WebRTC is poised to change the contact center. It will lead to a better user experience for both agents and customers. In fact, WebRTC can already be found in many contact centers today.
“Now it really is mainstream…2014 is going to be the year you are going to see massive deployment of RTC-style applications,” Richard McFarland, CEO of Voice4Net, told TMC’s Rachel Ramsey in an interview at ITEXPO Miami.
He added that WebRTC “is a real awesome technology.” It started out as a peer-to-peer browser communications and then became much more. “We were able to design and develop as vendors a server-based engine that would take the browser-based communication…and tie that into a network,” he said. “Now all of a sudden you can deploy it in a lot of different places, contact centers being one of them, which I think will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the new RTC technology.”
In addition, end users will find that communications on demand will become much easier. “If you are surfing a website, for example...you can literally just click…and begin talking,” he said.
For developers, WebRTC is “awesome,” McFarland adds. It is standard HTML5, Java Script type-programming on the front tend. “That opens you up to a whole new world of developers,” he said. “So it’s going to decrease costs because those types of developers are very numerous and very available. And much less expensive.”
There will also be advantages with graphical capabilities. “I can take advantage of the beauty and the graphics and the experience of what the users really want, and still give them the communications capability,” he added.
“This makes it so you can have one nice graphical, scrolling experience,” he said, “and move pieces of information interactively around that you need on demand. It is a rich Web experience.”
And as far as advice goes, McFarland says those businesses considering adding WebRTC need to have a good underlying architecture. That is an important first step.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
