The elusive achievement of IP contact center ROI: ten reasons why contact centers migrating to IP telephony don't hit their ROI projections--and what you can do about it.

One of the leading messages for IP telephony in contact center markets is that IP reduces costs and "increases your return on investment," or "delivers ROI in 12 to 18 months," or "produces a higher ROI than traditional communications." But while IP is backing up its savings claim with causes and effects such as toll bypass to reduce long-distance charges and simplified moves, adds and changes that lower IT and labor costs, the ROI equation remains open to interpretation.

Not surprisingly, the majority of contact centers that have adopted VoIP these past few years have failed to reach their projected ROI numbers and time frames. Why? The reasons vary, as no two IP migration projects are alike. Yet what is consistent from one project to the next are the misappropriation, or total lack of, true ROI dynamics in a contact center's ROI model.

Here are 10 of the most common reasons why contact centers and other businesses don't meet ROI objectives as planned, why vendors frequently come up short of advertised ROI timeframes, and what you can do to fix it.

1. No strategy, no ROI. Just as timing is everything in business, strategies are everything for IP migrations and maximization of return on investment--especially for multisite contact centers that lack a clearly defined plan to consolidate agents and skills across sites. By formulating and refining a plan to optimize VoIP, virtually any distributed contact center organization can more effectively balance call loads, reduce wait times and match each customer with the appropriate agent the first time. That, in turn, means more customers, higher customer retention rates, increased revenues and, ultimately, a better overall ROI.

2. Innovation counts. It's no secret how critical competitive advantages are to a contact center's prosperity and survival. With innovation as a driving force, new IP telephony software suites for contact centers pre-integrate features such as speech-enabled IVR to off-load agent time and knowledge management to off-load FAQs and routine customer requests. For one reason or another, though, most contact centers fail to leverage IP to inject innovation into the services on which their customers insist. Instead, they mimic the traditional systems they're accustomed to, offer no real value-adds to consumers (or clients, in the case of a teleservices provider), and miss out on opportunities to further elevate ROI.