We've all read about Generation Y or Z, the permanently 'connected' generation of consumers, so used to social networking and advanced technology that it will presumably not countenance dealing with an organisation in old-fashioned ways, such as speaking over the phone. When, in 2008, BT and Nortel jointly produced a research paper on changing consumer attitudes to contact centres, among the most striking findings was one that questioned this traditional assumption about young versus older consumers.

The Fragvergence paper showed in fact that younger consumers are actually more likely to want to use the phone in the future than their older counterparts.  Nearly three quarters (73 per cent) of 16-24 year olds questioned in the US and UK rated voice calls to a call centre as the channel they expect to use most in the future - a higher proportion than any other age range.

The instinctively sensible prediction that younger people will self-service in the future is perhaps not so sensible after all.

What this little example shows is that, when it comes to consumer attitudes, making predictions about future trends is, at best, precarious. Trends are changing all the time and making assumptions is dangerous (insofar as organisations may very well base expensive investment decisions on them) and, arguably, pointless.

Pointless because the prevalent winds of change in the contact centre world are carrying us towards new models and pricing structures, underpinned by the latest technology, that are all focused firmly on flexibility. The type of flexibility that means it no longer really matters what the future holds in terms of changing consumer attitudes towards how they interact with your organisation. The type of flexibility that will allow you to scale up and down and bolt on new channel offerings at the click of a mouse and not have to worry about how it all works.

Most large contact centres have traditionally been designed to handle peak demand. As a consequence, significant levels of redundancy were built into the contact centre model - but this, particularly in recessionary times, is unpalatable to shareholders and investors. Why, they are perfectly right to ask, are we running our major contact centre operations under capacity, most of the time?

This, along with the continual evolution and emergence of new channels for customer communication - voice, email, social media, text, web - has made building flexibility into the customer contact model increasingly challenging for anyone trying to plan ahead. The age of making a five or ten-year plan for customer contact strategy is, however, drawing to a close. The innovation that rests behind next generation contact centres is that you don’t have to care about the ‘context’ – changeable customer demands or technologies: as a hosted solution that can be procured by the minute, it handles whatever you need without you having to worry.

In this uncertain economic climate, being better placed to handle uncertainties, such as mergers and acquisitions, fluctuating staff numbers and changes in business direction is vital.  Realise that you can achieve this kind of agility while simultaneously improving customer service - without expensive capital outlay - and the case for a hosted solution becomes even more compelling.  This is why, although premises-based infrastructure remains dominant today, the adoption of hosted contact centre solutions is accelerating at well over 20 per cent a year in North America, for example (Market Trends: Forecast for North American Hosted Contact Center Market, 2007-2013).

The public telephone network is the simplest example of a hosted solution. A carrier, or third party, provides the infrastructure to which you can connect for service at anytime, anywhere, using a whole range of devices and features.  A hosted contact centre service works in the same way. A third party provides the infrastructure, including the communications network, the call centre technology and the processing power.  Organisations choose the features they need, the number of licenses they require, and employ the agents who can connect to the service at anytime, anywhere, through a variety of devices.

The next few years are going to see the hosted solution become more powerful than ever.  All the obvious benefits - no requirement for capital investment in initial hardware, predictability of operating expenses, reduced need for IT support, greater agility and flexibility in terms of capacity - will remain.  But there is an exciting number of new pricing models emerging for hosted solutions that will give organisations greater control than ever over how they interact with customers and how they evaluate the success of that interaction.

In 2010, there is a new opportunity for customer service, marketing and IT decision-makers, along with procurement departments, to review how they measure the return on investment for customer contact services. Most global organisations require a portfolio of customer contact solutions designed around specific tasks, campaigns or customer requirements.  Purchasing decision-makers need to be aware of the variety of solutions on offer, including the ways these solutions can be priced.

There is a growing demand for pay-as-you-use customer contact services, as the most sophisticated organisations have seen this model as a way to drive better value from their contact centre partners, and to avoid major capital expenditure on systems implementations and upgrades.  But there remains a gulf between those organisations able to measure and forecast the ROI on pay-as-you-go solutions and those whose knowledge extends only to services sold on a more traditional basis.

The different options are explored in full in BT's latest white paper, Buying flexibility: a guide to the new customer contact landscape, but, in a nutshell, organisations should be looking forward to paying for their contact centre not just on a per licence per year basis, but being able to pay per hour, or minute or even per successful customer transaction.

What is exciting about the models that are emerging is that they all lead to one thing - making the contact centre something that delivers measurable ROI. Historically, the contact centre has been perceived as something peripheral to the successful operation of an organisation; a cost that is necessary only insofar as it can be contained within acceptable boundaries.  Now it is becoming the pulse of an organisation.  It is and will continue to become the hub for complex issues that should be fed into, for example, the new product development process.  Companies are able to listen to their customers as never before.  And whether or not they are taking advantage of this capability today, they will have to do so in the future.

There is no need to worry about predicting the future in order to shape your contact centre strategy. And, in fact, you shouldn't. Don't bet your business on a prediction.  With the flexibility that is being built into hosted solutions now, you don't need to know anything about the future - other than that your contact centre is going to deliver you more value than in the past.