TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

The contact center solutions community is brimming with news as we start the New Year. From industry trends to regulations to new capabilities to the prospects for growth, the news spanned almost every sector of the community, as well as the globe.

Before getting to the hard news, a few items that are indicators of what to come are worth mentioning.  Community host Interactive Intelligence announced the preliminary agenda for its forthcoming Interactions 2013 event May 13-16 in Indianapolis, so mark your calendars and make your plans. 

I also wanted to highlight a few items that contain interesting insights and advice that are worth a read:

• Frequent contributor of features to the community, TMCnet Tracey Schelmetic has a really good piece on contact center solution trends for 2013.
• Tracey even had a follow-up that seeks to answer the question, “Is Your Contact Center Ready for 2013's Challenges?”
• Special guest, Benjamin Lederer, senior product manager, Sage North America, also raised and answer a very important question in his post, So You Can Access Your Organization's Social Media Data - Now What? 
• Find out why despite all of the hype, strangely contact centers are missing an opportunity and are still largely in the dark when it comes to social media. 
• The cloud in some way, shape or form is likely in your future if you have not made the move which is why the latest analysis of cloud adoption from research firm Current Analysis (News - Alert) is something worth your attention.

On the international news front, there were regulatory developments of interest. First, in the U.K., regulatory Ofcom is hot on putting an end to annoying telemarketing calls. And in Israel, there are new regulations on call waiting. This one is interesting because the new law states that in the event of a waiting time longer than three minutes, the customer must have the option to leave a message, and to be called back by the company in maximum three hours. 

 On the business of the business, items of note include:

• Voxeo (News - Alert) renamed its award-winning flagship VoiceObjects customer experience platform to Voxeo CXP.  
• In Greeneville, South Carolina, TD Bank's regional operations hub contact center renovations are coming to a close, so hiring is set to begin at this 300,000-square-foot campus. 
• A new report from Aspect (News - Alert) Software focused on the fact that smart grid deployments are going to necessitate that utilities in the U.K. implement aggressive unified communications (UC) strategies, and do so sooner rather than later to assure their customer have better interactive relationships going forward.  
• SEO and reputation management company 3ish.com has opened a satellite location for call center services division in Charlotte, North Carolina.
• Cloud Extend, a customization add-on software solution for various management designs, announced it improved customer service levels by 90 percent. 
• Startel’s Windows-based Call Management Center has been enhanced with four new reporting capabilities.  

I have saved this item for last this week. Software Advice, in conjunction with CIO, recently conducted an experiment using Twitter (News - Alert). Software Advice employees sent customer service tweets via their personal accounts to 14 leading consumer brands in seven industries. The goal was to test the speed, efficiency and quality of the brands' replies to tweeting customers.  Overall, companies responded to only 14 percent of the Tweets. This to say the least is discouraging given consumer shifts to using social media to contact companies whose products and services they use. Let’s hope that 2013 is the year the enterprises that are customers of contact center solutions providers, understand that they can no longer avoid, and should embrace, multichannel interactions and in particular need to pay very close attention to social media.  

Weekend Reading Suggestions  

Before getting to the weekend reading suggestions, first a pitch to participate in the webinar, Key Contact Center Trends and Priorities for the Upcoming Year – How you can be ready. It will be taking place on January 29 at 1.30 p.m. EST and you can click here for more details. And, speaking of webinars, if you missed this you might go into the archives and take a look and listen to the 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!  

Obviously, you are invited to use the links on the community to a variety of extremely valuable white papers, demos, videos, etc., and don’t forget to review our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology.

 Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.