McGee-Smith's journey reference brought me back to a conversation I had late last year with a couple of folks from Avaya -- Val Matula, senior director and head of Emerging Products and Technology, and Karen Hardy, senior director, product management. In the wake of Avaya's " era of engagement " analyst briefing, we talked about how the common call center is maturing into a customer engagement center using next-generation capabilities enabled by Avaya's open development platform. Context in Motion In general, companies know they need better information on their customers and, when those customers reach out, they need to understand the context of that interaction. Avaya talks about this in terms of the "contextual customer experience." "A company has to be able to figure out how to move all of the contextual information about a customer who is logged into its website and does a click-to-call or click-to-video from that website to the agent," she said. "As you learn how to do that, you move from a call center to a contact center to something that's contextual, as well. Ultimately, yes, that becomes a customer engagement center."