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ContactCenterSolutions Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

This week’s Contact Center Solutions Community had a decidedly international flavor to it. In fact, the news literally spanned the globe, including developments from outsourcing to some interesting findings about the level of preparedness in Germany for contact centers to deal with the multichannel environment. 

News from around the world:

• Online Forex and CFD broker, Forex-Metal has expanded its customer support team with the addition of Japanese-speaking customer support representatives. 
• It turns out that contact center outsourcing is on the rise in Brazil as companies struggle with multichannel and social customer service.
• Brazil is not the only country whose contact centers are having trouble with multichannel; a study showed that more than half of German contact centers lack channel integration.
• Webhelp bought Scotland's largest call center operator from Indian business process outsourcing owner, Hero Management Service Ltd., for approximately $120 million.
• ASC telecom AG, a provider of solutions to record analyze and evaluate communications, and Credit Agricole Cheuvreux (CA Cheuvreux), an Europe-based independent equity broker, deployed a new recording solution for an Alcatel-Lucent communications environment.
• Qualfon, a global business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, announced that it has inaugurated its second Dumaguete Qualfon facility.

On the new products and services front there were two announcements from Intradiem. The company revealed enhancements to its Intraday Task Management Platform that optimizes agent idle timeworkforce optimization platform. . It announced it will integrate with Aspect Software's

In other product and service developments:

• Q-Suite's new WFM Connectors are designed to help enhance contact center performance.
• Pegasystems introduced its Customer Process Manager (CPM) - the latest version of its Customer Service Solution that supports real-time collaboration between customers, customer service reps and back-office teams. 
• Fonolo helps 1st United Services Credit Union with iPhone mobile app to enhance contact center experience.
• For outbound social media campaigns, popular social media management solutions provider HootSuite Media is broadening Twitter options with paid advertising.

This week also saw a number of items which contained lots of really sound advice. The first was ContactCenterSolutions Contributing Editor Susan Campbell look at the Top 5 ways to meet the needs of today's contact center customers which included multichannel interactions with consistent experience; cross-channel integration; Intelligent IVR; Obvious interaction options; and Seamless agent transfer. 

She also gave some insight into the agent experience and its impact on customer satisfaction. And Kevin R. Kammer and Steven Parker – vice president and general manager, and director of Information Security for Arise Virtual Solutions, Inc. – both had a really good posting regarding security relating to remote call center workers.

Weekend review recommendations

For your weekend review, I recommend the webinar, Key Contact Center Trends and Priorities for the Upcoming Year – How you can be ready. And, don’t forget to check out the community’s white papers, demos, videos, etc.  In addition, for more information about areas of your interest, our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology, are great places to investigate.