Virtualizing The Reality of Business

As a tech strategist, planner and consultant I am constantly bombarded with new tech ideas and solutions. Most of the time I find they are just another technology "in search of" a customer or user. To provide really effective solutions, it must solve real-world problems but also have real CFO ROI (return on investment) benefits. Running a call/contact center is a complex and daunting task. Having worked with large global companies that route calls literally to multiple contact centers across five continents as well as that "tax" department we don't ever want to call, here are some key findings. Labor, real management, agent training and associated HR costs will always be the highest cost of any center. Automating tasks is a great idea but ask any customer caller and that is the last thing they want. Voice recognition is nice but rarely works all the time and, frankly makes the customer more upset than they already are.

Visualizing the problem, or "I see what the problem is," is a great step for many calls except those with physical challenges. Understanding what the customer sees speeds the solution as even if both the caller and the agent speak the same language we don't always mean what we say. Augmenting the visual reality or AR (augment reality) can accelerate that process even further as you would probably agree that our tech problems are not getting any easier nor like to in the future. In addition, problems are just person-to-person but person-to-machine. Creating virtual or augmented virtual reality spaces is emerging to reduce training time, accelerate repair time, build new "job aids" to improve BPO (business process optimization) and overall reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) of all efforts. A few vendors are on the right track understanding the reality of ROI and the augmented reality needed by agents and field technician to provide better service and repair at lower costs.