It’s a natural human tendency to see progress from a linear perspective in which advances happen at a steady and predictable pace. Yet, increasingly, this is no longer the case.

Throughout the world, many developments are now occurring at an exponential rate. They might start slowly, but after a short period their evolution takes on a pace that’s hard to comprehend.

A great example is the Human Genome Project which began the task of fully sequencing human DNA in 2003. Seven years into the project only one percent of the three billion base-pairs that constitute human DNA had been sequenced, and experts predicted it would take around 700 years to complete the entire task.

In reality, however, completion took less than seven more years and, today, a human genome can be sequenced in just a few hours. This is an example of the power of exponential progress.

The pace of technology
Aside from the life sciences, exponential change is most evident in information technology. In a trend that can be traced back to Moore’s Law, the power of computer chips is doubling every two years. Meanwhile the cost of data storage is falling while the capacities of communication networks are rising – all exponentially.

A key driver in this trend is the fact that everything is becoming information. When things become information, they can be manipulated and transmitted in ways that change all the rules. In the business world, the implications of this change are staggering.

Businesses that are in a position to leverage information are able to gain a significant competitive advantage over those that are not. Physical assets and capital expenditures are increasingly becoming liabilities rather than a benefit to a business. It’s information and the ability to use it that is key.

The bottom line is that every business is at risk of being disrupted by these dramatic advances and changes. Uber is a disruptor in the transportation sector, Bitcoin in finance, Amazon in retail, and Tesla in the automotive space. Disruption has become the new normal.

Disruption in the contact centre
This increasing pace of disruption is also happening in the contact centre. Here, the operators that succeed in the future will be those that embrace this disruption rather than fight it.

The following are key areas in which disruption can assist the contact centre:

• Shifting to the cloud

Shifting IT systems and resources from in-house data centres to cloud-based platforms is a disruptive step that can deliver big benefits. It simplifies the entire contact centre architecture and removes many impediments to change as capacity can be scaled up and down quickly as required.

It also improves security as a single physical location can be more easily secured than a dispersed infrastructure housed across multiple locations. The cloud provider assumes responsibility for everything from security software patches to locks on doors.

A cloud platform also facilitates the collection of large amounts of data, which can then be analysed to identify new trends and business opportunities, giving a business a significant competitive advantage.

• Opening new channels of communication with customers

Today customers expect more than just phone conversations when interacting with a contact centre agent. They are keen to use email, web chat and even social media, and want to do as much as possible from their favourite mobile device.

While much attention is given to the omnichannel contact centre, customer desire is taking this to the next level: multimodal interactions. This recognises that a customer may want to use more than one communication method in the course of a single interaction – think seamlessly moving from a web chat to a video session with screen sharing.

Further personalising these multimodal interactions are virtual reality tools, which are fast maturing.

• Going beyond data analytics

Exponential development in the field of computational power and artificial intelligence (AI) also has the potential to assist in the contact centre. AI tools – machine learning in particular – can be put to work to proactively identify problems and recognise trends in large amounts of data, achieving insights that human beings simply cannot.

Taking this a step further is deep learning, which is based on a set of algorithms that model very high-level abstractions from huge data sets using sophisticated methods of self-learning.

• Using collaboration technology inside the contact centre

With customer service now the job of every employee, the convergence of customer engagement and collaboration technologies is inevitable.

Think how valuable it would be for a contact centre to have subject-specific chat rooms that include agents and business users to far more quickly address specific customer issues? And from this same application, imagine if an agent could quickly look up a subject matter expert and send an instant message to receive real-time assistance, thus avoiding a transferred call or call back?

Conclusion

It’s clear that if businesses embrace rather than resist disruptive trends, they will position themselves for future growth.

For contact centres, disruptions such as cloud computing and AI present significant opportunities to improve internal operations and boost customer service levels. Disruption has become the new normal.

ABOUT BRENDAN MAREE//

Brendan Maree is the senior vice president Australia, New Zealand and Japan for call centre technologies and software solutions provider Interactive Intelligence.

Cloud computing has quickly established its rightful place in modern IT organisations, helping enterprises become more agile while keeping close watch on costs. As a new mainstream appeal, the new delivery model has proven its stripes with applications like messaging, storage and CRM.

Now, technology innovators are applying what they learned.

Cloud service delivery has hit critical mass, with the majority of organisations already riding the wave. With that adoption, enterprises have become more comfortable with this innovative service delivery model and their newfound confidence in paving the way to exciting new cloud opportunities. The next big wave of cloud-bound application is business communications. A majority of companies have started to bring business communications into the cloud as they are seeing business benefits and gaining a healthy ROI with the migration.

