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The feature we're highlighting today, by Bob Bellman, deals with contact center metrics, and how the network and applications help you reach meaningful goals in customer contact. Bob's article is a quick tutorial on the leading edge in contact center technologies, such as knowledge management systems and real-time speech analytics.

The feature we're highlighting today, by Bob Bellman, deals with contact center metrics, and how the network and applications help you reach meaningful goals in customer contact. Bob's article is a quick tutorial on the leading edge in contact center technologies, such as knowledge management systems and real-time speech analytics.From the beginning of the VOIP wave, contact centers have been at the leading edge. They were hampered at the outset by VOIP's initial unreliability; no one would trust a contact center to a technology that couldn't guarantee reliable, high-quality service. But now that people are feeling more comfortable about that, IP contact centers are getting more attention.

Not everything about IP contact centers is new; a lot of it is just CTI made more affordable. But the kind of wider integration that Bob Bellman illustrates would never work in practice without IP.

In this respect, contact centers are on the cutting edge again, as the industry starts talking about communications-enabling business processes. The case for doing so is pretty compelling in the contact center; the question, as with CTI, is how far beyond the contact center it goes.