This year’s Enterprise Connect conference was a whirlwind of sessions, demos and announcements. There was also an abundance of big reveals from major vendors including Cisco (re-launching its UC endeavor as “Spark”), Interactive Intelligence (announcing PureCloud Collaborate), Microsoft (unveiling Skype for Business) and Avaya (announcing a new call center partnership with Google).
I wrote up my top takeaways on trends related to call centers a couple weeks ago, you can read that here. Many industry analysts did the same and, now that the dust has settled, I’ve assembled the top posts here for easy reference. Continue reading
Over the past year, there has been growing attention paid to the role SMS might play as part of the contact center mix. One reason for this is there are now several cloud services that provide easy platforms on which to develop SMS-driven interactions, e.g. 
On Thursday, Avaya held a major analyst event (called “Avaya Engages”) to make several announcements and paint a picture of their roadmap. It was an invite only event, so most people only have the accompanying press releases as a source of information. Luckily, the analysts in attendance were tweeting prolifically and that gives the rest of us much greater insight.
Today I want to spell out some big challenges ahead for WebRTC specific to the call center space, an area in which I’ve been deeply immersed for the last 5 years. I have followed WebRTC quite closely, 
As technology for customer service advances, more and more channels of communication are added to the mix. We started with just the phone call, many decades ago. Then we added email (necessitating the switch from “call center” to “contact center”), then online forms, web-chat and social media. Many people believe WebRTC will be the next major advance on this front.
Last week, Fonolo hosted a Google Hangout to discuss multi-channel customer service. This fabulous panel of industry experts was eager to share their expertise and thoughts on how call centers can cope in this digital era of multi-modal communications.
WebRTC,the new in-browser framework for real-time video and audio communication, is getting a lot of attention lately. Some people feel it has the potential to cause major disruption throughout the telco world. They figure: If every web browser can be a soft-phone or VoIP client, that’s a game changer. Others see it as a neat technology that’s only an incremental improvement. They figure: Browsers can already do all of this with plug-ins, and while it’s better to be free of plug-ins, that’s a minor problem.
