The Dawn of the Call Center 2.0

By: Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher, Group Editor-in-Chief,
Technology Marketing Corporation

The modern call center industry is about 25 years old, yet it remains on the forefront of customer interactions. Paradoxically, for many years, call centers have not been on the leading edge of technology or foremost in the minds of corporate management. As markets become more competitive, it is essential that call centers embrace the latest technologies to ensure they not only keep their current customers, but are well positioned to attract new ones.

This is not to say that call centers have shunned technology. On the contrary, during the past quarter century, the call center has transformed itself from an industry that managed customer relationships on index cards to an industry that utilizes the latest CRM software on state-of-the-art servers. Over the years, call centers have embraced technology when automating their inbound and outbound calling functions using ACDs, skills-based routing and auto, predictive and preview dialers.

Beginning about 15 years ago, call centers began using technologies such as CTI (computer-telephony integration) to enable better sharing of voice and data between phone systems and computer systems. Screen pop is just a single example of how call centers embraced the merging computer and telephony realms to enable agents to know who was calling before the agent said “Hello.”

In the late 1990s, VoIP (voice over IP) was born. It was heralded as a technology that would transform service providers and enterprises as well as call centers. Massive investment in VoIP (define - news - alert) took place by all of these sectors. Most of these investments ceased after the financial markets took a hit in 2001. It was at this point that the call center market stepped up and took a leadership role in VoIP deployment.

The entire call center offshoring phenomenon has occurred because call centers were able to embrace VoIP for inexpensive calling. (Routing standard long-distance calls to India or the Philippines would have been far too cost-prohibitive.) VoIP allowed organizations to locate agents wherever it made the most sense, regardless of geography. In the last few years, state-of-the-art technology has transformed the Web to Web 2.0, VoIP to VoIP 2.0 and now, naturally, the call center is able to leverage advances in its own core technologies to achieve what is coming to be known as Call Center 2.0.

For the past two decades, many innovations have helped call centers become more productive and, subsequently, generate more savings and profit for companies. In many cases, the judicious use of advanced contact center technologies has effected dramatic increases in sales volumes and customer satisfaction and retention levels in today’s customer-facing organizations.

We are now poised to begin the next evolutionary phase of the call center: from where it stands today to where it will be over the next decade. This leap will be deemed “Call Center 2.0,” and it will be the biggest change the industry has ever seen. Call Center 2.0 is not about technology only, it’s about state-of-the-art customer relations and determining the best way to put the customer first. It amounts to mass customization of customer contact — the ability to make every customer feel special — to project that your company is focused exclusively on every customer’s needs on a personalized basis.

In addition, this new way of thinking about the call center will help it evolve into the next-generation entity called the contact center, and will help us realize that our customers are really groups of communities that can benefit from interacting with one another.

In addition, Call Center 2.0 heralds full integration into the corporate supply chain and drives forward the desire to integrate analytics into customer contact. Furthermore, it allows us to mine, archive and utilize the enormous amount of data available to our contact centers so we may respond to customer needs more effectively and create true customer delight.

Furthermore, Call Center 2.0 will focus on integrating various departments in organizations using SOA or service-oriented architectures. SOA-based applications will allow unprecedented amounts of information to flow between departments in order to answer customer questions and solve problems in near real-time. It will also allow agents to make use of critical, up-to-the- minute data that can make a scenario in which a customer calls to buy an extended warranty and leaves the interaction having decided to buy a new car realistic.

Video will play a huge part of Call Center 2.0. Call centers will implement and use video solutions to increase the customer service levels of phone calls. In some cases, conversations will be two-way video-enabled. In other instances, the benefits of using video calls will be so obvious that all call centers will scramble to show their agents’ faces to customers. Video kiosks will be an integral part of Call Center 2.0, allowing companies to put a virtual video call center anywhere they like. Sony can put such a kiosk in the stores of an electronics retailer, and Weight Watchers can put them in supermarkets. Some ATMs will become video-enabled, allowing bank tellers in call centers to answer questions for customers around-the-clock.

Call centers will embrace client-based VoIP, striking deals with companies such as Skype, Vonage and others. Call centers will go up-market with VoIP, allowing their customers to speak with agents in higher fidelity, with stereo and surround sound. VoIP will become a service differentiator. Call Center 2.0 will be speech-enabled, allowing customers to do their business via automation if they choose. They can seamlessly transfer to a live agent in the middle of the transaction, if needed, and then revert back to automation once again. Call Center 2.0 will use SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) endpoints, allowing more flexibility and interoperability. In addition, there will be enhanced presence use to determine when the best agents are available in an organization.

Essentially, SIP will allow all workers in a company to become call center agents. Call Center 2.0 will allow organizations to build vast, virtual and geographically distributed contact centers around the globe using the best workers for the task at hand. Also, it will allow callers to schedule callbacks online with ease, and will enable callers to view wait times online before they place a call.

Some of the technologies that make up Call Center 2.0 exist today, and every company needs to explore and discover the combination of concepts and technologies that will help them continue to both exceed customer expectations and attract new customers. Technologies such as AJAX, mash ups and just-in-time communications will soon be embraced by many organizations in their customer-facing applications. The companies that deploy Call Center 2.0 technology early will be well positioned to travel light years ahead of their competition.