TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

There is so much to make you aware of for your weekend reading about contact center solutions this week it is hard to know where to begin. Maybe the best place to start is actually looking at what is coming up next week that you absolutely should make note of. As my colleague Tracey Schelmetic featured, community sponsor Interactive Intelligence has a fascinating webinar on July 31 at 11:30 EST, “The New Mobile World: Changing the Way You’ll Service Your Customers.” This is an emerging area of profound potential impact, and is something that if you can’t participate in live you should definitely plan on reviewing when you have a chance.

News

On the news front we had a veritable flood of activity. Leading off are observations about industry trends. These included: 

• Heller Consulting revealing that their recent survey found not-for-profits (NFPs) are starting to realize the value to them of state-of-the-art CRM solutions.
• Contact Center Priorities Revealed by ICMI Study
• Another survey done by ICMI for inContact looked at global contact center industry priorities for this year with social media , mobile and self-service under-scored as driving  contact centers to transform their operations to be more customer centric and responsive.
• TMCnet Contributing Writer Steve Anderson reported on a new Ovum report that is predicting the number of remote workers will double by 2015. 
• The global nature of the business was the focus of a Frost & Sullivan report that showed Asia Pacific has become the preferred off-shore destination for contact center outsourcing lately. The region recorded a 9.7 percent growth in contact center agent seats and is estimated to reach $2.5 million in 2011.

As many of you know TMC is celebrating its 30^th year of covering the customer interactions space, and as Executive Editor Paula Bernier (News - Alert) has been interviewing a variety of industry executives and analysts to get their perspectives on where we have been, are and are headed. This week Paula got the thoughts of:

·         Lisa Stockberger, vice president of Vanguard Communications Corp.

·         David Baker, vice president of sales at Servion Global Solutions, Inc.

·         Alex Bratton, CEO and chief geek of Lextech Global Services     

·         Armin Gebauer, CEO of MobileAware

Since it is financial reporting season, the results from selected companies were also highlighted. Interactive Intelligence reseller Adapt Telephony Services turned in a strong first half, for example. And, despite what the financial analyst portrayal, in looking at the Interactive Intelligence results from a long-term rather than short-term perspective there were more than encouraging things to note. Sales were up despite global economic challenges, and cloud sales in particular are gaining momentum. In addition, the financial guys should have been impressed with the fact that Interactive Intelligence is getting bigger deals (with longer sales cycles and delayed revenue recognition because of the robust cloud services growth) and is investing in the future to sustain a strong competitive position in the cloud space.

In other industry news, things to be cognizant of included:

•  Aspect (News - Alert) ‘s debuts of a new workforce mobile app for call center managers and supervisors so they can keep track of call center performance remotely on smartphones.  
• Portugal's ZON Multimedia is using the Genesys SIP Server to improve query wait times and reduced operational costs.
• Good news came to Avtex (News - Alert) who received multiple awards at the recently concluded Interactions 2012 event  where Interactive Intelligence recognized them as: 'Support Partner of the Year' for delivering excellent customer support, 'Leading Edge Partner of the Year' for its ability to integrate Interactive's solutions with popular platforms from Microsoft and 'Marketing Partner of the Year' because it executed the most effective marketing campaigns.
• Also on the partner recognition front, VOX Network Solutions (News - Alert) was named 'Partner in Customer Excellence' by Avaya. 
• KVH Co. Ltd., a Tokyo-based information delivery platform, has partnered with Interactive Intelligence in a cloud-based contact center business venture. 
• TMCnet Contributor Madhubanti Rudra covered  Avista Utilities investment in a new integrated utility platform from Oracle (News - Alert). 
• TMCnet Contributor Tracey Schelmetic put us all on notice that Denver-based software company FullCOntact, which offers contact management solutions, may not be a place many of heard of but it business practices might make it a place at which we’d like to work.   

For your weekend viewing  

Just a reminder, we recently updated the community and added, “Video Showcase.”  This is a great place to pick up best practices, and other useful tips. Plus, do not forget to use all of the community’s resources —our glossary of terms, featured demo, eBook, podcasts, whitepapers.  And, if you have not, please sign up for a free Contact Center Solutions eNewsletter.