As video conferencing, instant messaging and Voice over IP become more prominent business tools, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) phones may prove their value in the coming months and years as organizations try to find communications solutions that evolve with available technologies.
One trend hitting contact centres in particular is the SIP phone – the technology allows for multi-party sessions over one or several media streams -- used widely to control voice and video communication sessions over IP. But other organizations have been getting in on the action too, according to one SIP phone manufacturer.
“The SIP station essentially has a chipset inside a very small housing,” said Rachel Wentink of Interactive Intelligence, an Indianapolis, Ind.-based provider of unified business communications solutions. The company unveiled this month its Interaction SIP Station device that Wentink said addresses challenges organizations face when moving their phone systems to an IP model.
“You could use a traditional phone with an IP system but you need special equipment to do it and that makes it more complex, more difficult to operate and support,” Wentink explained. “And when you get used to using an IP phone, you can have a variety of different kinds of features on the phone itself … (but) if you build the feature set into the phone, you’re dependent on the capacity of the chip inside and then you are limited in how you can add features.”
Wentink is hoping organizations will move to SIP phone boxes that she described as simple-to-use and reliable. They’re simpler than traditional IP phones and cost less money, she added.
“We have Fortune 500 customers who have big SIP phones for their agents where they actually tape paper over them to prevent the agents from playing with buttons and inadvertently forwarding calls where they shouldn’t,” she said.
