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March 13, 2014

At ITEXPO, Bolder Thinking Allows Contact Centers to Take Advantage of WebRTC


At the recent ITEXPO event held in Miami in February, TMC’s Erik Linask took a moment to sit down with Steve Jackson, VP of marketing and sales for cloud-based call center solutions provider Bolder Thinking.  As companies today strive to outdo their competitors in terms of the quality of customer support they offer, many are looking to technologies such as the open, browser-based audio or videoconferencing standard WebRTC to offer that extra edge.

Linask asked Jackson what effects WebRTC might have on the contact center in the future.

“It reminds me a great deal of when browsers came out,” said Jackson. “All of a sudden, you had a new, simple interface. Now what we see is that if you apply that at the end customer point, it makes a lot of sense. To go to a large infrastructure and say ‘OK, throw it all out and put in WebRTC’ doesn’t make a lot of sense. So we built a product that gives you the ability to enable that on your website, solve the customer immediacy and service problem but leave your existing infrastructure in place. And that’s a different means of thought.”

With a simple widget on their website, what the contact center sees at their end when a customer initiates a contact is a phone call, and if they choose they can enable their computer-telephony integration (CTI) connection to provide them with all of the context information regarding what that customer has been looking at on the Web site. Jackson says it’s a simple process and transitional, since most contact centers cannot afford to throw their existing infrastructure away.

Jackson notes that this simpler, one-way RTC idea with the “widget” has the potential to increase adoption rates in the contact center industry.

“What we’re hearing from the market is that the thought of replacing massive amounts of infrastructure is highly unattractive to large retailers, large customer service providers, outsourcers who are trying to bring new value for their customers. [Bolder Thinking’s solution] is inexpensive and it’s easy, but if I throw away all my other infrastructure, I’m lost. So we’re getting a lot of positive traction in the marketplace.”

Many shoppers who browse a retailer’s website often abandon their purchases because they have unresolved questions or issues. Solutions such as the one from Bolder Thinking allow a customer very fast access to an agent who can resolve the customer’s issue quickly and retain the sale. Customers don’t need to pick up the telephone and initiate a call to a contact center agent who won’t understand the context of their question.  According to Jackson, there is a big opportunity for both the customer and the company, and it was gained with very little effort or expense.

For more information about TMC’s WebRTC CONFERENCE & EXPO event taking place in Atlanta in June, click here.




Edited by Cassandra Tucker
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