Customer contact forms an integral part of virtually every organization's business strategy. Well-planned contact center automation is a valuable tool that is increasingly helping companies to differentiate themselves from the competition.

A contact center's core interaction technologies include the automatic call distributor, self-service application, predictive dialer as well as email and chat capabilities. These core interaction technologies are themselves supported by a number of additional technologies such as quality, performance, and analytics management, which are designed to help the business improve its processes and find the balance it needs for efficiency and effectiveness. These technologies are the primary vehicles through which many customer-company interactions take place before reaching an agent.

Perhaps more important, businesses need to look at the way these systems work together. A solution that has applications, which are inherently designed to work together as a single product, is the answer for every contact center that has been subjected to the tyranny of integration.

Unifying Solutions
To meet the escalating demand of empowered consumers, one trend, which is seen today, is that businesses are going for unified contact center solutions. A unified solution provides all elements required to run a comprehensive multimedia contact center-automatic call distribution (ACD), predictive dialing, speech self service, Internet contact via email or chat, recording, and logging and quality management, all with unified reporting, routing and administration, within a single platform. This helps increase flexibility reduce complexity, lower costs, inspire customer loyalty, and enhance productivity.

Enterprises are looking closely at VoIP technologies for their contact centers. It opens a number of new and exciting opportunities enabling increased interoperability and flexibility that is not available with traditional telephone systems. The technology vendor is recognizing this importance and offering unified IP which reduces complexity by uniting automated call distribution (ACD), predictive dialing, speech-enabled voice portal, email management, Web chat and collaboration, workflow management, recording and quality management.

Solutions through Speech
Another area that is emerging is the acceptance of speech recognition solutions. Speech recognition solutions have really matured in the last several years and we are beginning to see a significant uptake in the number of customers that are leveraging this technology in their contact centers. According to a market survey conducted by Aspect Software, especially for the Apac market, two in five contact centers in Asia are using quality monitoring systems, workforce management and analytics applications. Three in five contact centers are likely to invest in technology over the next twelve months, with key areas of focus being CRM, VoIP, CTI, and workforce management solutions. Thirty-two percent of Indian contact centers are currently using an ASP, while a further 32% is considering adopting one in the near future. Usage of VoIP in India and the Philippines is high and expected to reach 78% and 65% penetration rates, respectively, over the next two years.

SIP & Presence
There is an increasing acceptance of standard-based applications. Open standards are particularly valuable to contact centers because they provide a common platform upon which computer hardware and software can “speak” to one another. They deliver increased compatibility between components and enable true interoperability. Other technology breakthroughs are Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Presence. SIP is quickly evolving into the underlying technology for converged communication. SIP can support any type of communication session whether it is voice, video, or instant messaging. Presence, the same underlying technology that drives all the chat engines like MSN Messenger and AOL Chat, is one of the exciting applications of SIP. It allows you to locate a user and determine their availability to communicate via phone, email/text, or video. Both people and applications can use Presence information, providing the opportunity to integrate communications into business processes.

Wired Infrastructure
As long as the call center remains premise dependent, wired infrastructure will provide a better RoI. But, in the emerging paradigm of “contact management at the edges,” wireless devices and infrastructure would offer greater agility and flexibility.

Security is Important
As companies from every vertical industry are becoming more aware of the need to carefully monitor information security levels, security scans and audits are becoming a regular practice. Intended to identify all possible risks within a specific software application, scans and audits are a critical, unbiased way to help organizations determine whether or not the technology solutions meet industry standards for secure system and information management and to what extent changes need to be made to secure your environment. Working closely with the technology vendors, the goal of the information security audit is a simple one-to ensure organizations achieve the highest level of security available working within the framework of their business environment.

Additionally, the vendor should be willing to work with the organization to identify any customized support practices needed to ensure that the remote support access solution works within your corporate guidelines.

Improved IVR
In today's fast-paced world, customers want immediate and accurate assistance. When they call your company, they expect their call to be answered quickly and their problem to be resolved promptly. Well-implemented speech self-service system (IVR) can actually help you satisfy and retain your customers by allowing them to get the information they want, when they want it, without having to hold for assistance. IVR technology has advanced significantly over the last few years, and features such as text-to-speech, speech recognition and speaker verification now make it possible to create powerful self-service applications that allow customers to conveniently conduct business in ways that earlier IVR technology couldn't support. With the mass adoption of mobility and XML standards, we will see the proliferation of VUI (Voice User Interface) as an alternate to GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Time to Dwell Deeper
Call centers, as they were known before and as they are evolving today, have been in the frontline of customer acquisition and retention for enterprises with a large number of retail customers. Enterprises use call centers as an extended unit of their customer interaction process and to this effect, they should look for convergence of process, people, and technology investments to enhance business value.

Increasingly, contact center managers will wish to purchase much, or all, of their contact center infrastructure from a single source. Companies fitting the “early adopter” profile are presently looking at innovations in the areas of SIP, SOA, mobility, and rich presence and collaboration technologies. Companies fitting the “mainstream” and “late adopter” profiles are increasingly looking at virtual (distributed) contact center deployment, centralized infrastructure models, Web- and speech-integrated voice portals, and hosted and managed deployment models to support the desire to balance cost reduction and improved service initiatives.

Innovation is important and is a key to success for every business. In recent times, market disruptions precede technology innovation, and the evolving customer needs drive innovation by the ecosystem of vendors and service providers. Vendors should make a strategy through their earlier experience and focus to create innovative contact center solutions today that enable customers to meet key business objectives.

Wait for the Future
The industry is witnessing a transformation through the glass of Web 2.0 and the fusion of voice, data, and video on to an IP network. Therefore, the solutions approach could be telephony-enabled Web or Web-enabled telephony, depending on the incumbent technology infrastructure. In either of these, the end goal is to measure the effectiveness of customer interaction process through levels of customer experience. Vendors are continuously working on these lines so that companies around the world can have greater control, flexibility and scalability through SIP-based VoIP contact center solutions while also leveraging their existing technology investments.

Kumar Anshuman
anshumank@cybermedia.co.in