The contact center market is buzzing with talk about cloud-based computing. It began with applications such as CRM from salesforce.com, then came IBM with services based on hardware in the cloud and recently vendors such as Contactual, inContact, and LiveOps have brought nearly complete contact centers into the cloud. As well, vendors such as Interactive Intelligence have announced communications in the cloud. Now I have always considered public communications to be in the cloud: How else does a telecommunications operator route a call from one part of the world to another? Likewise how does the Internet log users into websites, which are based who knows where? What Interactive Intelligence and other such vendors do is add intelligence to call-handling – they make communications smarter. For example, they add smart routing so calls can be delivered based on a predefined set of rules. This is beneficial to companies running “virtual” contact centers because a call can be routed to the location and person best qualified to handle it.
Topics: Customer Experience, CallTower, Operational Performance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM
