At Call Centre Expo we asked a range of Straw Polls of people that we met at the show. One of the most pertinent questions was about how you see the future of the call centre industry.

We got a range of interesting replies which we have published on the website
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5154&Itemid=65

We are keen to see if there are any other ideas that you may have about how the industry will develop.

For me, the most important thing is going to be the growth of open source technologies, and the pressure this will put on suppliers to stop re-inventing the wheel and to provide innovative solutions instead.

Many years ago telephone systems were sold to call centres based upon how efficient they were at actually switching traffic - now it's taken for granted. It's all about intelligence and integration.

Some, such as Aspect, have already noted this and are making their solutions available on an open source platform. Dropping telephony from a product is quite a move for a telephony company that also aquired many other telephony companies.

Regards,
Darryl

Two things that should happen.

1) Call centres will stop worrying about technology and start worrying about the customer.

2) As a consequence of (1), the call centre will shrink back into the business and become, once again, part of the core flow of providing value to a customer, instead of being a seperate part of the enterprise.

Developing a more age diverse workforce by implementing policies and initiatives that enable them to value the experience, maturity, reliability and steadfastness that older employees bring.

I'm with the BT view on this one:User friendly technologies should increasingly allow for the simple,mundane and repetitive calls coming into the contact centre to be automated.

The role of the human advisor is transformed into a relationship builder,a complex problem solver and guide who empathises with the customer rather than someone simply processing calls.With calls getting more complex, customers expect to get an advisor that can help them.(www.btplc.com/innovation)

User friendly technologies should increasingly allow for the simple,mundane and repetitive calls coming into the contact centre to be automated.

It's not very often you see "User friendly" and "automated" in the same sentence.

Perhaps that's another change we'll see - those two phrases sitting happily together.

I still struggle to analyze where automated technology is going to go. Takeup has been poor in most areas, although there's been some killer apps where the business has taken very easy operations and automated them. (A lot of businesses try to take the really complicated stuff, as it takes so much time).

Perhaps part of the problem is that as individuals we don't like change much, and the conversion to automated systems has to be taken one small step at a time.

Its amazing when you look at how far enabling technology has come in the last "few" years though - it doesn't seem so long ago that an ACD was as good as it got and then "state of the art" was a poor IVR system....roll on 2010!