Building a smart city from the ground up involves more than technology. The unique issues that a city is trying to solve must be the guiding factor.

Still, smart cities usually have a few things in common:

• Buildings. Smart buildings use heating and cooling systems hooked into the Internet of Things (IoT) to maximize energy efficiency and occupant comfort. They utilize environmentally conscious technologies to keep their occupants and surroundings healthy, insulating businesses with green roofs, generating power with solar windows, optimizing energy use through smart sensors and using plant walls to recycle carbon dioxide. In some cases, multiple buildings can be managed remotely by a single dashboard.
• Transportation. Smart cities use sensors to manage traffic optimization. They also use app-powered smart parking meters to help drivers find parking spots faster, reducing pollution by reducing driving and idling time.
• Utilities. Smart cities use the IoT devices to monitor water and energy use and improve energy consumption patterns through smart outdoor lighting that's responsive to pedestrians and vehicles. Smart meters help citizens consume water and power more efficiently, and smart power grids help municipalities understand energy consumption trends citywide and optimize distribution and pricing.
• Infrastructure. Smart cities improve the stability of buildings and roads by, among other things, deploying sensors to monitor regions prone to earthquakes or detect leaks in the city's water or gas system.

Because a smart city is ultimately about improving its residents' security, health and livelihoods, its infrastructure must always be created with people in mind.

Broadly speaking, a city transitions to a smart infrastructure in three stages:

• Vision. There should be agreed-upon priorities and a holistic perspective that considers the issues and challenges in building smart cities and what overcoming them looks like. There should be a roadmap for the city; realistic, actionable and measurable goals; and a framework for collaboration across city agencies.
• Innovation. Pilot projects assist in identifying the potential benefits of technology that can help improve service delivery, city operations and infrastructure management. They should be aligned with the city's core challenges, required outcomes and operational needs.
• Outcomes. Smart city initiatives should deliver results at scale, and they should have a long-term impact on the quality and efficiency of essential city services, such as public safety, transportation, health, social equity and environmental quality. Innovative technology and approaches to service delivery should boost key city metrics while reducing the digital divide and creating an equitable city.

There's no single blueprint for how to build a smart city—each city will prioritize different challenges, solve them in different ways and follow different timelines. Smart solutions can be whatever a city needs them to be, but their outcomes are often driven by citizen needs, data and municipal policies.

Say, for instance, that you want to improve street safety. Your goal might be to deploy autonomous vehicles to reduce accidents caused by human error. Achieving that vision involves many data-guided steps. Once you know what data you have and what data you need, you can devise a plan to collect what's missing. And you don't have to rely on just your own data—there are lessons to be learned from burgeoning smart cities worldwide.

Poor call center management compromises the customer's contact center experience. The problem could be a lack of properly skilled agents: According to HubSpot, 33% of customers say that waiting on hold for the next available representative is the most frustrating aspect of getting customer service help. It could also be improper routing: Another 33% of HubSpot respondents said that repeating information over and over to multiple support representatives was their biggest frustration.

Customers hate waiting and hate repeating themselves—and inefficient contact centers make them do both. Customers left hanging on the phone grow more frustrated with every passing minute. Make them wait too long, and they'll just hang up, leaving their issues unresolved. Leave enough of those issues unresolved, and a customer might not remain a customer.

Virtual hold technology and queue management systems are designed to streamline contact center workflows. They can adjust resources in response to changing call volumes and better manage traffic spikes to improve the customer experience.

When wait times are long, queue management systems let callers who meet certain criteria hang up and receive a callback once call volume has subsided. The caller is placed in a virtual queue and automatically receives a call when their turn comes up. Businesses can set a wait-time limit, after which the customer is placed into callback, and a limit on the number of callers in a virtual queue. Callers who stay on the line will see shorter wait times, which should reduce the rate of abandoned calls. And deferred calls from peak traffic times can help fill the troughs when new traffic is low.

For Forbes, Christopher Elliot writes that callback systems can also:

• Connect customers to agents who already understand their issue
• Cut time-to-answer and call abandonment rates
• Reduce call length, as customers don't have to spend as much time explaining their problems
• Reduce phone costs, because virtual queueing time does not incur telephone charges

Interest in virtual hold systems continues to grow: The value of the queue management market is projected to reach almost $619 million by 2027.

Deploying virtual hold technology can improve the customer experience and deliver a significant return on investment. Bain & Company asserts that businesses can grow revenues between 4% and 8% above their market when they prioritize the customer service experience.