This was an interesting week for the contact center solutions space with news coming from a broad spectrum of the industry involving new capabilities, deals, industry recognition and some advice on good and best practices on customer service. In fact, I wish to start on the advice front that comes from me. I had a bad customer experience with The New York Times which is illustrative of what not to do no matter what business you are in.
I also would like to direct you to an interview and video we did at ITEXPO with Teresa Jose, product marketing manager of Altitude Software on unified customer interaction (UCI) solutions. And, a ContactCenterSolutions Contributing Editor has an interesting piece about how e-Core believes that making customers feel like they are part of your family is a winning approach. By all means please read the advice from Special Guest Drew Hendricks on the ways to promote your brand on and offline.
Online marketing is the best way to promote your products. This way you can reach people with no restrictions of the conventional marketing. When you have a product to sell, you need more customers, and yearn to earn a lot, then the online marketplaces let you enjoy what you want to. While there are many online marketplaces, this piece of information tells you about how to sell your products to these online marketplaces.
This was a significant week for community host Interactive Intelligence that is noteworthy on a few fronts. First, the much anticipated Interactive Intelligence MarketPlace, a collection of third-party and internally developed products and apps designed to leverage Interactive Intelligence's contact center automation, UC and business process automation solutions, is now up and running for adding apps to your CIC platform. In addition, the company, continuing its policy of expanding its direct engagement with customers, purchased the customer base of its New Zealand reseller, Amtel.
Implementation stories continue to demonstrate the health of the industry around the world. Items that made news this week included Hull University using C3’s converged platform to enhance campus communications; Canadian-based Roadpost Satcom, a company that provides mobile satellite products and services, picked the LogiSense Engage IP Billing and OSS platform for improving customer interactions; and a self-service solution from Contact Solutions' helped The Boston Globe meet its customer satisfaction goals.
As mentioned above, there was also industry recognition that made the news with Voiance being named a top large call center provider by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), and SpeechStorm getting a nod from research firm Ovum for its personalized IVR solutions.
Finally, in other industry news, Interactive Intelligence was not the only company on the acquisition trails as Convergys acquired Datacom's Asian contact center operations. And, in a sign of the times, Oracle it is opening a data center in Japan to better support its RightNow cloud service following its recent announcement of another such center in Australia.
Weekend reading suggestions
As is the custom, I have some suggestions for weekend viewing if you have the time. First, I continue to recommend the webinar, “Key Contact Center Trends and Priorities for the Upcoming Year – How you can be ready.”I also want urge you to make full use of the community’s white papers, demos, videos, etc. For more information about areas of interest, our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology are all great places to visit as well.