This photograph of an IBM RAMAC 305 portable disk drive was taken around 50 years ago. It contained 5 MB of memory - roughly the same as an iPod today. TUANZ After 5s speaker Pat Shafer used the photo in her presentation to illustrate that although technology is rapidly changing, the way a business connects with its customers is slower to evolve.
She told the audience that while the customer used to walk in through the front door, now there are as many as ten customer “touchpoints” if you count email, web, face to face and telephone transactions. Yet often companies are only good at operating in one area such as a voice and completely neglect email and the web as channels of communication.
Shafer was Agile’s headline speaker at the After 5s breakfasts in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. After each presentation Agile held a number of workshops as part of their launch of a new company Telic, which will focus on consultancy and managed services.
Now that technology intergrators such as Agile are able to streamline an organisation’s communication channels it made me wonder if the contact centre itself wasn’t becoming a little like that IBM RAMAC 305. If the time wasn’t approaching when the idea of having a large group of agents clustered in a separate area of the business would seem as cumbersome as a portable disc drive carried around on a forklift.