Despite the short Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S., the Contact Center Solutions Community was not short on news.
However, before getting to that news, I would like to direct your attention to several videos I did while attending the Interactive Intelligence Interactions 13 event that I think you’ll find extremely informative. Here are the links:
Community host Interactive Intelligence also made news that further validated its focus on larger enterprises as prime targets for moving their contact centers to the cloud. It announced a significant cloud-based win with T-Mobile in the Netherlands.
And, a few weeks ago, I wrote a story about the research on customer service experiences done by Interactive Intelligence, from both the IT professional and customer perspective, that was first revealed at its Interactions 13 event. I noted the full survey results would be released shortly and the good news is you can download the full survey here.
Now for the news, industry trends and insights:
A good place to start is with insights and trends. For example, NewVoiceMedia is out with a new study that shows why poor customer service pushes away customers.
The one that caught my attention was the posting by ContactCenterSolutions.com contributor Tracey Schelmetic on the drawbacks of third-party benchmarking of certain call center metrics. While contact centers keep track of a lot of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), there is evidence they are not always tracking the right ones. Average handle time (AHT) used to be an important metric in the contact center, yet many companies have dropped AHT as a yardstick because it does not indicate whether a call was completed successfully (unlike, for example, first-call resolution). This leads to the question as to whether you are measuring the right things.
Given the intense focus on security, a good read is our feature on Frost & Sullivan’s new report that takes a look at what companies can do in order to address the potential security breaches that can occur when credit card payments are going through a customer contact center. It is geared toward helping the managers of those centers understand what actions need to be taken to protect the data.
On an unrelated but important front given the large number of companies whose contact center operations are handled by outsourcers in India, it is heartening to hear that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recently issued changes to its "Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations," creating the Twelfth Amendment to the document to regulate unwanted telemarketing calls.
Finally, financial institutions are experiencing a significant increase in contact center fraud being perpetrated by organized criminal gangs. Find out what experts are suggesting to mitigate the risks of bad actors stealing such things as private customer information, including social security numbers, passwords and banking details.
In other news:
If you happen to be traveling in the Middle Eat this coming week, you may wish to see our community host Interactive Intelligence at the Middle East Call Center '13 (MECC '13) conference to be held from June 4 - 5 in Dubai.
Weekend reading
I continue to recommend the archived version of the webinar, “Making the Business Case for Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud” that was held on April 30, if you were unable to join. And, while the community continues to add more and more resources for your review, for a deeper dive on areas of specific interest our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology are great places to visit.