you don’t have
them engaged, Katsof said. “As soon as you have
contact center, you are messing with their world. If
you don’t have their buy-in, they are not going to
do it,” he said.
To avoid that, Arkadin and its sales partners have
learned to ask customers about their contact center,
how old it is and whether it’s built-in or separate
from the phone system. “What we don’t want to do
is have one hold up the other,” Katsof said. “A small
and medium business (50-150 employees) probably
doesn’t have a contact center, so it’s not a big issue,
but as they get bigger, the more robust the contact
center, the more complex it is to replace.”
PULSE ON
CONTACT CENTER SIZE
Defining Contact Centers by Number of Agents
Differences in resources, management techniques and
technology vary greatly by the size of the contact center.
Source: Contact Babel, U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide 2014
SMALL
10-50 agent
positions
MEDIUM
51-200 agent
positions
LARGE
200+ agent
positions
OUTB
OUND
INB
OUND
75%
of the
work
75%
of the
work
75%
of the work
PULSE ON
CONTACT CENTER TYPE
Comparing Inbound Outbound Contact Centers
Whether a contact center handles inbound or outbound contact
can impact how it is run and what technologies it uses.
Source: Contact Babel, U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide 2014
MIXED
7. CHANNELPARTNERSONLINE.COMCHANNEL PARTNERS DIGITAL ISSUE UCC 7
LYNC AND
THE CONTACT CENTER
Replacing contact center infrastructure with a
Lync-based software platform is a consideration
that businesses are beginning to take more
seriously. The holdup has been two-fold: One,
Microsoft doesn’t provide the functionality except
through third parties, and two, Lync as a true PBX
replacement (including voice) is relatively recent
notes McGee-Smith in a March 2012 white paper,
“Contact Center Applications for Microsoft Lync: A
Reseller View of the Market.”
A third reason might be lack of awareness that
Office 365 can be combined with the phone system
and the contact center. “A lot of organizations have
no idea that you can even do that,” said Arkadin’s
Katsof. “A lot of people don’t know that Lync can be
a contact center. A lot of them don’t even know that
Lync can be a phone system.”
Organizations can leverage presence in a Lync-
enabled contact center software platform without
a Lync voice deployment. However, for most
companies that are investing in Office 365 with Lync
Online, supporting the contact center is a secondary
consideration behind adding voice support with
on-premises or hosted Lync Server. While Lync
as an IM platform has been widely adopted, Lync
for telephony is trailing behind the established
market leaders.
“The question is not only, ‘Do I have all the
features I need for Lync to serve as my contact
center?’ Those are table stakes. Before you get
there, the question is, ‘Can I use Lync for voice, for
customer-facing interaction?’ That’s a more compli-
cated question than just comparing an Avaya or a
Cisco contact center experience,” said Wainhouse
Research’s Haskins.
McGee-Smith agreed, noting it’s not always easy
to answer. “If you talk to people who use Lync for
voice, they are not always happy with the quality
of the voice. Over time, it’s improving,” she said.
“With the Skype for Business announcement, it may
improve even more. Skype has better voice chops,
more voice expertise than Microsoft.”
In addition to the quality concerns, it is complex
and costly for companies to deploy Lync as a PBX
replacement, said Elka Popova, program director —
unified communications for Frost Sullivan. “That
is why it has been relatively more successful among
medium and large business. But these medium and
large businesses also require very sophisticated
advanced contact center capabilities,” she said,
noting they would prefer to purchase integrated
contact center and enterprise telephony platform.
So what are Lync’s contact center capabilities?
Lync has some very basic contact center func-
tionality, such as response groups and lightweight
interactive voice response (IVR), said Haskins, noting
this may be adequate for a number of applications,
such as an internal help desk, for example. “It’s the
Microsoft approach,” Haskins said, of meeting the
needs for a majority of the market. “The flipside is if
you are talking about a customer-facing or revenue-
bearing or support-facing kind of contact center …
Lync is really not used for that and I think by design.
You go to a partner; they have a number of partners
that solve this gap.”
THIRD-PARTY LYNC CONTACT
CENTER APPLICATIONS
The Microsoft website presently lists 20 partners
that have delivered contact center applications
for Lync 2010, 2013 or both. “The tolerance for
some of these solutions … on top of Lync, formally
supporting the contact center, have matured in the
last 24 to 36 months,” said Haskins, noting a shift
in mindset along with improvements in the applica-
tions themselves.
Third-party companies that are providing contact
center applications for Lync generally fall into one
of two groups — Lync-integrated and native Lync.
What’s the difference? Michael Greenlee, lead UC
“[I]f you are talking about a customer-
facing or revenue-bearing or support-
facing kind of contact center ... Lync is
really not used for that and I think by
design. You go to a partner; they have a
number of partners that solve this gap.
