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ContactCenterSolutions Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

As usual the Contact Center Solutions Community news this week was filled with a truly eclectic mix of items spanning such things as unified communications, leveraging speech recognition and a host of new offerings and some good advice.

Community host Interactive Intelligence set the pace early with the announcement that it has added a CaaS solution directed at SMBs. In fact, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani, had a great piece on the launch and put some historical context on why this is significant.   The company  also recognized one of its 250 VARs, s Altivon as Platinum Elite Partner. 

The advice area is the jumping off point for other industry news because this week there was a lot of great food for thought. It included:

• ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest Chris Diener, vice president of Analytics, AbsolutData, who had some sage words about how “big data” can be incredibly useful in improving the customer experience.  
• ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest, Mark Westover, SVP of Operations and Finance, LiveOps weighed in with six tips on contact center preparedness for when disasters strike. Plus you should also review the interview we did with Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, senior VP and chief marketing officer at LiveOps on why only an integrated approach can keep up with customer service in 2013, and the results of LiveOps research on why happy agents can enhance the customer experience and brand reach.

Speaking of interviews, you should also read the item and listen to the interview done with Voice4Net CEO Richard McFarland on the importance of streamlining fragmentation in contact centers.

As mentioned, there was also news on the new capabilities front. For example:

• Alteva's wholesale hosted unified communications (UC) offering is expanding to include optional Tiers 1 and 2 customer support to its resellers.
• Intuitive Consumer Experience Company, [24]7 said it has improved IVR experiences for customers using smartphones with its new [24]7 Visual Speech solution that employs an advanced HTML5 mobile web experience to consumers without the need for them to download a mobile application.
• IVR was also the subject of Aria Telecom’s debut of a new IVR system designed specifically for contact centers.
• Mobility was the focus of Comm100’s introduction of enhanced live chat solution with a "zero downtime upgrade" feature.  
• Avaya unveiled its Collaborative Cloud system.

The business of the business was represented with announcements that: ING DIRECT Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of Scotiabank, is leveraging IBM software and services to apply a smarter commerce approach to consumer banking to improve the bank's customer experience; JDWilliams, well known for direct home shopping in the United Kingdom, decided it could do with some help from eGain’s customer engagement hub; and Lisbon, Portugal-based Altitude Software, a provider of unified customer interaction solutions, is partnering with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise to be the strategic provider of key software solutions for Alcatel-Lucent's customer service solutions.

Last and certainly not least, customer process management service provider for U.K. utilities and public center markets Echo, recently acquired consumer data provider Callcredit Information Group’s Bristol-based contact center to expand the sectors the company can serve with contact center solutions.

Weekend review recommendations

If you have time this weekend, and were not able to join the event live, I highly recommend the webinar, Key Contact Center Trends and Priorities for the Upcoming Year – How you can be ready. And, please do not forget about all of the community’s white papers, demos, videos, etc.  or 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 which are great places to investigate as well.