It was a big week for Contact Center Communications Community host Interactive Intelligence, and there were several other interesting developments as well.
First, Interactive Intelligence, as I reported, turned in “very nice” first quarter results continuing to demonstrate leadership in helping contact center customers move to the cloud. I also had an opportunity to get advice from the company’s CMO Joe Staples about where to go and what to see at this coming week’s Interactions 2013 event in Indianapolis. In fact, if you are going to stop by and say hello to me and my TMC colleagues who will be attending.
In addition, the company’s Latitude Software unit released a major upgrade to its software suite, Latitude Center to help debt collectors be more efficient and effective. Some of the new features include a new dashboard tool, an online data center, and access to a service request gateway. And, we had an interesting guest contribution from Shaheen Haque, territory manager for the Middle East and Turkey at Interactive Intelligence, who made the case for the deployment of advanced contact centers for insurance providers particularly or those in the developing world.
And, last but certainly not least, Interactive Intelligence was ranked Interactive Intelligence Ranked among Indiana's Best Places to Work.
In other industry news:
For those of you who are avid followers of the week in review you know that we like to feature advice and this week was no different. ContactCenterSolutions Contributor Tracey Schelmetic solicited some interesting views on how an omnichannel approach is proving instrumental in helping the travel industry provide improved customer services.
I also think you will find the observations of ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest Robert Cowen, Representative and Advisor, Snowfly Incentives on how to improve compliance in contact centers in the face of a tsunami of mandates extremely useful.
Finally, in recognition of the fact that contact centers are a truly global business with lots of challenges, the feature on why the Malaysian BPO sector is on the path toward upgrade and modernization thought provoking. In the face of rising competition from neighboring Asian countries, especially Philippines, the Malaysian BPO industry has identified a need for adopting an improvement-focused strategy. Accordingly, The Customer Relationship Management and Contact Centre Association of Malaysia (CCAM) has brought on COPC Inc, a Texas-based international customer service consulting firm for consultations. The COPC recommendations are expected to equip the country with an improved BPO structure and framework.
Weekend reading
I continue to highly recommend the webinar, Making the Business Case for Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud that was held on April 30. Plus community home page is filled with links to a trove of current white papers, demos, videos, etc. Don’t forget to check out the “Ask the Experts” section for valuable insights. And, for more information about areas of interest, our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology, which are great places to visit as well.