10 Things to Think About with the Future of Contact Centers

Some random musing on some things we need to be thinking about and mantras we need to depart from in order to move call centers forward. Call it too much caffeine on a Monday night… 

1. Soon a Contact Center won’t have a “center” at all
2. We’ve moved from “Calls” to “Contacts”; “Interactions” is the next logical step
3. “Calls per Hour” as a metric needs to go away forever- please tell me that no one out there is still using it…
4. The same goes for Service Level – just when you thought I had stepped down from that soap box
5. "This call may be Analyzed for data mining purposes.”
6. Reporting from pre-summarized data (1/2 hour and daily reports from standard aggregated tables) is, and always has been, fundamentally flawed
7. Social Media + Customer Care = Tweet or Die
8. “Video Killed the Voice Only Star”
9. Outbound Telemarketing has been rebranded “Proactive Care” – Eat your heart out Do Not Call List
10. Erlang C and all it’s variants are no longer relevant (this means WFM as we know it will need to be rewritten)– yep, wrap your head around that one

Any thoughts?