Contact centers have in recent years focused their resources towards improving first call resolution, a key measurement of service quality. But there's also a new awareness that not all calls can be directly handled by the center's front-line, the tier-1 agents. For many businesses, the nature of the customer interaction has changed from a simple transaction to a collaborative experience in which experts must be brought in and richer media employed. As more transactions shift to the Internet, ordinary consumers are bringing their brick-and-mortar service expectations to the e-commerce world, demanding deeper support for products and greater level of knowledge than contact agents can handle on their own. Agents are more dependent than ever on non-agent knowledge experts. In this new world of online commerce and instant access to skills, call centers of all types are actively looking for ways to improve the customer experience. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a multimedia open-standard protocol, has a crucial role to play in the contact center, allowing customers to interact with agents more intimately through communication across many different types of endpoint devices, including desktop phone, mobile phone, or PC. With its power to track presence and location, a SIP-enabled contact center can pinpoint relevant experts and deliver context to users. Just as email, IM, and the Web helped turn call centers into contact centers, SIP will take contact centers to the next level through smarter and faster interactions. | 
