Call Centre Technology

One of the most significant trends in this new global economy is outsourcing. In fact, call center outsourcing has contributed to the "giant sucking sound" as upwards of 50,000 jobs per year move out of the United States and offshore. Regardless of whether you view this trend as an opportunity or a threat, outsourcing is a movement that must be on the radar of every major call center.

The idea of technology outsourcing is not exactly new. But new technologies -- namely VoiceXML and VoIP -- have made technology outsourcing practical. VoiceXML, for example, allows you to write a voice self-service application with reasonable confidence that it will work on different platforms, whether hosted or in house. Voice over IP (VoIP) reduces the cost and complexity of carrying calls between the cloud, the outsourcing vendor, your facilities and off-shore locations.

Another driver for the rise in technology outsourcing is the increasing cost of keeping up with the latest in contact center technology. As this series of articles highlights, there's more new technology for contact centers than ever before. The cost and effort involved in upgrading your existing technology, not to mention adopting new technology, is formidable. No matter how good the savings or how fast the ROI, new technology always requires more work to implement than you expect -- a proposition that makes technology outsourcing attractive.