Managing Change: Strategies For Future Proofing Your Contact Center By Katrin Burton, Envox Worldwide

If you are involved with contact center operations or contact center technology, you know the environment is characterized by constant change. Regular staff turnover, continuous pressure to reduce costs and ever more demanding customers are just a few of the ongoing challenges. Some of the biggest challenges though, are on the technology side, where the pace of technological change and, therefore, the risk of technological miss-step has never been greater. ‘Speech recognition, text-to-speech and chat services are just a few of the technologies now being deployed. Still newer capabilities for the contact center are now being developed, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) or IP contact centers, presence-based contact routing, video, and Web collaboration. Can you keep pace with the changes and still enhance your relationship with your customers? The answer is, "yes", but you'll have to take some steps now to future proof your contact center.

The "Simple" Old Days
In the good old days, a company could buy a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) for their contact center, set it up, and, aside from minor updates, leave it unchanged for 10-20 years. On the application side, new capabilities were periodically added, such as call recording and workforce management solutions which were major cultural and technological changes, but operations settled pretty quickly once they were integrated with the PBX.

Conditions have changed pretty dramatically over the past few years and those stable times are gone – probably forever. Driven by the adoption of the Internet and online customer service options, today's environment is much more dynamic due to an increasing customer demand for a more seamless relationship with vendors. This is pushing contact centers into an era of what will likely be constant change as companies are forced to compete for customers based on the quality of the relationship they are able to build.