TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

This week wraps up ITEXPO (News - Alert), which took place at the Miami Convention Center in Miami, Florida and showcased some of the most exciting new and updates solutions in the telecom industry, including the call center arena. So first we’ll highlight an announcement made during the show.

Collaborative software solutions company, Acqueon, outlined newly-designed solutions and partnerships for businesses to choose from in an effort to create a one-stop-shop contact center with designated partners and solution packages. Acqueon has strong relationships with technology partners around the world, including Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, Voxeo and Dialogic (News - Alert), and demonstrated a number of its products and multichannel solutions at ITEXPO – in particular, its SIP-based contact center solution.

Another important player made an announcement in the call center sphere this week. BT (News - Alert), the U.K.’s largest telecom company, announced new capabilities for its BT Contact portfolio, which was designed to make organizations easier to do business with, while removing costs and complexity from their contact center operations and enabling “omnichannel” customer service. The latest iteration of BT's cloud-based contact center solution was designed to help organizations keep ahead of multichannel trends in customer service – customer service delivered over multiple channels, but connected together within the organization to provide a seamless customer experience – regardless of channel used.

In other product news, Continental Message Solution (CMS) announced a new service package the company says is set to transform how retailers provide live customer support, and plans to return industry to a position where clients are able to take advantage of the order taking call center system, allowing customer interaction during the sales process.

Also this week, intraday management solutions developers at Intradiem unveiled Intradiem 9.0, which helps users come up with a set of rules to easily administer intraday tasks. With the updated solution, users can monitor the number of calls made and send personalized activities straight to agents’ PCs. The task indexing and management feature provided in this updated version is simple to use and it allows the users to deliver sophisticated sequences. Apart from this, they can connect to any data source to provide integrated task management.

This week, a number of companies in the call center space were honored, and we’ll outline some of those events as well.

InfoCision (News - Alert) Management Corp. announced that it has been named one of America’s Top 150 Workplaces by WorkplaceDynamics. The Akron, Ohio-based call center outsourcing company was chosen among 872 organizations with more than 1,000 employees that participated in regional top workplaces programs.

Teleservices giant Sitel revealed that it has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant in the 2012 Customer Management Contact Centre BPO report by Gartner (News - Alert). The annual report evaluates dealers and vendors on a specific series of strict criteria related to both company vision and the ability to implement it.

TMCnet also examined a new global survey from BroadSoft this week, which found that users are seeking mobile unified communications to keep up with their communication needs. The survey was responded to by more than 700 users in both the United States and Europe, and found that there are similar communications woes on both sides of the pond. Most employees cited waiting for information as their biggest frustration, although nearly as many felt that finding and contacting someone is equally frustrating.

Finally, TMCnet examined, based on new research, who makes the best call center agent: an introvert or an extrovert? The answer is somewhat surprising.

That’s all for this week in contact center solutions. Enjoy your weekend.