Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

August 03, 2013

As has been the case in recent weeks, the diversity of the contact center solutions community continues to shine, and includes everything from news solutions, customer implementations, integrations, industry recognition along with advice and insights.


In fact, it is on the insights side of things where I would like to start. Community host Interactive Intelligence recently concluded an extremely well-attended webinar, Making the Business Case for Moving Your Contact Center to the CloudAs part of the event it asked participants to answer the question, “What’s the biggest obstacle to get buy-in for moving the contact center to the cloud?” The answers are extremely revealing and I think you will find my interview with Interactive’s CMO, Joe Staples on the findings to be very helpful. In fact, you also might wish to save the date for its next webinar, “Delivering Social Customer Service – More than Just Having a Presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn,” to be held Aug. 13 at 11:30 a.m. 

Before leaving items relating to Interactive Intelligence, it also made news this week with the announcement that WRB Communications will be building its outbound campaigns on Interactive Intelligence Dialer.

Customer deployment activities this week included:

  • Aspect Software providing the Greater Cincinnati Water Works with customer interaction management, workforce optimization and back office solutions to improve service response rates and increase agent visibility.
  • ESDS selected IBM PureSystems cloud solution to obtain greater business efficiency.  
  • WyckWyre is seeing a nice increase in customer recommendations based on its custom designed applicant tracking systems for the food and hospitality industry.

There were also some interesting items regarding integrations and new capabilities. Noteworthy were:

  • Indosoft, a provider of contact center solutions based on Asterisk, has now integrated Twitter into its Q-Suite of Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) software.
  • Carlton's Training, a provider of training solutions for customer service, announced a new program called “Johnny the Bagger” that helps companies upgrade agent skills.   
  • Intelliverse publicized that its IntelliConnection calling app for field service would now be available in over 200 countries.
  • NICE unveiled a new contact center video recording solution designed to improve contact centers’ ability to enhance the customer experience. 
  • FreedomMobileSolutions.com launched a one-stop shop for mobile marketing.

As noted at the top the diversity of the community is on full display this week and that includes in the area of insights, advice and market trends. For starters, smartKPIs.com is out with its rankings of top key performance indicators (KPIs) for contact centers. Next, you really should read ContactCenterSolutions Special GuestMike Boukadakis, CEO of Enacomm’s posting, The Truth about Being Connected to a Customer Service Representative. And, ContactCenterSolutions Contributor Tracey Schelmetic has an interesting interview with Zendesk’s Andrew Gori about why despite the warm weather contact centers and retailers should start listening to customers about their end of the year holiday wishes right now.

As to market trends there was good news and not so good. On the good news front, a new report from Frost & Sullivan says that the Asia-Pacific Contact Center Analytics Market to Grow 13.8 Percent. The bad news side of things a new UK survey found that customer service has bypassed 'Dismal,' and gone to 'Horrendous'.

And, last but not least, the power of the Internet for spreading news was exhibited as a result of a Fox News story about a conspiracy theory regarding the California Health Insurance Exchange call center.   

Weekend reading  

On a more uplifting note, if you enjoy using the weekend to catch up on industry news and insights, the community resources are constantly being updated, with videos, white papers, access to demos etc. And, for more details on areas of specific interest our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology — are worth the clicks.





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