TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

With the beginning of the New Year, not unexpectedly the news in the Contact Center Solutions Community revolves around a host of items relating to resolutions and advice. Thus, in no particular order in terms of importance to making your 2013 a success the following are recommended for review:

• A good place to start is with the contribution of TMCnet Special Guest Anthony Smith, founder and CEO of Insightly. To say the least his comments on the importance of next generation CRM capabilities for SMBs are insightful.
• Gobal Devanahalli, vice president – Products, Platforms and Solutions for the Energy, Utilities, Communication & Services Business Unit of Infosys (News - Alert) Limited, weighed in with a great checklist on the 10 ways to transform your customer service experience in 2013.
• In fact, the importance of a good customer experience and having the right strategy to produce it was the focus of an item by TMCnet Contributing Writer Joe Rizzo.
• In one of the more provocative articles, a new study from Globo found that if employers had strict explicit guidelines on the BYOD use in the workplace employees would comply.

Seems like training and HR issues are going to be big in 2013 if the following are an indication:

• TMCnet Contributor Tracey Schelmetic focused on the need for making a resolution to upgrade your agent training capabilities.
• We also featured an article about finding the right balance in the contact center between flexibility and discipline to obtain optimal agent performance.
• And, online capabilities are even entering the agent hiring process.

In other industry news the business of the business is off to a nice start. This is reflected in deals, new capabilities and recognition:

• Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable announced the extension of its billing and customer care contract with CSG International through March 2017.
• Analysys (News - Alert) Mason recognized Oracle as the best company offering customer care systems across the globe. Plus, Oracle (News - Alert) also made news by enhancing its Customer Experience Cloud with the acquisition of Eloqua (News - Alert).
• Anthem Blue Cross revealed that patients will be able to use video to interact with a doctor online starting in Spring.
• Startup IVR company Exotel noted that business has been booming for the last two years.
• CoreMatric, a cloud computing consulting company also reported robust activity.

Weekend reading suggestions  

If you want to catch up on additional industry developments this weekend, the community resources are rich in content and are constantly being updated with new videos, whitepapers on a variety of subjects.   

I continue to suggest that you catch up on the recent webinar, Best Practices for Evaluating a New Contact Center Solution: Leading Analysts Share Their Insight and Research, as well as the webinar, The Call Center is Dead, Long Live the Contact Center!Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology. if you were not able to join them.  And, while I happened to have written the piece, I think you will enjoy Customer Experience, Mobile Ads, Ecosystems and Dwindling Retail Margins - 2013 will be a Watershed. Plus, please don’t’ forget to review our affiliated channels —