Contact Center Migration: What to Scope First

A Proposal That Arrives Before Anyone Has Looked

Most contact center projects start on a date somebody else set: a contract renews, support ends, or a parent company standardizes. Within a few weeks there are three proposals, and none of the vendors who wrote them has seen the routing that is running today.

A vendor cannot price what it has not seen, so it prices what it can count, and what it can count is agents. The parts of a contact center that make a migration long do not appear in an agent count.

What follows is what an assessment has to establish before a platform decision is worth making. Most of it is work you will do anyway. Doing it first is what gives you a scope instead of a quote.

The Routing You Are Actually Running

Every contact center has a routing diagram. It is two or three years old and does not include the changes made since by whoever had administrative access. Export the live configuration, read it against the diagram, then walk it with the supervisors who run the queues.

• Queues, and which ones carry traffic Count the queues, then count the ones with volume last quarter. Most estates carry queues built for a campaign or an office that closed, and retiring them now is cheaper than rebuilding them later.
• Skills, and how they are really assigned In many centers the routing decision that matters is a supervisor moving people between queues each morning. A platform that cannot reproduce that gets worked around by hand from day one.
• Overflow and the end of the chain Where a call goes when the queue is over threshold, and where it goes when the overflow is over threshold too. That last hop is often a voicemail box nobody owns.
• Out of hours, holidays and prompts Business hours, the emergency override used during weather events, and who can flip it. Holiday calendars are kept by hand and sites often keep different ones. Prompt trees carry legal wording and often a contracted voice artist, so re-recording is a lead-time item.

What Agents Have Open, and What a Screen Pop Has to Reach

Ask an agent to share their screen for one call. That demonstration is worth more than any integration inventory: a CRM, a billing or claims system, a knowledge base, and two or three internal applications nobody outside the department has heard of.

A screen pop is only useful if it reaches the system where the answer lives. Ask which application the agent needs on screen at second three of the call, and whether the platform has a documented route into it. A documented integration is a configuration task. An undocumented one is a development project with its own scope and price.

• The system of record The application the agent uses to answer the question, which is not always the CRM. Find it by watching a call.
• How the caller gets identified Calling number matching works until the caller uses a cell phone. Establish the fallback: an account number in the IVR, a name lookup, or an agent typing while the customer waits.
• Outbound and workforce management Preview, progressive and predictive dialing carry their own regulatory exposure and list management. Where forecasting, scheduling and quality come from a separate product, confirm which feeds it consumes.

Recording, Retention and Who Your Regulator Is

Recording is where a contact center scope meets law. The federal floor is one-party consent: 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(d) permits interception where one party to the communication has given prior consent. Several states require the consent of all parties, so a center taking calls nationwide has to design for the strictest state it serves. That is a question for counsel.

Card payments are stricter again. PCI Security Standards Council guidance states that storing card validation codes in any form of digital audio recording after authorization violates the prohibition on storing sensitive authentication data, and its guidance on telephone-based payment card data extends that to screen recording. Settle how card handling works before the platform is chosen; in regulated environments this is a governance, risk and compliance question before it is a telephony one.

• Retention periods, written down as numbers A healthcare organization retains Security Rule documentation for six years under 45 CFR 164.316(b)(2)(i), and state medical record rules run longer. In financial services, FINRA Rule 4511 requires at least six years where no other period is specified. Put the number in writing.
• Where recordings live, now and afterwards Storage location, encryption, who can play a recording back, and what an export produces. Old recordings rarely move cleanly between platforms, so the usual outcome is keeping the old system read-only for the retention period or exporting to a neutral format. Both are missing from most first budgets.
• Legal hold and scheduled deletion A center that cannot delete on schedule, and cannot suspend deletion on request, has a problem no platform choice will fix.

Reporting and Sizing: The Numbers That Decide the Design

Ask which reports the center depends on and you will be given a list of forty. Ask which ones a person opened last month and the list is usually under ten. The short list is the requirement. The long list is the migration risk, because somewhere in it is a report that only runs in January.

Sizing is the other number taken at face value. Every proposal is priced per agent, which makes agent count feel like the input. It is not the number that decides whether the design works: two centers with two hundred agents each can place completely different demands on a platform and on the network behind it.

Concurrency and interaction mix are what size a contact center: how many interactions are live at the same time during the busiest half hour of the busiest day, because a monthly average understates it badly. How that concurrency divides across voice, chat and email, whether agents carry more than one non-voice interaction at once, and how handle time and licensing differ by channel. Those figures come out of the historical reporting you have just inventoried.

