Technological changes have dramatically impacted the cost of doing business in the call center industry. The World Wide Web (WWW) and Internet Protocol (IP), evolution of next generation call center software, as well as advances in hardware and open source development, have unleashed unparalleled change that has significantly altered the industry. The importance of contact centers industry have grown due to global e-commerce. The sophistication and capabilities of the contact center technology platform have increased exponentially, while the cost per seat has gone down annually.
Contact center industry is presented with an opportunity to use changes in technology as a prime driver for healthy ROI. Factors driving this opportunity include paradigm shifts in telecommunications, cloud computing data centers, the availability of robust computing hardware at reasonable price, as well as open source and open architecture systems. The telecommunication capabilities of the contact center technology platform have been substantially improved by the emergence of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as a credible Voice over IP (VoIP) protocol, as well as the availability of Asterisk, a mature, feature-rich and robust open source telephony platform. As a result, call center deployments have become distributed, taking advantage of cost efficiencies in infrastructure, labor and telecom. We already see innovative call centers utilizing new, advanced technology to support such distributed and hosted operations; operations where the call center infrastructure is consolidated in an easy to manage location and the agents are capable of working from multiple geographic locations and from home. Read our white paper which provides a detailed insight into the technology aspects of contact center technology platform selection.