Cloud service delivery has become more than a novel new way to deploy applications. Since its inception, it has evolved quite quickly into a strategic detective for many companies. It is a way for companies to focus on their core business, offloading IT management to trusted third parties.

With all the early-adopter barriers crumbling, it has effectively become a new way of life for IT organisations.

Interest growing
In an attempt to uncover just how ingrained that new way of life has become, IDG Research Services queried approximately 150 technology and business leaders across a range of industries. The research determined that 81 percent of responding companies are indeed already using or planning to use cloud-based applications. One application that is cresting the adoption wave is business communications.

The function includes business-essential applications, such as inbound and outbound call centre automation, IP PBX, interactive voice response and more. In general, many have indicated that business communications applications are a good fit for cloud delivery. Cloud delivery is applicable across the whole spectrum of business communications – from basic PBX functionality to sophisticated call centre technology.

BUSINESS VALUE FOR ALL
The momentum behind bringing communications into the cloud is a testament to the value it brings to the enterprise – from the IT organisation to the business and on to the customers.

The IT organisation
From an IT perspective, moving communications to the cloud creates day-to-day impact. Primary benefits of the service delivery model include reduced IT staff requirements and faster deployment. For example, the IT department in an organisation can hand off the burden of a cloud-based IP PBX, and monitoring of the equipment 24/7 to a capable vendor. That translates into faster deployment because the vendor does all the heavy lifting. The IT staff that would normally be responsible for maintaining the system can be redirected to more strategic projects.

The business
Cloud delivery requires little to no upfront capital expenses.

Hence, its add-as-you-grow purchasing model becomes a strong business driver. Such cost benefits certainly apply to implementing a blended contact centre application, which can be laden with upfront capital outlays and little predictability in terms of future capacity. This is no doubt a much more cost- effective way to meet communications needs without a heavy investment. Not to mention, all those cloud-triggered cost savings can be funnelled into the business. At the same time, there is value associated with being able to focus solely on the call centre and reacting quickly to the fast-changing environment.

All the time and energy normally dedicated to infrastructure can now be diverted into growing revenue streams.

The other stakeholders
Cloud delivery also enhances communication for customers, employees, partners and other key stakeholders. For example, new functionality can be brought into a cloud-based interactive voice response system to improve customer interactions on a more frequent basis. Instead of waiting for a major release from a vendor, customers benefit from the latest and greatest capabilities as soon as they’re available.

CLOUD CONCERNS
Receptiveness to cloud-based business communications solutions is on the rise. Perhaps, this is because there are no real technology hurdles standing in the way. Most concerns reflect the challenges that once plagued early adopters of cloud service delivery. But the industry has come a long way toward overcoming those top barriers:

Security
The perceived lack of security is a top concern for most organisations.

Fortunately, vendors are working hard to overcome this objection, and good solutions comply with security standards and best practices. Organisations should consider cloud solutions with enhanced security standards. For example, look for cloud-based communication solutions that are delivered from a SAS-70 type II monitored data centre.

Organisations should also look for architectures that allow the voice and call recordings to remain on their corporate network. In addition, it is prudent to create security checklists and hold vendors accountable to relevant standards.

Reliability
Smart vendors are putting considerable effort into ensuring high availability.

For example, in a scenario where an organisation has a dedicated virtual server, the first user is unaffected by another’s CPU utilization drags because with a cloud-based IP PBX, each user has its own isolated virtual environment.

That isolation also ensures higher security.

Control
Today, vendors recognise their customers’ need for control and visibility into their hosted applications. Find a solution that allows for some level of monitoring and access; for instance, an application with access to a Web portal for reporting, administrative changes, billing information and configuration control.

Culture
Of course, the biggest intangible concern is the culture shift.

Some IT professionals have spent their entire careers in server rooms dealing with data feeds and product rollouts.

Now that someone else does much of the work, they may experience a huge cultural change. Cloud computing is no longer just a concept. It is now being adopted rapidly by many of the biggest and most trusted companies in the world. With cloud computing, the days of long deployment cycles, huge investments, and costly support contracts are gone. Of course, achieving successful migration is not without its barriers but get it right and we can tap into talent, reduce costs, differentiate and create a more flexible effective workforce.

Ultimately, cloud-based communications must be seen as a solution laced with many benefits and not one that is looking for a problem.