Author: Roger Sumner

This morning, I got in my car to drive to work. My car operates on gas, which is still the standard fuel for most vehicles. On my way to work, I drove on the right side of the road - the standard side in the U.S. And, after I sat down at my desk, I logged onto my computer to read the Wall Street Journal online. Of course, without HTTP as a standard, there would be no World Wide Web and no WSJ online.

My point is that standards are an essential part of everyday life, whether we realize we are using them or not. So, why wouldn’t they be important to the contact center? Actually, standards are VERY important to the contact center. They provide a common platform that allows hardware and software from multiple vendors to communicate with one another, giving you more choices. They also ease your integration hassles and reduce your implementation time and costs. Today, we are seeing the most active standards development occurring with web and VoIP. That is because companies are beginning to migrate from traditional telephony to IP telephony. It is also because both areas are inherently standards-based. There are some standards that I think are becoming the most important in the contact center space:

• Web services, which are built on standards such as HTTP and SOAP, will be essential for next generation applications.
• SIP and Presence provide standards-based solutions between agent/knowledge worker and customers. They enable the best devices at the best time offering true one-to-one communications.
• VoiceXML has been enormously successful with speech self-service, and already seems to be surpassing proprietary self-service applications. It provides for speech application portability between platforms.
• SCXML is in the early stages of development, but could emerge as the glue that binds together different functionality.

New standards are often good standards. In fact, I’m looking forward to the day when it’s standard for me to commute to work in a flying saucer, and then fold my vehicle into my briefcase – just like George Jetson.

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 8:05 am and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.