The changing marketplace is quickly bringing about new technologies for communication including e-mail, Twitter, and SMS. Increasingly, consumers are moving to these new mediums and expecting businesses to do the same. Staying on top of these fast growing channels of communication can provide an edge to the contact center of the future.
Roughly 85% of generation Y is already using a smartphone as their main tool of communication. This gives them access to not only voice, but SMS and other text based communications such as e-mail and various forms of social media.
Integrating non-traditional forms of communication into an Asterisk based contact center can be difficult, but the rewards can be great. A single agent that was once able to answer only a single phone call at a time, can now respond to multiple non-verbal mediums simultaneously. This reduces overall handle time and increases the number of contacts a single agent can handle. Responding to clients in their chosen medium will also help improve their impression of the customer service.
Traditional telephony ACD will still be a necessity to handle the more complex interactions, but is looking less likely to be the first point of interaction as the marketplace evolves. Calling will likely shift from inbound to outbound, as agents proactively respond to these types of inquiries.
These changes have the potential to transform the industry from call centers with many low skilled agents into a contact center with a handful of highly skilled agents. To leverage these changes, the new Q-Suite 6.0 offers full integration for both email and Twitter, with plans to include SMS and other non-traditional mediums in the future. Agents will have the ability to multitask multiple non-realtime channels, while still being able to take inbound calls from a queue or dial a client directly.