As Bob Dylan once said, “The times, they are a-changing”. Consumers are now quicker to move their business, expect shorter waiting times, faster resolutions and are increasingly opting for customer service over the internet and email as opposed to traditional telephone-based interactions. The next generation of contact centre solutions includes innovations in multimedia work assignment, workforce optimisation and outbound self-service, providing businesses with the tools to enhance customer experiences, raise agent productivity, and streamline costs throughout contact centres. These solutions drive real-time communications, and provide the building blocks for effective experience management, a process that begins with an open communications foundation, and enables businesses to orchestrate people and information along with customer context, and immerse agents and customers into a cohesive experience. These technologies will define the next generation of contact centres, or what may be referred to as ‘context’ centres. What is a context centre? A context centre is a network of IT infrastructure and customer service resources that delivers customer service well beyond the scope of today’s contact centres, creating more efficient service interactions and delivering cost savings and increased productivity to businesses. Context centres are able to achieve this by identifying the best contextual response path for consumer interactions, including white mail, email, SMS, text chat and/or social media. They do this by filtering incoming data into actionable work items. The filtering process can identify items such as customer comments, sales opportunities and trends which can then be easily actioned by a resource manager or customer service assistant.Consumer usage trends have driven the development of the contact centre. Since 2007, the use of email and/or the internet as a primary customer service channel has grown from 14% to 23%, and in 2009 a total of 66% of New Zealanders who were polled in the Avaya Contact Centre Consumer Index 2010 said they strongly preferred the use of internet and email communications compared to calling a contact centre. However, in an increasingly digital communication environment, telephony and contact centres still remain as a central part of the customer service offering of many (if not all) telecommunications companies, with 68% of consumers still listing telephony as their most frequently used customer service channel in 2009*. For enterprise-level organisations such as carriers and telecommunications companies, this data raises some significant questions: how can companies protect their current customer service investments while extending their existing capabilities to take advantage of online communication opportunities? And how could this align with future business growth plans? How do context centres improve the telecommunications tndustry? The next evolution of the contact centre improves telephony-based customer service interactions and streamlines existing IT operations, at the same time incorporating additional functionality for a variety of new digital communication channels. These context-based centres can be easily aligned with current business goals and objectives because they create an environment that streamlines existing contact centre technologies and offers new tools to support an expanding number of customer communication channels.To streamline existing operations, we need a new take on the flow of information and resources in today’s contact centres. Traditional telephony-based customer interactions process incoming data streams by routing a call and its accompanying data from one part of the system to another, often from one Customer Service Advisor (CSA) to another or from one department to another. In this scenario the customer can often feel like a tennis ball, bouncing unappreciatively from one side of the court to another, and this can result in a negative customer service experience. A context centre anchors data, rather than routing it. By anchoring an interaction, customers remain in a single holding position, and all relevant resources and data from the organisation are brought directly to the customer, rather than the customer being routed to various resources across the organisation. In this scenario, customers will not experience the frustration of repeating details that are lost in a transfer, or lengthy queuing because they remain in a single persistent conference, with agents conferencing with other agents, accessing real-time shared records to deliver the best customer service experience possible today. With poor contact centre service rating as the number one reason that consumers will move business to another company, this context-based approach is a powerful customer retention tool. Contextual awareness also presents significant benefits to businesses, in addition to delivering better customer service experiences. When a call is anchored, all resources are pooled and thus no media needs to be moved around. A model like this greatly reduces the flow of data and therefore reduces the need for computer-telephony Integration, which in turn lowers operating costs. And consolidating features into a single user interface for white mail, telephony, email, blogs, text chat and social media leads to increased staff productivity and more efficient customer interactions. Social media in contact centres Context centres enhance customer experience by personalising each customer service collaboration session, simultaneously creating an individual context for each customer, based on his or her indicated preferences, values, customer history and current collaboration data. In a world that is increasingly dominated by collaboration, epitomised by the growth of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the ability for an organisation to interact with its customers in the way they prefer is not only important for that customer interaction – it can have a widespread impact through that customer’s online communities and friends. Agent productivity is a key area of concern for companies in running an efficient customer service operation. Agents will no longer have to juggle separate communications channels across multiple systems. A single desktop agent application can be used to track and manage up to six types of transactions simultaneously (one voice and five non-voice, eg: email, web chat, IM, etc). Businesses can deliver advanced work items (such as online applications or claims) as part of the interaction. Additionally, during incoming customer instant messages or chats, a context-aware system can identify contextsensitive keywords that are then matched up with prepared textual responses the agent can use to speed up the interaction process. Keywords can also be used to create a list of relevant available experts, reducing time spent searching for them *Statistics are taken from the 2010 Avaya Contact Centre Consumer Index. For a copy of the Australian and NZ reports, please contact Claire at clarsen@avaya.com