After several years of retrenchment and economic malaise, it may seem like the call center industry is in the doldrums, with mature and well-tested technologies taking the lion's share of the attention and purchasing dollars.

That may be true, but with the economy looking a little better, we can look over the horizon and see that several interesting developments are coming our way. Tools that have flash and panache are moving from the realm of marketing hype into the hands of early adopters. From there, it's just a short leap before they become the technology of the every day.

So as we turn the calendar, it seems a good time to explore the world of the future: those next-gen technologies we hear so much about that still aren't pervasive in call centers yet. But that every manager will have to know about over the next few purchasing cycles.

IP In the Center

By far the most talked-about set of next-gen tools is Voice-over-IP. Does it have a place in call centers? Yes. Is there a consensus about what that place is, and how it will be used? No.

There seem to be two emerging camps that have different views of how IP will make itself felt in the center.

There are the cost-cutters, who look to an IP telecom infrastructure because it has the promise of a significantly lower total cost of ownership over the product lifecycle. The combined cost of build out and premise equipment can be much lower than traditional agent equipment, especially when you replace desk phones with PC softphones and headsets.

Cost cutting is also the driver behind the wildly popular offshoring movement, and IP is taking center stage in that arena. IP can reduce the still-high cost of moving US telephone traffic halfway around the world and back.

In the second camp are those whose goal is to convert the contact center from a cost-center, isolated from core business and strategy, to a profit-center with deep filial connections to product/service development, sales, executive management and other departments. For these users, IP offers more tenuous benefits.

Instead of focusing on how IP makes the cost of running calls across networks cheaper, they have to find the benefits in how the merging of data and voice networks allows for more interesting applications that run atop that infrastructure. And the questions then multiply: how does IP enable better practices through enhanced recording, workforce management, agent retention, quality assurance and other more progressive tools.

Whichever camp you fall into, there are emerging tools that attempt to make the case for IP in the call center.

Altigen (Fremont, CA) makes the AltiServ phone system, a PC-based PBX upon which they've been marketing a "pro-grade" set of contact center solutions. Latest in the series is AltiContact Manager (ACM). The ACM system was designed to support inbound, outbound or blended contact centers and is targeted at contact centers of 12 to 500 agents.

It's a turnkey IP hardware/software system that supports up to 128 active agents on a single chassis - up to 500 active agents in a multiple chassis or distributed implementation. Some customers use the system's IP trunking capability to tie together multiple centers, and a few are using the product to tie call centers together with upstream vendors, in innovative supply-chain enhanced communications scenarios.

NEC (Irving, TX) makes IP available in every NEAX call center system as well as the choice to run TDM or IP on a per station basis. On top of that, they've just come out with an app called Global Navigator 5.0, a monitoring solution for tracking call activity and agent performance across single or multiple contact center operations.

It includes Infocast, a real-time information delivery solution that sends critical contact center statistics to a small window at the agent's workstation.

You can have your IP as part of the regular TDM switch, or you can go a more adventurous route and engage an all-IP contact center system that supports telephone, Web chat, Web voice, Web video, Web collaboration, e-mail and voice mail in one high capacity, high availability, multi-tenant platform - that would be the CosmoCall Universe system, from CosmoCom (Melville, NY).

CosmoCall Universe is a complete, unified contact center suite that includes ACD, IVR, CTI, predictive dialing, multimedia recording and a complement of powerful management applications. Network Service Providers use CosmoCall Universe to offer hosted Contact Center On-Demand solutions to their end-user customers.

The Next-Gen Agent

Once you get past the question of whether (and when) IP has a place in your center, you can start to wonder what you'll do with all that fantastic capability. The answer lies with the agents you employ.

Agent skills, call blending, and multimedia have become a routine part of many centers' routing pictures. Today's most advanced workforce management software deals with scheduling, plus the logistics of communicating with the workforce providing analytical components for projecting solutions, optimization components for making intra-day adjustments, and interactive/feedback tools for notifying agents and supervisors of schedules, changes, and expectations.

Underlying that analytical strata, though, is the layer of recording technology that provides the raw material for your WFM cruncher.

Call recording exposes the strengths and weaknesses of agents, managers, policies and tools, giving you information you need to engineer and advocate for changes in how the work is done. In a modern center, just recording the voice isn't adequate; you also have to know what the agent is doing with the keyboard and mouse.

While recording "everything" is wasteful and potentially confusing, the next generation of technology is going to provide more sophisticated algorithms for choosing what is recorded, saved and analyzed.

In addition, the recording methodology is expanding its reach beyond the traditional voice-based interaction.

Recording tools are beginning to morph into tools that do more than grab data and track its path. Some are becoming full-featured suites that aim to deliver analytical information (on a more "meta" level) to people who are in a position to do something with it.

Case in point, Dictaphone's (Stratford, CT) ContactPoint solution. The ContactPoint Workforce Relationship Management system focuses inward toward the agent workforce, recognizing that no matter how much technology and process apply to customer interactions; ultimately, it is the quality of the contact between the agents and customers that has the biggest impact on customer retention.

The centerpiece is a competency model that enables contact centers to create job profiles that outline the skills, knowledge and abilities that agents need to be successful. These job profiles can be linked to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), or goals that agents are expected to achieve.

The ContactPoint solution systematically applies these competencies to the contact center's recruiting, training, and assessment activities. Agents are pre-screened and recruited based on the specific skills, knowledge and abilities that are required for the job.

Aspect's (San Jose, CA) new UnIPhi architecture has cleverly built a platform that leverages one set of features and apps that extend to serve PSTN, hybrid PSTN/IP and all-IP voice infrastructure. The evolving UnIPhi stack provides integrations for tried-and-true apps, while addressing telephony infrastructure from Aspect, Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, Cisco, Shoreline and other providers.

Aspect Performance Optimization runs on a PC integrated to various contact center components across the LAN. This module's key is its ability to "drill down" into center metrics and show in real time how the center's performance got that way in the moment, rather than days later when the data analysts have figured it out. It also pushes this performance information down to agents and supervisors, empowering them to manage their performance (and pay) in the moment.