Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

April 18, 2014

On behalf of ContactCenterSolutions I’d like to wish a happy holiday to those celebrating Passover and Easter this week.  Interestingly, despite the short week there was no shortage of news in the Contact Center Solutions Community. 

Before getting to the news there are two reminder articles about activities sponsored by community host Interactive Intelligence.  They relate to deadlines for very important events that are coming up at or near the end of this month.  First is for those who are Accounts Receivable Management professionals, if you have not signed up for the webinar, Pitfalls of TCPA, April 29 at 11:30 AM, take note and take action. The second is a reminder that April 30th is the last day you will be able to sign up for the Interactive Intelligence Customer Experience Makeover Contest


Since we are on the subject of our community hosts, it is notable that they have a new partner in Saudi Arabia in the form of AWAL, the IT subsidiary of Saudi Telecom Company (STC).  And, if you are going to Indianapolis in early June for INTERACTIONS 2014, you should consider participating in the CX Hot Trends Symposium, which along with other hot topics will be offering tips on how to embrace proactive customer care. In fact, check out the power-packed agenda that includes numerous recognized industry experts discussing the challenges and opportunities that are driving industry transformation. 

In other industry news a place to start is with the continued expansion of the community globally, and I do mean around the world. 

New contact centers included:

  • Namibia’s Erongo Regional Electricity Distributor opened a new contact center which is seen as a critical means for interacting with citizens pre and post natural disasters along with handling issues with electric utility service in general. 
  • Aircraft manufacturer Gulfstream opened a customer support contact center in Hong Kong.   
  • Securus Technologies, a provider of inmate communications services, investigative technologies, corrections/law enforcement/ emergency information technology services, and active global positioning systems (GPS) based offender monitoring devices, announced its plans to hire more people in its Dallas Call Center to further improve their customer service.
  • If you are a contact center professional and think Joplin, Kansas might be a nice place to set down roots, Aegis Communications is growing and is looking to hire up to 150 full-time people in the next few months.

As usual there was industry recognition of note as well this week.  In fact, Revana, the growth services division of TeleTech Holdings, Inc., was recognized with Sales Outsourcing Provider of the Year award, in the 9th Annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The company has won the Sales Outsourcing Provider of the Year award for third consecutive year. Apart from the Gold Stevie Award, Revana also won Silver awards both in the Online Sales and Telesales categories for its partnership with Google and another global client.  And, mplsystems' IntelligentContact won Top Technology honors in Call Centre Helper's 2014 Contact Centre Technology award.

The rest of the news included an acquisition, new features, advice, and even an odd business practice for managing employees. Depending on your interests check out:

  •  Hospitality industry solutions provider IHS GmbH acquired central reservations specialists InnLink LLC.   
  • OTRS Group has enhanced its customer support software by adding a new OTRS Feature Add-On "Ticket Allocation" feature—good news for service organizations and contact centers that want to assign tickets automatically. 
  • The insights from a guest post on Asterisk developer Digium's blog by Loway founder Lorenzo Emilitri who says the open source PBX works great in heavy trafficked contact center environments.
  • Special guest contributor Shaheen Haque, Territory Manager (Middle East & Turkey), Interactive Intelligence provided interesting insights in to how to excel at mobile customer service in the Middle East.

I saved the item about employee management for last because it is about Amazon.com and, at a time when companies are looking for skilled employees Amazon is actually benefitting so much from its automation processes that it is offering them monetary incentives to quit as a means to right-size their fulfillment center workforce.  Each year the retail e-commerce giant plans to offer its fulfillment-center employees a $2,000 bonus if they decide to quit. It increases $1,000 each year until it caps at $5,000. 

Weekend Reading

I realize it is a holiday weekend, but if you need a contact center information fix, our newly re-designed home page is the way to get easy access to the constantly updated new eBooks, whitepapers, videos, demos, etc.  And, check out our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology — for news and insights on specific areas that you wish to explore.   

Once again, enjoy the holiday weekend and don’t forget to register for the TCPA webinar and the Makeover Contest. 





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