Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

ContactCenterSolutions's Contact Center Week In Review

November 16, 2007

Lots of contact center news this week. From product releases, to the latest research, ContactCenterSolutions has got you covered on all things call center- related in this week's jam-packed news review.
 
This week, international contact center consultancy, The Taylor Reach Group, announced new On-Demand services for call and contact center operators.

 
"We have developed a business model with a number of our clients that involve them calling us each month, just before they meet with senior management to discuss their performance and/or review their plans and upcoming activities. The calls allow the clients to get an independent perspective on their services, performance, budgets or plans," the company's CEO, Colin Taylor explained.
 
Virtual call center solutions company Sentillion also made headlines this week with highlights from their 3Q07 achievements.

For the third quarter of 2007, the company added six new single sign-on/virtualized remote access customers—bringing the number of live users of Sentillion solutions to more than 335,000. The company also noted a total of 85,100 new user licenses.
 
Contact center software provider Altitude Software said their expanded operation in India, "a key market in the global contact center outsourcing industry, due to the country's burgeoning number of outsourced call center seats," is the result of an expanding Altitude partner network and a growing customer base.
 
After recognizing strong growth from just a year of direct presence in the Indian Market, Sanjay Sapru, India Country Head, Altitude Software, said the company is on track to achieving a significant market share with contact center outsourcers in India.
 
In more contact center news, ShoreTel and Syntellect Inc. a provider of enterprise-class contact center solutions, have announced the signing of a strategic distribution agreement.
 
As per the agreement, ShoreTel will offer Syntellect’s contact center solution in conjunction with its Pure IP Unified Communications system to ShoreTel resellers globally.
 
Steve Timmerman, vice president of marketing at ShoreTel commented, “As we have grown our position within the large enterprise market, we have experienced demand for more advanced contact center applications. With Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management solution and ShoreTel’s Pure IP Unified Communications system, we are able to offer these customers a large, distributed communications solution with the most sophisticated contact center capabilities.”

In more IP contact center news, a survey conducted by Contact Babel has unveiled an increasing usage of IP infrastructure in today's contact centers.
 
"Although IP implementation had a relatively slow start, survey results point towards IP being an integral and strategic part of the contact center now and in the future," ContactCenterSolutions's Susan Campbell wrote.
 
"To try and take advantage of new technology offerings, many contact centers are becoming IP-enabled. Such a move provides benefits including the use of common protocol; the ability to set up virtual contact centers and employ home-based agents; promoting the successful take-up and management of multimedia customer interactions; and so much more. "

Also this week, an interview with Five9's chief technology officer Jim Dvorkin highlighted the importance of the SMB market to contact center solutions providers.
 
For IP contact center software vendors, the SMB market offers a huge growth potential.
 
When asked what smaller companies are able to do with the newer SMB-targeted solutions that they couldn't do a few years ago, Dovkrin said:
 
"With the continued adoption of VoIP and service-oriented architecture, and greater usage of standards such as VXML and SIP, call center solutions for SMBs can retain attractive price points and also provide a broader set of features such as call recording, text-to-speech, and integration to enterprise applications even when utilizing hosted software."
 
Click HERE for the rest of the interview.
 
Contact centers and their increasing push to "go green" was also a focus this week as the results of an 'On the Conference Floor' survey of senior managers and executives attending this year's CCA Annual Convention, on behalf of customer management consultancy and solutions provider, Softlab,  offered insight into the reason why green contact centers are on the rise.
 
"With productivity and revenue gains seen as the most important drivers for implementing a green policy - by 26%and 24%of respondents respectively - companies do want to be seen to be taking steps to reduce their impact on the environment, but only if it makes commercial and financial business sense,” Softlab senior consultant, Lisa Olafsdottir was quoted as saying.
 
That’s all for this week's contact center-related news highlights. As always, be sure to check back with ContactCenterSolutions for all the latest in contact center news as it happens.
 
Until then, be sure to check out:
 
 
 
 
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Stefania Viscusi is an established writer and avid reader. To see more of her articles, please visit Stefania Viscusi’s columnist page.



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