• The definitions behind the headline metrics Service level, abandon rate and average handle time are calculated differently between platforms. Write down the current formula, including how short abandons and after-call work are treated, and collect a sample of the real output. A metric that quietly changes definition produces a number that looks wrong to someone who has watched it for years.
• Real time and historical are separate builds Wallboards, supervisor views and threshold alerting are different work from historical reporting, and usually specified far too late.
• Who receives it, and where it ends up Scheduled distributions to people outside the contact center surface after a migration, so ask finance and operations too. If a data warehouse consumes this data, that pipeline is its own workstream.
• Busy hour concurrency, from real data Pull at least twelve months so the seasonal peaks are visible: open enrollment, tax season, storm response, semester start. An annual average produces a system that struggles on the day it matters most.
• Where the agents sit Home, office, or a mix, and how that has changed. Home-based agents move part of the design onto the network and the endpoint.

Porting Dates and the Edges That Move Them

Carrier dates drive the schedule on most contact center projects. Number porting has a regulated interval only for simple ports: under 47 CFR 52.35 a carrier must complete a simple port request within one business day. The FCC defines a simple port narrowly: no unbundled network elements, an account for only a single line, no complex switch translations such as Centrex or ISDN, and no reseller.

Almost nothing in a contact center meets that definition. Toll-free numbers, DID ranges, main published numbers and anything behind a hunt group are complex ports, running to whatever interval the losing carrier works to. Order the customer service record early, and confirm who holds the responsible organization records for the toll-free numbers.

• Emergency calling obligations Kari's Law requires that a user can dial 911 with no prefix or access code, and that the system notifies an on-site or off-site location when the call is placed. RAY BAUM's Act Section 506 requires a dispatchable location with the call. Home-based agents are inside those rules.
• The equipment nobody counted Recorded announcement devices, wallboards on legacy feeds, analog headset amplifiers, faxes attached to a queue, paging circuits shared with the building. The inventory discipline in analog endpoints and cloud calling migration applies here, and it belongs in implementation and migration planning.
• The period when both systems run The platform, carrier and recording contracts rarely end on the same day, and calls, transfers and reporting have to work across the split for as long as it lasts.

Where That Leaves the Platform Decision

None of this picks a platform. It produces a shortlist drawn against requirements the center recognizes, and proposals priced against the same scope. If a proposal arrives before that work is done, from us or anybody else, the reasonable question is what it was based on. Contact center is the piece of a collaboration and unified communications program that we scope and price on its own, for exactly that reason.

Common questions

How long does a contact center migration take?

It depends more on porting dates, the number of integrations and the state of the current routing than on the platform. We give you a schedule after discovery, built on the carrier dates we are actually given. Anyone quoting a duration before that is guessing.

Do we have to choose a platform before the assessment?

No. Plenty of organizations arrive with the decision already made, often for licensing reasons settled well above IT, and that is workable. The assessment then defines the migration and the integration work that follows.

Our vendor has already sent a proposal. Is an assessment still worth doing?

Usually, yes. A proposal written before discovery is priced on agent count and a standard build. The assessment shows which parts of your environment fall outside that standard build, and those are much easier to negotiate before signature than after.

Can you assess a contact center that somebody else installed?

Yes, and that is the normal case. Most of what we take on was built by another party, and the documentation rarely matches what is running. Establishing the size of that gap is the first job.

What usually delays a contact center cutover?

Number porting, integrations that turn out to need development, recording and retention requirements found late, and legacy equipment nobody counted. All four are visible during a proper discovery and expensive to find after one.

Sources

• eCFR - 47 CFR 52.35, Porting intervals and validation requirements
• FCC 09-41 - Report and Order and Order on Reconsideration, WC Docket 07-244 (definition of a simple port)
• FCC - Porting: Keeping Your Phone Number When You Change Providers
• FCC - Multi-Line Telephone Systems: Kari's Law and RAY BAUM's Act 911 Requirements
• PCI Security Standards Council FAQ - Are audio/voice recordings permitted to contain sensitive authentication data?
• PCI Security Standards Council - Information Supplement: Protecting Telephone-based Payment Card Data
• eCFR - 45 CFR 164.316, Policies and procedures and documentation requirements
• FINRA Rule 4511 - General Requirements (books and records)
• Cornell Legal Information Institute - 18 U.S.C. 2511