A Friday video - Cisco's call centre of the future

My previous videos have been well received (see "Embedded Call Centre Video" and "For a Friday - Contact Centre, video and the call centre movie") so I suspect that it's time for another one. It's also Friday and that's a good enough reason for a less serious post.

I was very interested to see that one of Cisco's promotional videos is up on YouTube. This is n illustration of Cisco's vision of what call centre could be: video enabled, integrated around the enterprise, seamless inbound and outbound and full multi-media.



In fact, the view from one of the experts in Cisco's product house is that almost all of this contact centre vision could be achieved today (though not all of it are yet products), give or take the robot dog.....

Embedded Call Centre Video

I've been seeing quite a bit on video call centre lately, and most of the focus has been on video as an alternative to just voice communication. I've done quite a bit of posting on this lately in "Video and contact centre - some thoughts" and "For a Friday - Contact Centre, video and the call centre movie".

One area more neglected area of video where there's some interesting ideas is the agent desktop. The thoughts here are more around embedding video for the agent as either e-learning or brand awareness training. As an example, I've embedded the trailer for the call centre movie below.



The thinking is that this way agents could quickly learn about the latest TV advertising campaign, for example, that an organisation is using to generate inbound sales traffic. If this campaign were to be run only at peak times then there is a high probability that the agents on the shift that takes the calls will not have seen it.

Other uses potentially include adding dynamic content to portals and integrating it with mashups. Mashups with Video and VoIP enablement strike me as very interesting area for the desktop and is something I'll look at in more detail soon.

For a Friday - Contact Centre, video and the call centre movie

I feel there is the opportunity for a serious discussion about video in contact centre, but Friday is probably not the time to have it. The growth of 3G for mobiles and video calls on Skype make video very relevant for any discussion of the future of the contact centre. I believe video is an inherent part of the move to voice over IP. If you can send packets of voice across a network, then sending packets of video is a logical next step and restricted more by bandwidth limitations (which are ever reducing), than it is by technology capabilities.

I've touched on video before in "SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 2, voice portals", especially with reference to the Cisco Voice Portal but video deserves a deeper discussion than most people have time for at the end of the week.

I'll write more about managing video at the start of next week and instead introduce you to "Call Centre the Movie". It's a film with no intention of taking itself, outsourcing or call centres seriously, but it is important because it has shaped perceptions of the industry, it has won a number of awards (e.g. here at the 2005 Riverside International Film Festival) and it has a very significant internet presence as any Google search will show. You can see the trailer here on Youtube .

If that 30 seconds has whetted your appetite, then the full movie (all 12 minutes) is here.

What I find interesting about this movie is how well it shows that consumers understand offshore service as being driven by cost. Whether you like the movie or not, it does summarise very neatly a lot of public perceptions the call centre industry has to deal with.