You’ll find information about the coming together of call centers and the Internet. It’s impossible to leave the subject of buying telecom transmission services without saying something about what the Internet revolution will do to call centers.
Though I’ve focused on three carriers here, there are dozens more that provide advanced networking services to large businesses that include call centers. We are poised on the edge of a new networking world, one in which a bewildering array of higher bandwidth networks will be available for piping into your center. Frame relay,
ATM, xDSL, ISDN, all sorts of IP permutations — they are strange, and the market economics haven’t been worked out yet. I don’t know yet what combinations of voice and data traffic will win out, and which carriers will offer what two or five years down the road.
What I do know is that, as the pipe grows thicker and stronger and more varied, the cost of each individual call gets lower and lower. As I said before, it’s going to be the value-added services that differentiate carriers. It’s going to be harder to tell who is a carrier, as data networking melds with telecom. And it’s certain that some form of digitized packet-based traffic will be part of even the most traditional network, driving costs down and opening up new international dialing vistas. The moral: don’t box yourself in, get the best deal you can and prepare to turn on a dime when someone offers you something cheaper or throws a killer application on top of their core service.
No comments:
Post a Comment