TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

Clearly, the Contact Center Solutions Community is off to a roaring start as the news indicates.  From advice to a series of new capabilities, partnerships, certifications and customer wins, 2013 is shaping up nicely.

Community sponsor, Interactive Intelligence is good place to start in our review. In case you missed it, they have announced the preliminary agenda for their forthcoming Interactions 2013 event May 13-16 in Indianapolis. Mark your calendars, and hopefully I will get to see you there.

 Before getting to the rest of the news, I also wanted to draw attention to the fact that Interactive Intelligence’s CEO Interactive Intelligence CEO Dr. Donald Brown (News - Alert) was honored recently by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels with the prestigious 2012 Sagamore of the Wabash award. Congratulations to Dr. Brown.

News

Now for the rest of the news. Voxware had two items of note this past week. It along with LogFire is now targeting helping companies with a combined voice and warehouse management solution.   The company also announced that is has recently upgraded its Voice Management Suite to enhance its management console, VoxPilot and dashboard functionality. 

In other industry news on the business of the business:

• Nuance Communications, Inc. unveiled a program for international contact center solutions providers, known as Nuance Connection, which offers sophisticated voice and natural language solutions.  
• Center Partners earned a certification from J.D. Power and Associates in the Certified Call Center Program for Outsourcers.  
• Intorrent Technologies moved to a customized contact center facility in a bid to augment its technical support and development staff.
• Enghouse Interactive (News - Alert) introduced an improved professional attendant operator console.
• Infosys’ (News - Alert) new AssistEdge is aimed at improving overall customer experience by addressing contact center agent productivity and integrating service-related activities across all channels.
• Noble Systems (News - Alert) upgraded Noble Maestro 7.1 for contact center management.
• Digital DataVoice and VHT have a new solution that bridges the gap between self service and agent-based interactions. 
• Trendium announced changes to its approach to the marketing of its Customer Experience Assurance (CEA) and Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions.   

In addition to the news, as has been the case for the past few weeks, our community has had no shortage of trends and advice. The one that struck me as very interesting was results from a study by Acquity that showed that big brands were not doing a great job on outreach in terms of their leveraging social media, particularly Twitter. Two other items involving critical elements of agent interactions with customers are also worth a read. A study by AchieveGlobal ,that TMCnet Contributor Tracey Schelmetic reviewed, says that the best customer support calls may depend on emotion.  She also examined the implications of a new research report from Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group that focused on the importance of companies looking at the right metrics for assessing the quality of the customer experience being provided.  

There was also an item that is worth spending some time on by TMCnet Special GuestNitin Mahajan, Lead Product Manager of Customer Service Experience, Infosys about the role of your contact center agent being much more than you thing.

Finally, there was an piece by Jacqueline Lee about how contact centers are proving a valuable source of employment for veterans of the U.S. armed forces.

Weekend reading suggestions  

Don’t forget 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 1.30PM EST and you can click here for more details. And, please avail yourself not just of the links on the community to a variety of extremely valuable white papers, demos, videos, etc., but also review our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology.