Hot Spots for Communications in 2010

Collaborative Customer Service
With markets still volatile many companies are focusing on customer satisfaction. However, providing one or two channels for customers to contact companies is no longer good enough for modern businesses. Companies wanting to enhance the customer experience need to embrace forms of media collaboratively. One such technology and concept greatly under-used is the Universal Queue - whereby multiple communication channels are integrated into a single 'universal queue' to standardise processing and handling. This allows agents to collaborate centrally and resolve customer queries more effectively.

We expect to see companies making more use of this technology in 2010 as the divide between the call centre and online interaction narrows.  Longer term we expect to see companies using the concept of Universal Queue in a proactive way, improving the service expectation of customers.

Unified Communication (UC)
Enterprises will further adopt UC next year. Allowing users to personalise, control and manage calls, messages, directories and information from any location is a valuable tool for any organisation. However, enterprises will increasingly put ‘presence’ at the heart of UC. By this we don’t just mean seeing who is on the phone but what devices and objects are linked to the network i.e. the status of a printer or what documents are open and by whom.

Companies to look out for include Corebridge whose solutions make phones, PCs, business applications and communication hardware and software work together.

We believe UC will move even further into the enterprise towards the end of the year with links in to CRM and ERP systems for automatic updates and further improvements to efficiency and performance.

All in all, 2010 will be an exciting year for communication systems and applications.