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I’ve been reviewing VoiceCon Orlando presentations, and the one that’s grabbed me the most so far is Sheila McGee-Smith’s. Sheila runs two of our contact center sessions-an executive forum on Monday afternoon with representatives from the market-leading vendors, and a Tuesday morning market review session. It’s this latter one that caught my eye.

Sheila describes the technology trends in ways that make you start to see how the multimedia, multichannel contact center may emerge. She also discusses trends on the back-end/management side. For example, one of the most important trends is in the way that reporting and analytics are coming together to improve contact center efficiency and responsiveness. Sheila bullets out five ways this is occurring:

• Making reports available across the enterprise, not just inside the contact center
• Ability to collapse data from multiple vendors
• Combining information from non-contact center sources to make reporting more relevant to enterprise issues
• Emphasis on real-time information, not just historical
• Creating role-based reports

We also had a great in-depth article on this subject by Ike Mitchell, a consultant with Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) over at our new No Jitter website, where Sheila is also a regular blogger.

What you see here is that the line between the company and the contact center is blurring. It’s become kind of a cliché to say this, but generally when people talk about The Company as Contact Center (we have a session by that name in Orlando), they tend to mean bringing enterprise resources into the contact center-the overused example is the customer service rep being able to IM a subject matter expert to help answer a caller’s question, or even transferring the call to that expert, even though the expert isn’t formally part of the contact center.

That’s good as far as it goes, but you can see that Sheila’s examples take it much farther. Namely, they hold out the promise that everyone in the enterprise who might have a need to understand contact center data can get their hands on that data, and can get it in a form that’s useful to that individual in his or her non-contact-center role. And other enterprise data can be brought into the contact center where relevant. And the idea is to deliver all of this information in real time.

The other exciting area of development that Sheila’s going to discuss at the show is video. This is another area where the hype far pre-dated any possible cost-effective application, but that may now be changing. Sheila discusses telepresence as a possible application, but it’s the smaller, client-based applications that carry the real potential. And the place to start here isn’t necessarily the desktop, but the mobile device. Sheila shows a screen shot of a CosmoCom application aimed at cell phone users, offering visual menus and video advertising to the caller on hold.

Finally, Sheila addresses the increasing tendency to lump contact centers together with Unified Communications. She does so in a pretty devastating set of bullet points that make the contrast:

• Contact centers have been around for almost 40 years
• Contact Centers are included in 30-50% of enterprise communications implementations
• Everybody is pretty clear about how contact centers are defined or what is included
• The ROI for a contact center is pretty straightforward
• Contact centers are not a fad

My one quibble is that, while I agree that the term “Unified Communications” may well turn out to be a fad, the underlying technologies and business practices won’t be. I think that eventually UC will just become C, just communications as an integral part of the technologies we use to do all of our work that requires any computing technology.

Contact centers have always been on the cutting edge of communications technology, and as Sheila demonstrates, that will continue.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Contact Centers/CRM, Management, Tech Trends, Unified Communications |

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