In 2004, we had a client with a call center in Northern New Brunswick. For a dozen seats, he required thousands of dollars in telephony equipment, including the Pika board required to wire in the multiple incoming telephone channels, CTI server and a server to manage the leads and agent interaction. A few years later, and after a downturn in the economy, he was able to repurpose the equipment. He moved it to his basement, kept a few call center seats there, and used DSL to connect to a SIP provider. If he were to start today, he wouldn’t need the telephony card, the servers, and the wiring. He could start in his basement, using the Cloud, and only move to an outside office when his growth demanded.
A lot of people don’t understand what exponential means. You might think it means a lot. It’s more than that. Moore’s law says that the number of components on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. What that means is an astounding performance boost in hardware every couple of years. It also means that the capacity of the Cloud is ever increasing. Where it would have been highly impractical to host a call center in the Cloud in 2004, it’s astonishingly easy today. What’s tough today will be routine tomorrow, and trivial in a few years. Software as a Service is becoming routine.
What does that mean for your call center and the contact center technology it’s using? Great things, for sure. Capabilities are improving. Costs are dropping. It’s easier to get quality software like Asterisk running on the Cloud. APIs make it easier to incorporate contact center features into the software you’re using today. And it just gets better. As hardware improves, you can easily upgrade the hardware. As software improves, you get the benefit. What will be possible in two years? Who knows? Better speech recognition for sure. Additional logic for routing calls to the right party? Freedom to run your call center remotely? From the beachfront? Remote agents working from convenient locations? Well, those are already here.