I got an email from a vendor today, a very typical research type of email asking for my thoughts on general trends: "Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories is curious, what does a contact center technology reporter/editor such as yourself think are the critical business issues facing contact centers today?" I went ahead and answered it, but then I realized that though I like the folks at Genesys, they shouldn't have a monopoly on my thinking on such a broad subject. So here, basically, is what I told them:

1. Collaboration and communication between the call center management and the rest of the organization, particularly IT, HR and finance. Issues of culture and turf come into play, but are exacerbated by differences in the kinds of metrics each wing of the business finds meaningful; there are communication gaps all over. Add to that a lack of clear understanding of the center's role, and the varying criteria for "success" and you have a mess.

2. Analytics and measurement technologies that rely on activity from the switch, hence that are derived from call handling stats, instead of measures that are based on real value of customers, profits, revenues, etc. Flawed metrics play into the communications gap in 1, above.

3. Lack of understanding inside the center of the importance of agents to the health of the customer relationship. Most companies don't know how to assign a value to the customer relationship except on a broad scale; and hence don't know how to quantify the cost/value/profit potential innate in each interaction. So they also don't know how to prioritize resources to their most important customers, and don't know how to allocated call center resources (training, etc.) to agents that are most likely to facilitate longer customer tenure, cross- or up-sell opportunities, and the like.

Does anyone have any more pressing issues? I think these three are pretty key, but I'd be interested in hearing from people who think this is way off. Note, also that the question was phrased to ask about business issues - I deliberately answered it that way, leaving aside some pure technology issues that I know people are wrestling with, like the deployment of IP.