Webinar Event Reveals Insight into Contact Center Trends for This Year

Is your contact center ready for the challenges the New Year is bringing? Both technologically and organizationally speaking, 2012 is likely to bring some drastic changes that forward-thinking contact centers must keep up with or risk falling behind.

On Tuesday, January 31, a special web event entitled, “2012: Key Contact Center Trends and Priorities for the Upcoming Year – How You Can Be Ready," featured Forrester Research's principal analyst, Art Schoeller, and Interactive Intelligence's (News - Alert) senior vice president, Joe Staples. Together, along with a panel of guests including Don Van Doren, Founder and President of Vanguard Communications, and Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, LLC, they discussed how successful contact centers can be ready to take the best advantage of the new technologies, solutions and practices that will become more prevalent this year.

The event attracted more than 2,300 registered attendees and identified some overriding areas of importance for the contact center in 2012. These include:

• The increasing use of remote agents;
• A renewed focus on the customer experience;
• The rapid adoption of cloud solutions;
• The impact of social media;
• The incorporation of mobile devices;
• The evolution of telephone endpoint devices; and
• A new focus on primary key performance indicators.

Many of these concepts are better enabled by the continued adoption of cloud-based contact center solutions, said Interactive Intelligence's Joe Staples (News - Alert).

“As vendors successfully address top customer concerns of security, reliability and control, it's no wonder that cloud-based solutions are growing,” Staples said. “In fact, analysts forecast that over the next three to five years the market for cloud-based contact center solutions will grow at a rate of about 18 to 20 percent. Compare that to the growth of premise solutions, which is in the low single digits and forecast to plateau or even diminish over the same period.”

The delivery method still has some reaching when it comes to penetrating the contact center marketplace; a poll conducted of event attendees indicated that 58 percent of contact centers were now using cloud-based solutions.

The importance of the customer experience was also highlighted, as companies struggle to stay relevant and keep an edge over their competition.

“If there was any doubt about the importance of the customer experience, it's clear that 2012 is the year that it becomes the competitive differentiator among organizations,” said Schoeller. “It's the wise contact center manager who heeds this and develops a plan that lets customers interact from anywhere, using any device, and across all channels, especially social media platforms.” 

For listen to a recording of the event, click here.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, happening NOW in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO registration click here.

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