Oracle's Eli Borodow Talks about the 'Self-Healing, Self Optimizing Call Center' at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo

By Rich Tehrani

President and Editor-in-Chief

 

Eli Borodow, who was recently CEO of Telephony@Work and now with Oracle (Telephony@Work (News - Alert) was purchased by Oracle (News - Alert) in June), gave a riveting speech about how the call center of the future will be much more automated and flexible during the Call Center 2.0 Conference this morning at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo, WEST, taking place this week at the Sand Diego Convention Center in San Diego, Calif.

As you can imagine, he touched on multi-tenancy (a core differentiator of Telephony@Work products) and went on to say that multi-tenancy is not only useful for service providers but also for many large customers who can take advantage of multi-tenancy to share infrastructure across sites and business units without sacrificing local autonomy and control over each group’s business processes.

Call Center 2.0 was the theme of this keynote, with a focus on tight integration with Oracle’s CRM offerings; unification of the disciplines of Customer Relationship Management and Customer Interaction Management; multi-tenancy and its benefits for corporate hosting (to service diverse internal business units on common infrastructure) and commercial hosting of IP contact center technology (through carrier-partners and Oracle itself); as well as the differentiated ability to adapt and change IP Contact Center ACD business processes in real-time via human inputs into Oracle’s unified Administration Manager tool (for their multi-channel ACD offerings).


The goal of such adaptability is to achieve ongoing technology lifecycle renewal, increase efficiency and maximize customer satisfaction. Eli also alluded to the fact that real-time automated business process optimization is “call center 3.0” and that much of that is possible at Oracle today, via Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite, including its acquisition of Sigma Dynamics (a real-time analytics company that can enable real-time automated business process optimization for call centers on a custom basis based on a customized set of performance goals). Eli’s vision is that such technology will ultimately be packaged as a ‘productized’ and pre-integrated solution to empower ‘mass market’ mainstream call centers to get the most out of their Oracle ACD and CRM investments.

The point is, we will soon see an increasing ability to automate call center optimization, with metrics that are driven by performance goals and the ability to make real-time adjustments to technology-driven business processes. The technology should also become easier to implement and more affordable. So apparently, while TMC thought we were ahead of the curve by launching a call center 2.0 conference, perhaps the call center market is moving even faster than we imagined.

Certainly, Oracle’s vision of the call center of the future is very exciting and portends a world where call centers become more efficient than our wildest dreams.

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Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC. In addition he is the Chairman of the world’s best attended VoIP event, Internet Telephony Conference & Expo.