| | December 20148CIOReviewNew Technologies Poised to Impact Contact CentersBy John Burton, Director Product Management, SAP It's no secret that contact centers have historically been where old technology went to die. Walk into the wrong contact center and you'll find bargain-bin computer systems and equipment that you didn't know was still in existence, much less actually being used anymore. It can be a bit like strolling through a museum of computer history. "Oh look, there's one of those big computers that sit under your desk. Wow, it has dual CD-ROM drives. And check out that 15'' green-screen CRT monitor. What is that, like 60 Hz refresh rate?" Browsing around, you might think you just walked into an abandoned Radio Shack in the 1990s. Sadly, most call center reps have better technology in the dashboards of their cars than they do on their contact-center desktops. The standard-issue Ford Fusion airport car rental comes equipped with Bluetooth integration that connects directly to your smartphone, allowing you to make calls, play music, or pull up driving directions with your voice--without clicking a button. Whereas the trouble-ticketing software used in the typical contact center may require twenty or more mouse clicks just to open and respond to a single customer email. And forget about trying to control your typical help-desk software with your voice. "Computer, open next email." Yeah, right! What do you think your expensive CRM software system is, Siri? Ironically, your contact-center reps can probably do a lot more with their iPhone than they can with your contact-center software. The US military has software that lets pilots fly multi-million dollar jets just using their mind. And your seven year-old neighbor kid has an Xbox 360 Kinect that allows him to play video games just using hand and body gestures. But your contact center reps still need to pound on their keyboard and click their mouse furiously to get anything done.All right, so it might be another few years (or few hundred years) until motion-sensing input devices and voice control make their way into contact-center software allowing your reps to answer calls like Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise characters. But fortunately, you still can take advantage of some other slightly-less-cool technology that has finally trickled down from the military and video game industry into the contact center market. Everyone knows (or should already know) about basic things like IP Telephony and Cloud/SaaS delivery models that have been around for decades. But here are three other cool new contact-center technologies that might be able to turn your contact center reps into sci-fi movie stars.Avatars No, not the Hollywood sci-fi movie; the other kind of avatars. Imagine if you in myopinion | | December 20148CIOReview
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