Manage Competing Priorities

The problem: How do you roll out VoIP when top management has other priorities, and when you need several third-party partners to go along with you?

The answer: Realize VoIP pilots will take more time than most other pilot tests.

Mike Benson wishes he were done with the VoIP installation going on at his company’s 30 call centers. Benson, executive vice president and CIO of DirecTV, hoped to be saving millions of dollars a month in phone bills with VoIP by mid-2006. Instead, he’s still working toward a second-quarter 2007 finish date.

Benson wants VoIP because it costs DirecTV 1 to 2 cents to transfer a call from one call center to another. That doesn’t sound like much money until you realize that DirecTV spends about $60 million a year on telecom, about 75 percent of which Benson estimates comes from connecting calls between centers. VoIP could eliminate those transfers, saving DirecTV several million dollars a month on its phone bill.

The good news when Benson’s pilot began: DirecTV had been planning an upgrade to MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) networking infrastructure and was upgrading its Avaya equipment already. So VoIP’s cost would be inconsequential.

Benson piloted VoIP in one of the company-owned centers and found that it was "pretty straightforward" to implement. VoIP did require making sure switches at the center and outside of the network were IP-capable and had appropriate software in them.

The bad news: Benson controlled only four of the call centers DirecTV uses. The other 26 were outsourced to three companies, primarily Convergys. Planning talks with his third-party providers went slowly. Convergys was also moving to an MPLS network, and the two companies planned similar network architectures and used similar equipment. But that wasn’t true for his other providers, which didn’t necessarily have the same priorities for IT, either. And Benson would get no cost savings if VoIP weren’t in place at both ends of the network.

Today, Benson has learned some lessons about managing the multiple vendor issues. While it does take time to nudge a service provider in a direction it might not want to go, there are things that help, Benson says. In his case, having one large service provider and two smaller ones meant he could play them off against each other, to a point. The smaller providers wanted to get more of his business, so they acted more cooperative, which put pressure on Convergys to come around. (It helped that Convergys started to miss its service-level targets, which meant Benson could legitimately threaten to pull contracts.)