The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

For years we have asked Executives for their views and opinions in our annual new year feature - We caught up with Simon Burke and asked him to look back at 2011 and forward to 2012. Read the interview.

In your opinion, what has been the greatest challenge the contact center industry has faced in the last 12 months?
Responding to the pace of change as consumers utilise more and more social media type channels and in response many enterprises are paralysed in terms of how to keep pace.

Why do you believe has this been a challenge?
Consumers are adopting new technology at a faster pace than enterprises can adapt.

In 2012, what do you think will be the top priorities in the contact center industry for:

a) Contact Center Directors
- Embracing multi channel communication into the customer experience

b) Company Executives
- consistently delivering a customer experience

c) IT Directors
- experimenting with new innovation

d) Human Resources Directors
- planning for the skill sets and cultural change that challenges provision of a great and consistent customer experience

What technology do you believe will have the biggest impact on the industry over the next 12 months?
True Cloud ....not fake cloud providers or hosting vendors (proclaiming to be cloud).

What impact have "external events" even had on your company, and how have you adapted your business?
European debt concerns and the knock on effects have impacted market confidence. This has meant that enterprises are increasingly questioning large scale investments and capex into the contact centre. This has helped accelerate the growth of true cloud providers because enterprises can access features and pay on the basis of usage.

What developments are you planning to launch in 2012 and how will they benefit the industry?
Agile Messaging Service (AMS) that enables enterprises to design the customer conversation using a drag & drop interface that when published enables multi channel communication interaction.

What contact center technology or other innovation excites you the most as an Executive in the contact center industry?
The fact that cloud technology represents and is delivering real technology change and value to an industry that has been oversold, over promised, over charged and under delivered from mainstream technology vendors.

What has been the most important contact center related conversation topic in 2011 and what are your views on this?
The debate between the merits of on premise, hosted and cloud technology. My views are that each model has merit and value to a specific segment. Increasingly the value of cloud will take over more of the on-premise and hosted models - with on premise always maintaining a market share.

Lastly, what do you think 2012 holds for the industry?
2012 will put the industry under massive pressure as the challenge of delivering a customer experience with become harder for those companies that don't start experimenting with cloud technologies.

About Simon Burke:

About IPscape:
Built from the ground up in Australia, IPscape's award-winning hosted call centre and customer contact solutions benefit from over 50 years first-hand call centre experience and the latest voice and data technologies. IPscape's SaaS approach is simple, clever and fast so clients can concentrate on customer service delivery not the infrastructure.