Within three years, more than 100 million people will be able to make phone calls from Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, and other Microsoft Office Systems applications; and customers will be able to gain this value with VoIP solutions that are half the cost of what they are today.
During the past two decades, we’ve witnessed dramatic changes to the way we do business.There is phenomenal expansion in workplace communications and technology. Enterprises are truly global, expanding their operations worldwide. Customers and partners expect 24 by 7 services. And ultimately we’ve raised the bar in worker productivity.
While this communications revolution has been embraced by organizations and their people, it has also created some new challenges. Although people can communicate and collaborate with coworkers and customers in more ways, with more devices, from more places, few of these communications technologies work together.Working from home has been a privilege for all job roles lately.
However, the increasing buzz on Voice over IP in the contact center industry increased questions on whether or not working from home is a possibility for the customer services and support staff.There are no technology barriers; a few big IT / Banking players in the United States have already implemented / invested largely in new infrastructure using VoIP to provision support staff to work remotely.
Recent announcements by Microsoft, unveiled a Unified Communications initiative partnered with telecommunications majors like Nortel: http://www.microsoft.com/uc, Google’s recent acquisition of GrandCentral offers a unique service where subscribers can use a ‘single’ phone number that can be routed to different phone numbers at different times of day, and also avail comprehensive web based management of the phone number, and voicemails http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/all-aboard.html.
These new technologies break the long known communication barriers of voicemails, ‘out of office messages’ and ‘call forwarding’ blues. What impact will these changes have on the contact center world? Will these help support staff to be on par with the other divisions in the organization with respect to the privilege of working from home? I would like to hear your thoughts …
