TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

A key focus for Contact Center Solutions community members is getting a better understanding of who owns the customer experience. My thoughts on the subject may surprise you. Here’s a hint: It is not who you think. And before getting to the industry news this week, two items on other topics that are top of mind are worth a look.

The first, Is Your Back Office Prepared?, highlights the topic of a recent webinar TMC (News - Alert) moderated with Bay Bridge Networks on this important subject. 

In the second,  Best Practices in Choosing a Contact Center Solutionwebinar hosted by community host Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) that will feature presentations and comments from industry experts Interactive Intelligence CMO Joe Staples, Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst Nancy Jamison, Gartner Research VP Drew Kraus, McGee-Smith Analytics founder and Principal Analyst Sheila McGee-Smith and Nemertes Research VP and Service Director, Irwin Lazar.  , TMCnet Contributor Tracey Schelmetic  previews another important upcoming

News

At the top of the news was the significant speculation that Google is building a call center to support Nexus 7 customers. 

In other developments:

• Guest Direct, a division of Customer Direct (News - Alert), has signed a contract to provide central phone reservation services to Historic Hotels of America, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The services will be provided to more than 240 hotels under Historic Hotels of America. 
• Harry & David, the website and catalog merchant famous for pricey but impressive treats, announced earlier this week that it's bringing a little extra happiness to Eugene, Oregon this holiday season. The call center in Eugene, which they needed to close for financial reasons, is being reopened, and it's hiring.
• Jebsen & Jessen Communications (JJC), a company that delivers business communication solutions for multinational customers, was awarded the 2012 Frost & Sullivan Southeast Asia Contact Center System Integrator of the Year Award. 
• Demonstrating the value of contact center solutions around the world, particularly for municipalities, the Dubai Municipality Contact Center said it has received over 70,000 notifications during the first half of the year alone.  
• SoundBite Communications (News - Alert) revealed it has become a member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). 
• U.K. home broadband and telephone service phone provider, TalkTalk, announced that it is planning a major reorganization of its call center operations causing protests over off-shoring in the U.K. by the Communication Workers Union (CWU). 
• Israeli-based Nice Systems introduced what is claiming is the industry's first mobile workforce optimization suite, which enables customer service managers and employees access to operational and personal data at any time, from anywhere, using their mobile phone or tablet.

Weekend browsing  

First, I would urge you to view the video interview my colleague Rich Steeves did at the recently concluded ITEXPO (News - Alert) Austin 2012 event, with Tim Passios, director of solutions marketing on contact center solutions and the cloud.

As is customary, I’d also like to recommend for your weekend reading all of the valuable resources available to you on the community including videos, whitepapers and podcasts of a variety of subjects.  In particular, now would be a good time to go back and review the insights of our Ask The Experts section, where there are great items on remote agents and debunking the myths about hosted contact center solutions.

 In addition, for more focused information, click over to the affiliated channels – Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology. And once again based on its popularity, I also want to recommend the Editor’s Choice article, “The Cloud and You: Interactive Intelligence CaaS Quick Spin Makes Seeing Believing.”

Hopefully it will entice you to take the cloud out for a spin.