Technology Gets Practical
1 Nov, 2004
By: Dan CoenA Practical Guide to Call Center Technology
Technology is today’s savior. It has provided the means by which customers and organizations can team together to identify complaints, form relationships, answer questions and complete transactions. Best of all, great technology saves organizations money and improves processes. Think about your relationship with any business: From the first email or telephone call throughout the entire process, hasn’t technology guided the experience in some fashion?
Andrew J. Waite’s A Practical Guide to Call Center Technology has the most information, resources and ideas in one book to help management oversee its contact center’s technology and workflow that I have ever read. It is a giant book (497 pages) of anything and everything about systems, ranging from the challenge of integrating the Internet into the contact center to purchasing the correct ACD package in order to gather data and reporting.
Waite nailed the premise of his book when he quoted the great Confucian curse “May you live interesting times!” And Waite sums it up early when he states, “We are entering a sea change in connection technology that is bringing a shift from separate telephone, data networks and address identification for physical delivery, to telephony and data converging into a single Internet-protocol-based voice and data network, broadly described as the Internet.”
Because of the Internet, the world has shifted. Most of those old platforms offering phenomenal technology disappeared. Now, organizations have the ability to use such Internet-based systems as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to communicate via the telephone and severely reduce telephone call expenses. High quality call monitoring that is recorded and stored on the Internet is today’s hot topic. Contact center management can listen to any call, anywhere, at any time, using an Internet connection and a password. No more storage difficulties, no more platforms that force monitoring to occur via the telephone or on-site. Perhaps the greatest Internet revolution of them all is outbound predictive dialing and inbound call routing via virtual systems provided on the Internet. No longer is hardware required—the Internet can execute ACD and CTI for contact centers using the Internet as the engine. And things keep changing!
This book blends these technologies and other systems, together. But, there is a caveat worth exploring. Waite articulates that, even with new Internet-based packages, it is the core “plumbing” that really matters most to your contact center. Sure, new technologies will fly every day. Some will stick while most disappear. But the plumbing is essential to building a first-rate contact center. Management, IT professionals, even customers must understand why they need something and how it is to work long before they attempt to utilize it simply because of its coolness. They must recognize whether what they want is doable for their contact center and their industry. This insight to buying the right systems is more important than just buying systems because it appears to be the right thing to do.
The basics of what a business organization needs to competitively impact its customers, to help employees thrive daily, and to capture and assess and recommend data will never change. All the glitz and glamour in the world does not alter the fact that core competencies will dominate contact center operations into the foreseeable future. Those, and other staples, are the responsibility of human beings to understand. Technology simply provides the information.
A Practical Guide to Call Center Technology is a solid read. I like those books that allow the reader to jump chapters without missing a beat, finding topics that truly interest the reader, and that is certainly the case here. Two special notes I found of valuable interest: First, enclosed in the book are several ready-to-use Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that were done very well and provide an excellent guide for contact center management. Second, the glossary in the book is priceless. That, itself, should be a required read for any contact center executive looking to learn more about technology and systems.
