The Internet of Things (IoT) has rapidly become one of the most familiar, and maybe should be phrased most hyped — expressions across business and technology. What is crazy, is the hype, is entirely justified and is backed up by the volume of data. Over 44 zettabytes of data will be created by seven billion people and 30 billion IoT devices connected to the internet by 2020, according to EMC. 


One zettabyte is equal to a billion terabytes and 2.8 zettabytes produced in 2012.

• One zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes.
• One exabyte is 1,000 petabytes.
• One petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.
• One terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.

To meet their needs, enterprises need to focus on a number of core areas such as agile innovation, delivering real-time experiences and predicting new ways to serve customers. Gartner recently completed a IoT survey of business and IT executives noted manufacturing and retail are two sectors with particularly high expectations of the IoT. I thought of twelve IoT basic fields (I’m sure there are 100s more, but just there twelve will definitely revolutionize the traditional way of doing things.

1. IoT in Home Automation
2. IoT in Industrial Machines
3. IoT in Connected cars
4. IoT in Healthcare
5. IoT in Sports and Fitness
6. IoT in Wearables
7. IoT in Agriculture
8. IoT in Cities
9. IoT in Utilities
10. IoT in Traffic
11. IoT in Security
12. IoT in Identification

Clearly, the IoT will have a great impact on the economy by transforming many enterprises into digital businesses and facilitating new business models, improving efficiency and generating new forms of revenue. However, the ways in which BPOs can actualize any benefits will be diverse and, in some cases, painful. Enterprise Contact Centers and BPOs will need to make plans and preparations now or risk being left behind by their faster-moving competitors.

Every day our CSRs still fill out forms manually, restate the obvious on a call or embark on redundant data entry of information for the millionth time. These changes will lead to major opportunities for contact centers with OmniChannel with A.I.

Here are 10 examples for where IoT needs Contact Centers to make M2H connection:
1.     IoT software updates (call center will call IT team and schedule downtime needed time to update/upgrade (car, factory, oil drill, etc)
2.     IoT reporting outage (high value SLA (service level agreement) triggers an alert where call center must call human if email or SMS are ignored)
3.     IoT maintenance reminders (Customer service can call with emails have been ignored)
4.     IoT non use (Contact centers can proactively call a customer with instruction that were too difficult, or change dissatisfaction with satisfaction)
5.     IoT usage (Manufactures will pay for BPOs to design workflow based on: rpm, height, speed, location, distance, temp, etc)
6.     IoT safe driving (trucking companies need a workflow built to better understand: speed, breaking, acceleration, top speeds, average speed)
7.     IoT consumption (Copy machine contact center can call about a new copier based on actual usage. BPOs can design workflow based on: amount used, how much in inventory, Amount of customer’s inventory, days before reorder)
8.     IoT inventory (BPOs can make their customer’s workflows based on: when products go into use, location tracking)
9.     IoT agricultural crops (BPOs can make workflows for Seed, fertilizer and herbicide companies with the following info: water, Ph, root depth, density, color)
10. IoT agricultural livestock (BPOs can make workflows for corporate farms or feed companies based on: weight, height, feed, water)

A savvy BPO would need to find a great OmniChannel Contact Center solutions and make sure IoT is one of their channels. For their Enterprise customers they would create M2M reporting and M2M workflows with A.I. The programming would be billable, high value, professional service hours and ongoing there will be a cost per action. I believe the lack of a compelling business case is a major impediment to IoT growth for enterprises and BPOs. This is not so much because of a lack of a business case, rather than the IoT business cases for BPOs have yet to be discovered.

Please contact us for any call center technology need or telecom challenge.

Thank you,

James Wilson, CEO
Call Center Pros
+1-404 936 4000
james@call-center-pros.comr
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswwilson