"Automation technology that improves the customer experience through increased consistency of service, while improving the economics of the call through decreased handle times and increasing first time call resolution, will have a big impact on the outsourcing industry. Automation also reduces agent training time and speeds productivity.

Sitel’s approach to technology, including automation channel technology, has always been to remain flexible and scalable. We have branded our own proprietary strategy as Sitel Interactive, which includes best of breed technology platforms and delivery experts. Sitel’s approach prizes diversity and allows for maximum innovation free from the constraints of a single platform solution."

"Email and real time chat capabilities along with voice analytics will have an impact. I believe the establishment and/or enhancement of a robust CRM system will also be a strong focus in the next 12 months for all companies."

"If VOIP is implemented then this technology would be a boon for the call center industry."

"Possibly automated technology, where the customer could get their answer faster at a cheaper cost to the provider – although if this is not done in the right way, it could actually alienate customers.

Also multichannel technology which will give the customer a single view of the supplier. Contact centres are rapidly moving towards a multi-channel future, with email, SMS/Text and web chat increasing. This presents specific challenges, such as the need to have agents who have the relevant technical and IT skills to work with it. So contact centres need to have systems that can be updated and that are simple enough for staff to use.

With the ultimate vision of Unified Communications in mind and seamless use of multiple channels, it is no surprise that every single system that we have installed for contact centres in 2009 has included Voice over IP. Advances in technology have meant that VoIP now offers a stable infrastructure, enabling many businesses – and not just the largest – to save on equipment, software, network maintenance and administration, management and operational costs."

"I believe that adoption of self-help technologies wherever possible in the process workflow will be the biggest business lever over the next 12- 18 months."

• Running simulations and "what if" scenarios to improve the fit of plans to expected demand and to fluctuations in demand
• Employee portals accessible via mobile devices
• Automated response and call-back technologies for communicating with the workforce (e.g. in planning shifts and performing last-minute updates to the shift allocations)
• Enhanced forecasting abilities through workload simulation
• CTI analysis tools for assessment and fine-tuning of the call center's technological systems

"Work-at-home technology is going to be instrumental in moving our industry further into the 21st century, and that also means we have to build smarter virtual security systems to tackle the challenges that go with a virtual contact center world. Protecting consumers is an integral part of serving them well."

"Real time, actionable cloud based survey and customer analytics software that is tightly linked to a CRM solution"

"Speech analytics is the technology to watch in 2010. It provides the breakthrough transparency (insight) on people performance, process effectiveness and end-customer experience that will revitalize the contact center industry and propel it to a more prominent role within the organization. Other business units will be looking towards the contact center for insights on product usability, customer needs, campaign effectiveness, competitive information, website abandon reasons, back-office bottlenecks, as well as, for liability protection.

By automating the recognition and analysis of unstructured human-to-human conversations in a non-intrusive and highly scalable way, speech analytics is able to dive into both the customer and agent side of the equation for comprehensive root cause investigation, trend analysis and hypothesis validation. It uncovers the first call resolution per issue per agent, the customer satisfaction per product per agent, among others. It further provides targeted recommendations for quality assurance, agent coaching, process improvements, sales conversion factors and customer satisfaction drivers. This enables executives to focus their investments and efforts on the areas that will give them the biggest bang for the buck.

Moreover, speech metrics can be easily tied back to operational and corporate KPIs like average handle time, resource utilization, customer satisfaction, first call resolution, sales conversion rate, collections promise-to-pay and customer propensity to churn. This allows the contact center to be fully aligned with corporate performance goals and metrics."

"I think performance related technology will be instrumental in ensuring that Customer Service excellence continues to be delivered effectively. I also think Speech analytics will begin to have an interest in the marketplace. However, budget constraints may prevent the procurement of this, at this stage."

"The IPCC still has life as per my forecast - it is the most significant impact creator today and should continue in the next 12 months or at least for the most of it."

"NewVoiceMedia believes that cloud computing will have a huge impact on the industry in 2010, a view shared recently by analyst Gartner."

"Workforce Management systems (namely eWFM) will lead the call center industry in 2010 to enormous savings. With 70% of call center overhead tied to FTE, huge gains will be realized in the way of budgetary cost avoidance. If Aspect continues to focus intently on enhancing their Collections modules, they will surpass their competition at even greater lengths and reap a harvest of new customers."

"CRM technologies still tops my list."

"The 'contact center in the cloud'"

"Social networks - facebook, chat and web collaboration."

"Virtualization of agents , of working from anywhere in the world to serve a customer anywhere"

"Technology will be outsourced for specialized system needs, or as I call it, 'resource' to optimize their practice. The 'try before you buy' concept has great merit when saving cost and development time, or make it easy for callers to use 'Self-service' to ease workload."

"The telephone and internet/email will still have an impact in 2010"

"SELF SERVICE technologies are rapidly improving and companies are constantly looking for new ways to provide answers to their standard customer queries. So, in the near future many customers will take care of themselves with intelligent and interactive self-service tools, and therefore, contact center employees will have to be experienced and emotionally intelligent who will mainly be dealing with special inquires and more complicated cases."