Our guest blogger today is John Joseph, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Envox Worldwide. He manages worldwide marketing, including corporate and marketing communications, product management and marketing, and all 3rd party marketing for the company.

With all the news out there it’s hard to decipher what’s important and what’s not. Nowhere is this more confusing than in the world of technology. As a call center manager you are faced with daily technology news updates, vendors calling to sell their latest products, agents complaining they need more automation and management looking over your shoulder to be sure expenses are managed while efficiency and productivity aren’t compromised.

Here are the Top 5 Tech Developments you should pay attention to:

#1: Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) – optimize contact center efficiency and personalize the customer experience by adding intelligent call routing, screen pop, call monitoring and click-to-call functionality to your contact center solution.

#2: VoIP – Internet telephony enabled by Voice over IP (VoIP) technology can lower corporate phone bills by as much as 40% and centralize your contact center operations for increased agility, streamlined management and more efficient use of staff.

#3: Speech – dramatically reduce call center costs by replacing proprietary interactive voice response (IVR) systems with self-service solutions powered by automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) and speaker verification technologies. Speech technology has become more mainstream and sophisticated in the last year, offering an opportunity for contact centers to re-engineer their self-service applications to be more robust, dynamic and personalized.

#4: Outbound predictive dialing – along with increasing efficiency, outbound predictive dialing can help to proactively and personally communicate with existing customers for greater loyalty and up selling.

#5: Video – video provides a unique opportunity to create more effective self-service and revenue enhancing solutions as well as decrease call times on more difficult inquiries, especially for technical support, because you can “show” someone instead of playing 20 questions. It also offers branding and marketing opportunities and can increase agent effectiveness on more difficult sales calls.