What should a contact center consider when selecting a voice system? Millennials see communication as much more than hearing a voice on the other end of the line. There might not be a line at all!
Contact center technology has come a long ways from the days when an agent would pick up a phone and manually dial a consumer. It has evolved from basic telecom platforms and grown with the computing industry. There were many big steps taken along the way. Computer telephony integration (CTI) gave rise to reducing call event time through screen pops and automated account handling. This gave way to new contact channels like texting, email and chat. As the Internet grew along with the ingenuity of new ways to communicate, social media has become a medium for both communication and ways to voice likes and dislikes about our service economy. Voice over IP (VoIP) shouldn’t be left out of this equation. It has given rise to making calls from your computer to more cost effective ways to centralize phone systems and dialers using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).
As all of the different ways to communicate have grown in popularity a natural extension of the first phone systems is to have a platform that provides a unified communication conduit between contact centers and their customers. True unified systems have taken time to mature and include tools that make it easier to process a call. It is a significant under taking to bring all of the channels under one platform. These include:
- Voice communications
- Click to dial using VoIP from a webpage
- Virtual hold where a customer stays in line off the phone and is called back
- Chat
- Text
- Social media including the business website, Facebook, Twitter and many others
- Work queue processing
There are many systems that have finally come of age that include all of the ways both people of the past and millennials want to communicate. It is important that any new system that is purchased includes every contact channel. If it doesn’t, an important segment of the growing consumer base will not ever “talk” to you, because they don’t want to use a “line” to talk!
Bob Kasten’s passion stems from a strong desire that he had since an early age to use his creativity to build solutions. His career has grown from starting as a programmer over 25 years ago, to managing several large IT teams. His biggest satisfaction comes from building innovative solutions that find a new ways to better manage the business processes, make IT a revenue source, reduce costs through automation or improve quality.
