Don't let the lowest person in your call center make or break your customer relationship. As someone who started working in the industry more than 25 years ago, Bill Hunt has plenty of ideas regarding its future. Hunt's look to the future includes more than just his thoughts regarding VoIP. He believes there will be a continuing recognition that the call center is not simply an expense, but a manifestation of a company's brand.

"When somebody calls Lands' End or an L.L. Bean, they're not seeing L.L. Bean's beautiful store in Freeport [Maine]," he said. "They're just talking to one individual on the phone who may be making $9, $10, $12, $15 an hour, and that whole customer relationship can be made or broken on that phone call.

"A lot of industries aren't catching on to that yet and I think they will. And as they do, that's the opportunity we see for our product. The integrated desktop that guides the agent through and manages from hello to goodbye is going to be a big play in the next five years or so."

Hunt's firm provides software development services, applications and infrastructure for customer contact. He added that contact center agents are often given the wrong equipment, the wrong tools, to do their job.

"Do you really want to farm out to a stranger ... the whole reputation of your company? That ... is a [dangerous] gamble that some companies have taken with considerable harm." "Most software that these people are using [is] written for data entry clerks or accountants or sales people entering things after a sales call," he said. "They're not written to be used while they are on the phone with somebody."

While discussing developments at his company, Hunt mentioned the release of the version 4.0 of Dirigo Contact Suite later this month.

"We will [also] be announcing later this year the release of our own VoIP PBX/ACD for the 50-seat-and-down call center market," he added.

Success has been part of the company's recent history and is expected to continue. Revenue is about 50 percent ahead of last year.

"We're marketing via channels," he said. "We hope to expand our channel base.

"The fact that we can address both the low end of the market in the 10-, 15-, 20-seat range, and at the same time -- we're talking to a Fortune 1000 company that has over 10,000 agents -- we can scale the product that way is also an exciting thing." "You must be able to handle dealing with business people, not just telecom people, and dealing with solving business solutions."

Hunt expects sustained 20 percent growth, at a minimum, during the next five years.

"But I think we'll do better than that over the next five years," he said. "We see numbers that could be bigger than that. We could grow faster than that in the near term, but that's a little harder to manage.

"Having a complete contact center solution at the low end will be very powerful. The price point for the product initially will be a differentiator."

Hunt was also asked about the challenges facing the industry.

"When somebody calls Lands' End or an L.L. Bean, they're not seeing L.L. Bean's beautiful store in Freeport [Maine]. They're just talking to one individual on the phone who may be making $9, $10, $12, $15 an hour, and that whole customer relationship can be made or broken on that phone call.""One of them is companies, from a vendor perspective, recognizing that ... it's not enough to provide a good phone system," he said. "A good ACD is not enough. You must be able to handle dealing with business people, not just telecom people, and dealing with solving business solutions. Dealing with the whole disruption caused by VoIP is obviously going to be a challenge as well [and] consolidation in the industry will present some challenges."

Of CRM limitations, Hunt had this to say:

"CRM ... is used to gather information about a customer from the past and see their behavior in order to forecast future behavior, both for that customer and for the group as a whole," he noted. "They don't really deal with 'how do I talk to this person today?' I'm not going to have the real 'how does a contact center person have that conversation?' That's where our focus is, and I think that part of the market is still underserved."... there will be a continuing recognition that the call center is not simply an expense, but a manifestation of a company's brand.

Once again looking into the future, Hunt said the home agent sector of the industry will continue to grow -- but slowly.

"There's still a lot of management issues to overcome," he said.

And regarding offshoring, Hunt recognized that technology is ahead of management capabilities.

"How do you manage a development operation that is 12 hours off your time and is not familiar with the culture and what you're trying to accomplish?" he asked. "We're going to see more companies coming home.

"Do you really want to farm out to a stranger ... the whole reputation of your company? That ... is a [dangerous] gamble that some companies have taken with considerable harm."