Happy Fourth of July holiday to U.S. enthusiasts of the Contact Center Solutions Community, and a happy weekend to everyone else. The fact that this is a short week in the U.S. does not mean that there was a shortage of interesting developments this past week in the community. In fact, quite the contrary happens to be the case.
A good place to start is with the recognition given to community host Interactive Intelligence, which for the sixth straight year has been place in Gartner’s Leaders Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure.
Next, you might wish to look at my observations on the question as to whether your organization needs a customer experience C-level. This has been a subject of much discussion, along with the fact that such positions are now one of the fastest growing ones in organizations around the world. And, while the answer to the question is yes, it comes with significant qualifications since appointing such an individual without CEO support and having them vested with authority and accountability can be dangerous to your corporate health.
And, speaking of customer experiences, you should find the posting on how and why insurance company Legal & General has decided to train its Insurance Customer Service Division’s 1,300 employees in what is calling customer empathy and engagement.
This week also saw two different items on social media and its impact on customer service. The first item highlighted the fact that business that have used social media to be more responsive when engaging their customers have seen positive impacts. The second item dealt with a survey done of U.K. retailers that highlighted why investing in omni-channel channels is great but making sure they are increasing agent responsiveness and providing a consistent user experience is paramount and in the U.K. this is not being done well.
The previous item is also a good companion piece to one done by ContactCenterSolutions Contributing writer Lavanya Rathnam on how implementation of a sound customer experience management (CEM) solution can have significant impacts on improving customer loyalty.
The rest of the news this week as usual was a mixture of people and even places on the move, new capabilities and delighted customers. Places moving include Voxware, which is moving its U.K. offices to London in response growing customer interest in cloud-based voice management solutions. On the people front, in our Comings & Goings we noted that contact center solution provider VOX Network Solutions recently appointed industry veteran Chanley Geveshausen director of contact center solutions.
In other industry news:
Finally, as quality of interaction is a key performance indicator (KPI) that should matter, it should be an item of more than passing interest that SpeechStorm and Cyara have collaborated to produce S-Connect for testing customer experience. The solutions leverages the power and capabilities of the speech-enabled IVR capabilities in SpeechStorm’s environment, and imports generated test cases directly into the Cyara platform for testing. .
Weekend Reading
Remember that we have recently re-designed our community home page to make navigating to the information and insights you are interested even easier. It is your gateway to constantly updated 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 area of interest.
In addition, if you were unable to join us, register to watch the achieved copy of the June 24 webinar, “Business Process Automation Best Practices For Improving Customer Complaint Resolution.”