It may be the end of most people’s August vacations, but things remain hot in the Contact Center Solutions Community especially as the industry and conference season is about to begin next week with TMC’s own ITEXPO and co-located events.
I wish to start with a recommendation to pay special attention to our Editor’s Choice feature item by ContactCenterSolutions, Contributor Tracey Schelmetic, Getting Serious About Social Media in the Contact Center. As we all are aware, social media has gone from nicety to necessity in modern contact centers and my colleague provides a great review of a recent webinar presented by community host interactive Intelligence that talked about best practices for going social.
I also wish to make mention that the Interactive Intelligence Foundation, which our host uses as its vehicle for giving back to their local community, with be hosting its annual gala in Indianapolis September 28 to raise money for at-risk youth to be held.
In a break from the usual presentation of the week’s news, I wanted to call attention to two market forecasts which should bring a smile to everyone in the community. The first is the one from Synergy Research Group that showed the UCaaS market, which is so closely associated with the transformations taking place in contact centers, grew 22 percent in Q2 2013. The second is equally as interesting since it a forecast from 451 Research about the overall growth of the global cloud computing market of which contact centers are increasingly become a major share of.
Speaking of the cloud, and why discussion of developments in the area are of importance to contact center community members, ContactCenterSolutions Contributing writer Karen Veazey has some interesting information about why the SaaS (Software as a Service) market appears to be at a tipping point.
In other postings, there was a lot of advice that was noteworthy including some really useful pieces from our special guest contributors:
On the customer wins and implementations side of things:
Finally, the rest of the news this week was diverse. It included PageUp People releasing an enhanced version of its unified talent management system. It also feature Cisco honoring channel partner Allstream with a Customer Satisfaction Excellence Gold Star award for the eighth straight year, and KANA Software announcing that it will be joining thinkJar founder Esteban Kolsky to present a session at the CRM Evolution Conference in a session titled "Trends and Analysis towards Consistent, Contextual Customer Experiences."
Weekend reading
It you set aside time for some weekend industry catch-up reading, the community resources accessible from the home page 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 places to visit and bookmark.
Hope to see a lot of you in Las Vegas this coming week!