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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

The news this past week in the Contact Center Solutions Community – as we enter the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S. – was dominated interestingly by contact center openings (and one closing), people getting new responsibilities and a bit of advice. 

Before getting started I also would recommend you take a look at the news that came out of TMC’s ITEXPO event in Las Vegas this week, where multi-channel capabilities for contact centers and a host of other related subjects were a hot topic. In fact, you might wish to find out about who presented and their topics so you can follow-up in case you were unable to attend.

There was a panel on social media strategy moderated by Blair Pleasant of COMMFusion LLC and UCStrategies.com, which included Garrett Smith of Smith on VoIP, Jeremy Watkin of Phone.com, and David Vaughan of TSG Global. Calabrio's senior product manager, Tom Sullivan, spoke on the importance of analytics, and Zeacom was one of the interesting presenters along with being a prominent member of the Microsoft Lync Pavilion. 

A good place to start on other news is with jobs and associated activities related to contact center growth.

• In an interesting item, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis contact center received certification as a Center of Excellence under the BenchmarkPortal call center certification process. This process for those unaware, assesses the efficiency of a contact center based on a number of criteria such as first call resolution, cost per call, call waiting time, customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction and utilization of human resources. 
• Contact center openings and closings included: Atlantic Grupa opening a new regional contact center that will service markets such as Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia; EMC looking to South Africa for increasing customer interactions in that key market; and Sprint’s decision to eliminate 800 positions as a result of its purchase by SoftBank.   

As noted, there were a few notable personal moves this past week at Interactions Corporation, where Jim Bandanza was named Executive VP of Sales and Edward Durkin was appointed CFO.  Fonolo also added industry vet Nicolas De Kouchkovsky to its Advisory Board.  

In the area of new capabilities and solutions:

• SDL, a provider of customer experience management solutions, announced a strategic alliance with Webtrends, a specialist in digital marketing solutions. 
• Full Circle CRM, a provider of marketing performance management solutions, has signed RingDNA as one of its Marketing Technology Partners to deliver improved call tracking analytics for inbound and outbound sales calling campaigns in Salesforce. 
• LanguageLine Solutions, an interpreting and translation company, says its LanguageUc video remote interpreting (VRI) application now supports the Arabic, Russian and Somali languages, and more high-demand languages will be added soon. 
• Apple redesigned its AppleCare Live Chat support page so agents can carry out more than one chat at once. 

In other news this was surprisingly good news from Hart InterCivic, a leading provider of election management and voting systems who found that 92 percent of its customers were extremely happy with the customer service they received.  

Finally, in case you missed the webinar by LiveOps, TMC moderated this week entitled “CRM vs. CEM: Why not both?” you might want to watch and listen to the archived version.  

Weekend reading  

Over this long holiday weekend if you decide to catch up on industry trends and insights, the 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.