From the Publisher
A Call from the 21st Century is intended to be a strategic plan for senior executives who are responsible for determining the integrated role that the technologies of customer contact will play in the future of their enterprise. The company call center is no longer just a customer service opportunity; it is a stakeholder handshake at your company's front door. As the blinding light of the industrial age tunnel races toward us at fiber-optic speeds, is it any wonder that most executives have an uncertain, restless, and discontented grasp of the technologies of tomorrow? As executives strive to envision the role of technology, A Call from the 21st Century provides valuable insight into the expectations of the information age.
From the Back Cover
Your company may be on the right technological track, but if you are not moving fast enough, you will become road-kill on the information superhighway. Focusing on the technology of customer contact as a locus of this dramatic revolution, telecommunications researcher and futurist Paul Anderson examines four critical trends:
-Digitization of the global economy -Evolution (as opposed to revolution) of the simple telephone -Ascension of "knowbots", a new class of super-skilled knowledge worker -One-to-one marketing and the technologies of dialogue
A Call from the 21st Century examines the evolution of communication from the limited, narrow-band technologies of today (such as fax and ISDN) to ATM, Asynchronous Transfer Mode-based, broadband technologies of tomorrow... and most importantly, the two- to five-year middle-band in between.
Call centers are the proving ground for technological convergence of consumer mass media appliances outside your company with the information systems inside your company.
Anderson poses a future scenario in which client/server-based architectures provide the most cost-effective, reliable, and scalable technology for sustaining the intimate customer contact imperative for all companies that expect to take calls into the 21st century.
As the blinding light at the end of the industrial age tunnel races toward us at digital speeds, is it any wonder that most strategic technologists have an uncertain, restless, and discontented grasp of the technologies of tomorrow?
