VoiceCon San Francisco Preview: Contact Center Deep DiveVoiceCon San Francisco Preview: Contact Center Deep Dive

If your business runs a contact center, and chances are very high that if you're coming to VoiceCon it does, plan to leave the bar a little early Wednesday night and join the discussion.

For those of you heading to VoiceCon, my purpose here is to give you a great reason to get out of bed on Thursday morning. The exhibits may close on Wednesday, but there's still another packed half day of breakout sessions, "Deep Dives" and a locknote session starting at 8 am.Deep Dives are a new concept being explored by VoiceCon management to create different types of sessions for varying needs. In the past, I have participated in two contact center sessions, one a market overview, the other a panel with executives from the leading contact center solutions vendors. The two sessions were typically attended by a very similar audience, those of us who live and breathe contact centers (as well as a number of other interested parties), but separated by a day.

This year, we will do both sessions back to back which offers a different set of dynamics. In my presentation, I'll give my view of the trends driving implementation and product development trends in the contact center market today, including social networking and hosted solutions. I'll also review vendor solutions, describing strengths and challenges of each.

After a short break, we'll convene the executive panel, with representatives from Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence and Nortel. Spoiler Alert: Don't come expecting to hear the contact center roadmap for Avaya/Nortel contact center solutions. Until the deal is done, neither party is at liberty to talk publicly about their integration plans. That said, the executives will likely be highlighting the components of their respective portfolios we may see in that final converged plan.

As we've done since the inception of the contact center executive panel several years ago, the goal will be to draw the majority of the questions that will be addressed to the panel from the audience. Each question will be directed to two or three panel members, with preference given to questions coming from end users in the audience.

So if your business runs a contact center, and chances are very high that if you're coming to VoiceCon it does, plan to leave the bar a little early Wednesday night and join the discussion.If your business runs a contact center, and chances are very high that if you're coming to VoiceCon it does, plan to leave the bar a little early Wednesday night and join the discussion.