Top Contact Center Technology Ever

I've been in the contact center business for some time now - going on 30 years.

I've seen a lot of technologies come and go - as have many of you who have similar backgrounds. But for me, the one technology that has had the most impact on the contact center has been the one that focused the least on the contact center - social media.

Yes, I realize that social media isn't really a single technology, but many technologies. But at the core, they have all enabled something that just didn't exist before - the ability for a customer to shout to the world about the quality of service they did or didn't receive. With this power, companies had to stop and listen to - and actually pay attention to - their customers in ways no other contact center technology had previously achieved.

No other technology has impacted the contact center more than Social Media.

No longer could companies sit idly by behind their contact center shields where so many customer complaints fell into an unknown void with little to no action. Finally, the customer had a voice and once they figured out what they could do with social media, they used it.

In researching a bit for this post, I found that Social Media has actually been around for some time but it wasn't until 2005-2006 when YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter came on the scene giving customers the tools they needed to have their voice truly heard. Since then, things have been different.

That's been nearly 15 years and we've seen companies scrambling to adopt even more technologies (VoC, OmniChannel ACD, Speech Analytics, Video, etc. ), creating new positions (Chief Customer Office, Chief Experience Office, social media support agent, to name a few) and even changing who the contact center rolls up to (Chief Marketing Office) in order to refocus the organization on thinking about the customer first. These are all the beginning steps of converting from an inside-out company (where you think about the company first) to an outside-in company (where you think about the customer first).

What do you think? Where would you place Social Media as a technology that has impacted the contact center the most? There are certainly many, many others, including the ACD, IVR, Speech Rec, Fax, Chat, VoC Surveys and others. What would you rank as #1?