I’ve been interested with the concept of the bitcoin since it began surfacing in the media recently. I caught wind of this article about the Winklevoss twins (or Winklevii, if you prefer) getting involved with funding for bitcoins at the beginning of the summer.
Bitcoins are a form of currency that is entirely virtual. Their rumored origin is the black market located in the wild west of the internet far beyond the known and ranked pages of google and other search engines.
The idea of currency that is virtual in the same way that cloud-based software is, or Software as a Service (SaaS), could be really awesome. Imagine an entirely virtual platform with virtual currency. We already see the idea of virtual currency in online games like Candy Crush; real money used to buy digital currency or tokens. However, with bitcoins, what they can buy isn’t limited to a virtual world. They can be used to inflate or deflate the physical currencies of the world. The lines between the physical virtual world are becoming blurred with these digital advancements.
Just a week or so ago, Forbes brought bitcoins back to the forefront of attention with the news that all of its important investors got subpoenaed for an investigation by New York’s financial regulator because of the bitcoin’s shady illegitimate past. If influential investors and companies involved can face legal action from a virtual currency, then the virtual world truly is upon us.
This is a pretty high-concept, for just a corporate blogger like me.
But, just like bitcoin is an emerging digital currency, SaaS is an emergent platform for contact center software solutions, taking the demands that your contact center runs on digital. So what does that currency buy you?
High performance, reliability, and security. Duh. This has already been covered in every blog about cloud-software systems ever.
The truth is your contact center runs on the customer service that you provide. It’s not a tangible thing, but it is certainly the most powerful currency that your contact center has to offer. To make sure that you are getting the most value out of it, make sure that you provide the most efficient and productive environment for your contact center representatives to work in.
This means using contact center software with full, multichannel capabilities so that your representatives can provide excellent customer service on all channels including chat, email, social media, and voice. As a contact center manager, you need to provide sufficient training for your customer service representatives so that they can utilize the full functionality of such a software system to its full potential. Contact center software needs to be somewhat complex in order to provide the variety of functions it takes to truly run and manage a contact center, and engage customers completely. A partial understanding of it will weaken the value of your customer service as a currency.
It also means doing the best to ensure that maximum amount of your contact center representatives’ time is spent talking to and engaging with customers. That means ensuring that your dialer allows for rapid progress through a database, or list of calls. Additionally, whether your contact center is making outbound calls, or receiving inbound calls, there needs to be constant 100% uptime. Outages, whether from server failure or maintenance and upgrades, limit the time that your business is accessible to your customers and your representatives’ ability to connect with those customers.
I personally look forward to the virtual reality that is rapidly becoming our reality, and what that means for us as citizens of the world, but also as members of the telecommunication and voice industry.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
