Carriers Make Their Moves in Cloud-based Contact Centers

C. Whelan

Summary Bullets:

• Hosted contact center features are gaining a more prominent role in carriers’ business-class telephony solutions.
• Hosted contact center solutions fit well with carriers’ hosted voice solutions from the enterprise to the mid-market.

As business IP telephony services continue to evolve, hosted contact center features are playing an important role in carriers’ cloud-based voice solutions.  Business is increasingly conducted online, and the contact center function is a critical element in business communications with customers.  Hosted solutions being marketed by contact center specialists today include fundamentals such as automatic call distribution (ACD), intelligent call routing (ICR), and interactive voice response (IVR).  However, these services can also include integration with customer relationship management (CRM) tools, chat, click to call, reporting and call analytics, and mobile customer engagement.  Social media such as Twitter and Facebook also play an important role: Businesses need to be able to monitor and respond to customer complaints that may be posted in the social media universe.  Some of these hosted contact center specialists have teamed up with carriers, letting carriers sell services that include these new features.  For example, in late 2011, Verizon announced that it was partnering with inContact for its new Virtual Contact Center offer; the partnership lets Verizon offer a more sophisticated, comprehensive suite of services to its customers.  Similarly, AT&T’s Hosted Integrated Contact Services, based on the Genesys platform, include multichannel capabilities for e-mail, chat, and social networking.