Web 2.0: Federating The Contact Center

[Podcast]
Contact centers are not going to disappear, however, the idea that the contact center is treated as a separate entity from the rest of the enterprise is going away. This week I was asked about what trends I thought were emerging in customer service. I told him I thought Web 2.0 was one of the most relevant trends in this area. Gauging by his reaction, I am pretty sure that wasn't the answer he was expecting. So I set forth to explain my position.

Look at the messaging the major industry players are marketing these days. It's all centered around the idea of extending the ownership of the customer experience to include knowledge workers. The trend is towards a federation of contact center functions and enterprise functions (If some of this sounds familiar, we started this conversation earlier in the year in the blog, Creating a UC Folksonomy. This builds on that initial thought...).

The way some of the vendors are approaching this is by creating greater ties between contact center applications and unified communications. Proof point - Microsoft recently made an equity investment in Aspect (a leading contact center vendor). The press release talked about extending the contact center functions via UC and Microsoft's OCS platform. In fact, Aspect's new marketing slogan is "Unified Communications for the Contact Center". Cisco and Avaya are also taking similar approaches.

However, I think it's going to take more than just UC to accomplish this. Its got to go beyond just connecting with a resident expert who happens to be sitting in a branch office or mobile environment. For end customers to see value in this model it's going to have to involve a highly coordinated, collaborative effort to create sustainable value. This will take two things core to the Universal Collaboration concept (remember that Universal Collaboration=Web 2.0+UC): a connected workspace (per last week's blog) and a strategy that stretches beyond the boundaries of the traditional enterprise. It needs to include an organization's ecosystem (business partners, technology partners, suppliers, contractors and consultants). This goes back to the conversation around traversing trust boundaries/firewalls from a few weeks back...integrating UC capabilities from different corporate domains, federating presence from disparate collaboration platforms, seamlessly integrating on premise and on demand/Saas applications, etc.

A funny little story related to this topic is that in 2003 a colleague and I collaborated on a paper that proposed the idea of using UC to extend the management of customer relationships to the knowledge worker. At the time, senior management thought it was a ridiculous idea that would never catch on, yet here we are and it only took 5 years!

What role do you think Web 2.0 and UC will play in the future of customer service? How will the contact center look in five years?