Four factors that will transform your call center: Are you ready for the change?

It seems incredible to me that in the 18 years since this magazine started publishing in 1982, the call center market has been one of the fastest growing segments of our economy! Every year, a bevy of new companies, products and technologies are introduced to the industry media and, of course, your call centers.

The most important recent technology that call center decision makers need to keep track of is Internet telephony or IP (Internet Protocol) telephony. Internet telephony typically implies that telephony is traveling over the Internet and IP telephony implies telephony traveling over any network that is based on the Internet protocol such as an Intranet or your corporate LAN.

Coincidentally, I am also Group Publisher of INTERNET TELEPHONY(R) magazine and this gives me a unique perspective of the voice and data convergence market and how it affects your call center. Internet telephony in your call center makes a tremendous amount of sense because call centers are so telephony centric. Efficiencies that a traditional office enjoys through automation are increased exponentially in a call center due to enormous calling volumes.

My first hint of IP telephony creeping into the call center came to me when I met representatives from a company called CellIT (www .cellit.com) a few years back and witnessed their ACD based on ATM, a networking technology that was designed from its inception to handle voice and video. Other companies such as PakNetX (www.paknetx.com) released IP telephony call center solutions that were software-only products.

So, you may be thinking, every week there are hundreds of new press releases announcing call center products from Web-based ACD monitoring tools to Javabased agent interfaces to CRM solutions that can consolidate a companies sales, marketing and customer service functions into a single solution. Why are these two companies so special?

These companies' products are just precursors to a much bigger snapshot of the call center's evolution. In the last few months, four things have happened that convinced me that the call center market will never be the same - we are set for a transformation.

1) Cisco Buys GeoTel: Two years ago, Cisco could hardly even spell telephony and now, almost out of nowhere, it is the biggest threat that Lucent and Nortel have ever faced. As a result of Cisco's entry into the voice market, Lucent and Nortel have collectively spent over 30 billion dollars to acquire data communications companies. Cisco's first push into telephony was by IP telephony-enabling its routers; it then purchased Selsius Systems, an IP-PBX or voice/data switch vendor. With its purchase of GeoTel, Cisco is now able to leverage its expertise in service provider and corporate telephony into the call center. It has the power to establish new standards almost overnight and can easily leverage existing products and distribution channels to get into your call center.

2) The response to the Live, Blended Multimedia Call Center at CTI(TM) EXPO in May of this year: By far, the most interest in any booth I have ever seen at any trade show this year was the interest paid to CellIT's live call center. In conjunction with a host of partners, CellIT demonstrated why the future of call centers is based on ATM as well as IP telephony technology. Please see the CTI(TM) EXPO sidebar for details.

3) Intel has just purchased Dialogic: Dialogic makes the voice and fax boards for the majority of ACDs, predictive dialers and fax servers in our market. Recently, Microsoft decided to make Dialogic's CT Media an industry standard and in addition, purchased a portion of Dialogic. A few weeks ago, Intel decided to purchase Dialogic and this will mean that the CTI market and call center market as a whole will grow more quickly through the more rapid adoption of open standards and programming interfaces. For more information on CT Media, please see my "High Priority!" column in the May 1999 issue of C@LL CENTER Solutions(TM) or visit www.tmcnet.com/articles/ccsmag/0599/0599hip ri.htm. For more information on the Intel/Dialogic purchase, please see my "Publisher's Outlook" in the July issue of CTI(R) or visit www.tmcnet.com/articles/ctimag/0799/0799pubout.com.

4) Recent conversations with Microsoft have alluded to the fact that Microsoft is extremely interested in getting more involved in the call center market: Microsoft's greater involvement in the industry increases the visibility of the call center market and means that we can expect more companies to get involved with producing call center products and as a result we can look forward to more industry-standard, less expensive products.

So we can expect the second half of 1999 and the next millennium to be filled with innovations and more efficient technologies brought on by the integration of IP telephony into the call center. If you are planning any call center telecom hardware purchases, you really must keep up with the latest IP telephony technology as it relates to your call center and customer relationship management.

BY RICH TEHRANI, GROUP PUBLISHER, TECHNOLOGY MARKETING CORPORATION

Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation Jul 1999
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