Introduction to the CEC

Development History

The development of the CEC can be divided into three phases based on the name.

Phase 1: Call Center

The earliest call center mainly processes hotline calls. The interactive voice response (IVR) reduces the number of handled manual services and agent workload. The computer telephony integration (CTI) technology allows the telephone exchange system to be integrated with the computer system. In this way, agents can obtain customer information from the computer when answering calls, and provide personalized services for customers. Recording devices improve the service quality with recordings in the entire service process. The real-time monitoring system, inspection system, and report system enable the management personnel to monitor the running states of the call center.

Phase 2: Contact Center

The rapid development of Internet technologies and emergence of new media, such as SMS messages, instant messaging, emails, web chats, WeChat, and Weibo, bring fundamental changes to customers' communication modes. The call center implements not only voice calls, but also multi-media communication. With this transformation, the call center becomes the contact center.

The key technologies of the contact center platform are platform openness and unified multimedia routing. The platform openness implements the access of multiple media, and the unified routing implements the unified routing and distribution of multimedia.

Phase 3: Cloud Contact Center

Although the functions of the contact center are complete, the on-premises deployment mode is widely used, resulting in high hardware and maintenance costs and slow capacity expansion. The CEC cloudifies all resources of a contact center to deploy services based on cloud computing. The public cloud–based contact center frees enterprises from purchasing and maintaining hardware devices. Instead, enterprises can purchase agent resources on demand and pay for them based on the usage.

Cloud computing is a technology that is naturally applicable to contact centers and brings more service flexibility to enterprises. Small- and medium-sized enterprises can use high-quality contact center services upon purchase.

Currently, two types of cloud contact center services are available in the market:

• PaaS mode: Enterprises must have the PaaS interconnection capability. Enterprises encapsulate various open APIs of the cloud contact center and develop their own agent software.
• SaaS mode: Enterprises can directly purchase and use the agent software.

Advantages

The revolutionary innovation of the deployment mode promotes the development of the contact center. The cloud contact center has the following advantages: short construction period, low investment, flexible deployment, and easy management. Therefore, cloudification becomes an important option for enterprises to build contact centers.

Future

Unattended (artificial intelligence) and remote (video call) business handling and consulting services are changing people's daily life as well as contact centers. Intelligent voice navigation (that replaces key navigation), intelligent outbound call (that replaces manual outbound call), chatbot, intelligent inspection (ASR and TTS inspection), and HD video call are fundamentally changing the experience of a contact center.

In the future, the CEC will provide more considerate and personalized services for customers and create new service experience for the contact center.