VoIP is 'not dented by recession'
The take-up of VoIP systems is not being dented by the recession, according to research by the network provider Dimension Data.
Findings from the company's Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report showed that there was an increase of interest in VoIP solutions.
Dimension Data is a specialist IT services and solution provider, which assists clients with their computer systems and IT infrastructures.
The research also revealed that of the 550 contact centres, which are spread across 36 countries throughout the world, a large amount is using new technology for value-added services.
According to the data, half of all contact centres have reported to already have VoIP services and integrated business systems in place.
Howard Spink, the UK director for customer interactive solutions at Dimension Data, said the report showed that businesses were "on the cusp of a contact centre evolution driven in part by the tough economic conditions today".
"Within three to four years, we expect that most contact centres will become a key source of value creation for businesses," he explained.
Mr Spink remarked that two-thirds of call centres currently had a strategy in place to reduce the costs of serving customers.
Africa was shown to be leading the way as three-quarters of the call centres there are using VoIP systems.
This is in comparison to half in the US and under two-thirds in Britain.
Martin Dove, global managing director at Dimensions Data, said companies were waking up and focussing their resources and energies to delivering better services to the customers that they already have.
They wanted to keep their existing customers and this meant adapting technologies to maintain their business.
A key reason for the rise in VoIP systems was due to changes in customer behaviour.
The research showed that more than half of consumers between the ages of 16 and 34 will go online as their first port of call.
Mr Dove commented that as these young consumers alter the way companies communicate, as businesses must find different ways to interact with them.
He remarked that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook had grown in popularity thanks to the appeal to this group of people.
This comes as both Facebook and Twitter announced this week that they would be implementing VoIP systems on their websites.
With the new services, users of the sites would be able to call their contacts over the internet.
The Facebook application would allow people to make calls to those on their friends list and the Twitter system would let people speak to anyone even without having a contact number for them.
In a similar manner to the character limitations on the websites tweets, Twitter's VoIP calls would be restricted to just two minutes.
This is similar to the 140-word tweets that users of the site are able to post.
Facebook's VoIP service has been launched by Web Voice and Twitter's new scheme will be run by Jajah.
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