”— WAINHOUSE RESEARCH’S
BILL HASKINS
8. channelpartnersconference.com
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9. CHANNELPARTNERSONLINE.COMCHANNEL PARTNERS DIGITAL ISSUE UCC 9
architect and Lync MVP for Clarity Consulting, a
Microsoft developer, explains in an August 2012
white paper, “Native vs. Non-Native for Lync
Contact Centers”:
• Lync-integrated applications have their own
separate telephony infrastructure and media-
handling capabilities, and integrate with Lync,
allowing calls and possibly presence information
to be passed from
one system to the
other. Products of
this type often come
from the traditional
telephony world.
• Lync-native
applications,
rather than simply
integrating with Lync,
are built entirely
within the Lync
platform and use the
same infrastructure
as Lync itself.
Greenlee’s company,
Clarity Consulting,
offers a product in the
second category called Clarity Connect. “We are
a fully native, Web-based server-side solution,”
explained Jeremy Puent, product manager for Clarity
Consulting. “We have zero desktop footprint; there is
no client needed other than the Lync client. We live
inside of the Lync world and the Web.”
Clarity Connect can be deployed on-premises
or hosted by a service provider like Arkadin, which
uses the platform along with its own hosted Lync
voice product to enable contact center functionality,
such as ACD, IVR, screen pops, call reporting,
analytics, email and IM routing and Web chat. CRM
integration also is available as an option.
ADVANTAGES OF A LYNC-
BASED PLATFORM
For the IT team, the benefit of a standard Lync
experience across the enterprise and contact
center includes easier user training, software
management and desktop deployment, said
Wainhouse Research’s Haskins.
Clarity Consulting’s Puente illustrates the
advantages of a simplified infrastructure with an
anecdote from his past career managing contact
center infrastructure. “In the Cisco world, there’s
an agent desktop, supervisor desktop, historical
reporting client and an admin client. When you
upgrade those servers, you have to go to every
PC, uninstall, reboot and install new versions,” he
said. “Ten years ago when I was doing that work. I
would do the cutover in two hours, but spend the
whole weekend working through all the machines
in the call center [to load the software] and test
and make sure it’s
working. With Clarity,
you upgrade the server
and it’s done because
it’s Web-based. You
are good to go.”
It’s also easier from
a user experience
standpoint, since the
only desktop presence
is Lync. Agents are
not logging into
multiple clients to
handle interactions.
Puente said this
highlights the biggest
advantage of native
Lync contact centers
— Lync itself. Unlike other UCC platforms that are
a hodgepodge of bolted-on technologies, Lync
was created from the ground up as a UC platform.
“From within the Lync client, I can IM, then hit a
button to turn it to a voice call, then I can share my
desk and give them control. We are collaborating
in real time on documents using Microsoft Word
and SharePoint, but it’s a truly unified collaborative
environment,” Puente said. “We are just layering
the contact center piece into that.”
That said, the ability to escalate from IM to voice
to collaboration is only available internally, but
Microsoft’s road map includes plans to extend such
functionality externally as well.
IMPLEMENTING LYNC CONTACT
CENTER APPLICATIONS
Implementing a native Lync contact center
application can be done in several ways, from
multiple entry points, and is commonly rolled out in
phases as the customer needs grow. “What we find
works is figuring out where they are at today, where
they are unhappy and if there is an opportunity,”
said Arkadin’s Katsof. “We focus on what they are
interested in.”
Unlike other UCC platforms that
are a hodgepodge of bolted-on
technologies, Lync was created from
the ground up as a UC platform.
10. CHANNELPARTNERSONLINE.COMCHANNEL PARTNERS DIGITAL ISSUE UCC 10
For example, a company using Office 365 with
Lync Online may not be ready to replace its phone
system, but may be interested in introducing
Web chat functionality into its website. A native
Lync application is one way to create a Web chat
response team. “It’s an easy entry into using Lync
in the contact center,” said Katsof. “It’s a way to
get in the door.”
On the flip side, inbound call centers may not be
ready to take on inbound email or Web chat, and
are more interested in voice functionality. That’s a
discussion that usually begins with replacing the
phone system. If they are open to that, it’s easier
to talk about using Lync voice for contact center
because it’s part of a larger system, Katsof said.
However, in some instances companies only want
to move the contact center to Lync voice.
In any case, Arkadin recommends enabling a few
agents in a demo environment to start. “Once they
see that it works, we grow it to the entire contact
center,” Katsof said.
Larger organizations see internal applications as
a less intimidating entry point, Katsof said. “A lot of
IT groups are deploying and contact center ‘lite’
— skills based IM routing — and as they see it
works and is reliable, then they will think about
extending it to their customer-facing use cases as
well,” he explained.
Khali Henderson is a freelance journalist and the
former editor-in-chief of Channel Partners.
linkedin.com/in/khalihenderson
@khalihenderson
MORE INFO
Arkadin
Clarity Consulting
ContactBabel
DMG Consulting
Frost Sullivan
Gartner Inc.
McGee-Smith Analytics
Microsoft Corp.
Wainhouse Research
