TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

It’s been a busy week in the Contact Center Solutions community, to say the least. It has featured important product and services announcements, along with market insights and some interesting tweaks to improve the customer experience as well as contact center productivity. 

Community host Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) takes center stage based on a flurry of activity. First order of business is on the product front, which saw the release of Interaction Mobilizer for Windows 8 and Windows RT, enabling companies to leverage customer service apps with tablets and mobile phones. 

There was also a major upgrade to the company’s Interaction Dialer to let agents make out-bound calls more efficiently using enhanced predictive dialer capabilities.  

Interactive Intelligence also got some attention from the decision by the U.K.'s Skipton Building Society, a financial services solutions provider, to have over 1,200 end users rely on elements of Interactive Intelligence’s flagship Customer Interaction Center (CIC) suite, including Interaction Recorder and Interaction Analyzer.

I also would like to call your attention to an upcoming webinar, Best Practices for Evaluating a New Contact Center Solution: Leading Analysts Share Their Insight and Research, which features what truly are the industry’s top analysts.

News

Before getting to the “industry buzz,” there was an interesting item by TMCnet Contributor Tracey Schelmetic on personal data storage that is a must read. It looks at the issue of how to cope with new PCI DSS Payment Standards.  And, an Avande commissioned surveylooked at enterprise mobility trends and their impact on how the BYOD trend is changing the nature of customer interactions.   

As to the other news, improving customer experiences and business process automation as usual topped the list:

• Sangoma's new answering machine detection software for helping contact center agents avoid the time-wasting talents of these devices is an interesting innovation.
• A new software module for TriageLogic's Call Center Solution software allows its nurse triage centers to integrate with electronic health records of each practice they serve. The HIPAA-compliant module makes information available to providers in real time and in a secure manner. 
• TMCnet Contributor Carolyn Dawson noted that a recent Forrester (News - Alert) survey highlighted the importance of cross-channel customer care and how SoundBite's Proactive Customer Care Offers is helping organizations that are struggling to devise best practices across their client interactions.
• In regard to the customer experience, Missouri-based cable TV operator Fidelity Communications realized that providing superior customer service would give them a competitive edge and turned to Zeacom Communications for the answer. 
• ACT Advancing Call Center Capabilities with Castel Communications
• Castel (News - Alert) Communications' Castel Connects Dialer, Castel Tracker DVR, Castel Convey Enhanced Intelligent Messaging Delivery, Castel Detect Voice and Speech Analysis, and Castel Compass Real-Time Business Intelligence Dashboard will each be installed at ACT's four locations in Canoga Park, California; Bakersfield, California; San Angelo, Texas; and Mason, Ohio. 
• ACT, a provider of debt management capabilities, is upgrading its California, Texas and Ohio locations with a suite of solutions from Castel Communications. 
• South Africa’s leading international call center services provider got fast relief from a recent disaster problem from Intuate Group.
• Ontario Systems, aprovider of accounts receivable management software and consulting services, released Contact Savvy, a next-generation contact management service.

A few items that show the robustness of the market are also of note this week:

• Verizon Wireless (News - Alert) has announced it will be hiring 200 new full-time employees at its call center in Henrietta, New York.
• UBM plc launched a new call center jobs board in the UK.called "Call Centre Jobs." 
• Orange (News - Alert) Business Services, the business services arm of France Telecom, announced it plans to expand and alter its international contact center footprint. And double its international contact center revenue over the next three years.
• NAVIS, a provider in reservation sales systems for the North American lodging industry, recently announced a major restructuring of NAVIS RezForce, its Reservation Call Center service.

Weekend reading  

There is a lot for you to partake of over the weekend if you have time. For example, you should enjoy the interview my colleague Rich Steeves did at the recently concluded ITEXPO Austin 2012 event with Tim Passios, director, solutions marketing on contact center solutions and the cloud.  Plus, the community is filled with updated materials which include new videos, whitepapers and podcasts on a variety of subjects.

In fact, as noted last week, I liked the “Ask the Experts” piece on excelling at mobile customer service is worth a read.  

And as always, don’t’ forget to that more focused information is available on our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology.