TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

This week was awash in contract center solutions items, spanning all aspects of the industry. From financial results to the increased importance of social media integration to analytics, there’s a lot to digest.

Possibly the most interesting development was the first-quarter financial results of community sponsor Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert).   While in an initial review the results were modest, the growth of the company’s revenues from cloud-based contact center solutions, and its emergence as an important player in large enterprise deals, positions them well for the future. It also validates the heavy investments they have made in R&D in general and in the Cloud.

Industry buzz

Considering the attention that social media has, the impact it has on the nature of customer interactions and overall customer experience is a subject of seemingly unending developments. TMCnet Contributor Tracey Schelmetic starts us off with an interesting item on social media’s growing importance, “Cooperation Between Marketing and the Contact Center Even More Critical, Thanks to Social Media,” that should more than pique your curiosity.

As TMCnet Contributor Calcin Azuri noted in a feature on Social Dynamics, the company has launched a new way to monitor the mass of conversations happening around various social media platforms.  Multi-channel marketing and analytics were also the focus of our feature on Infor’s recent release of the Infor10 CRM Enterprise Interaction Advisor (Epiphany) next-best-action engine. It is designed as a part of the Infor10 CRM Enterprise (Epiphany) Suite, and allows marketers to predict customer behavior and preferences, based on the customer's past responses and real-time activity.

Deployments by customers of new capabilities were also a highlight of activity this week:

• ExponentHR has deployed MaxACD Contact Center Solutions for Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync.
• The U.S. supermarket chain Kroger Co. (#1 in store locations and #2 in retail volume) announced plans to partner with Koncert IT to create a new consumer affairs pharmacy call center in Hamilton, Ohio. the second-place general retailer in the country, just after Wal-Mart.
• Nottingham, England-based outsourced call center services provider Answer-4u has won a contract to provide 24-hour-a-day contact center services to lift company Morris Vermaport, headquartered in Nottingham but has operations in both Scarborough and London.

Certifications were also popular. KnoahSoft (News - Alert), a provider of VoIP applications for contact centers, announced that its workforce optimization (WFO) solution, Harmony, is compatible with Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.0.1 using Avaya Aura Application Enablement Services 6.1.1.  And Chinese networking and telecom giant Huawei, a platinum-level member of the Oracle (News - Alert) PartnerNetwork (OPN), announced this week it has achieved Oracle Validated Integration of its contact center solution.

 Analytics and compliance caught the attention of TMCnet’s contributors. 

• Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C. The MSP has launched its Desktop Activity BI solution for analyzing desktop activity and application performance data in order to provide better insight into trends, best practices and areas that need improvement.
• Compliance became an issue in the U.K., as Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the U.K. communications industries, announced it has levied its first fine on a company for breaking the country's 2010 revised rules on call abandonment in a call center. The agency is charging Homeserve, a provider of emergency home repair services, a fine of £750,000 ($1.2 million) for making 36,000 calls that breached regulations, including 15,000 silent calls.
• Contact center solutions provider Rostrvm (News - Alert) Solutions revealed a new tool to help companies with outbound dialing compliance.

Finally, while Spring is in the air in the Northern hemisphere, there is no reason not to take your tablet outside to enjoy the weather and catch up on all of the resources this community has to offer – the free Contact Center Solutions eNewsletter, videos, podcasts, eBooks and the links to valuable white papers. 

Be sure to click on the link to Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS QUick Spin so you can experience in real-time communications in the cloud, and check out the latest contribution in the Ask the Expert area, where special guests Kyle Lyons, managing director at Ponvia Technology and Gina Clarkin, product manager at Interactive Intelligence, gather to discuss “The Evolving Role of Process Automation and the Customer Service Experience.”