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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

This week, the Contact Center Solutions Community once again highlighted the global reach and extraordinary diversity of community members. However, I wanted to start the review by pulling out three items relating to community host Interactive Intelligence.

First, as you can see from the Editor’s Choice item, special attention should be given to how charitable organization InspiriTec, with the help of a great app from Interactive Intelligence, is enabling contact center agents with special needs to provide outstanding customer service. This is a story that will make you proud of being in our business.

Second, in conjunction with TMC, Interactive Intelligence has announced a new symposium that will be held in June in Indianapolis. “CX Hot Trends Symposium: Shaping the Customer Experience” will be collocated with Interactive Intelligence’s Interactions 2014 and will highlight, as the name says, the hot trends in customer experience, with presentations by our industry’s leading subject matter experts. 

Finally, also noteworthy was Frost & Sullivan naming Interactive Intelligence “2013 EMEA Contact Center Company of the Year.”

In other industry news relating to deployments and new products, there was plenty of activity. On the deployment front:

• Telefonica will be using Moixie Software’s Chat Spaces solution to help drive customer service and support in Spain.   
• Adyen announced that the online and mobile-optimized websites of Lebara across the UK have gone "live" via the Adyen payment platform, providing a fully outsourced payment solution. 
• Mahanagar Telephone Mauritius Limited (MTML) selected AMEYO’s contact center communication suite to successfully deliver "Chili", MTML’s new GSM service.

New capabilities include:

• Intelligent Voice, a provider of automatic telephone transcription and analysis, will be enhancing four major areas of its voice processing and analysis solution to enhance contact center efficiency and effectiveness.
• Right First Time added an agent recognition element to its auditing process.
• ProntoForms introduced ProntoForms Deployment Services, which concentrates on using mobility to enhance process automation for increasingly distributed workforces.   
• It was revealed that Jacada visual IVR capabilities will be integrated in Vocantas’s suite of solutions aimed at the healthcare, higher education and utility vertical markets.  
• Kentrox released an enhanced version of its communications management solution for enhanced site management, which monitors the health of distributed antenna systems (DAS) and microwave equipment. It helps support service provider interaction agents be more proactive in their support of field technicians.  

In other news, ContactCenterSolutions Web Editor Blaise McNamee talked with Base about their CRM solution for sales pipeline management and the importance of this information for enabling better customer interactions. Also, Indosoft announced that Voiceware Communicaciones Solutions is now an official reseller and exclusive partner of its Q-Suite 5.7. in Portugal and Spain.  

Finally, wrapping up the week is an interesting study by business analytics vendor SAS and global retail research company, Conlumino, with their study, Retail, Loyalty and the Consumer. According to the study, almost 95 percent of U.K. consumers like loyalty programs and have at least one loyalty card that they use regularly. The study highlights the importance of loyalty programs and points out that those retailers that lacked an emotional connection with consumers didn’t appear to find favor with them.

Weekend reading  

With Summer giving way to Fall this weekend, you might wish to catch up on industry trends and insights this weekend. A great way to do this is by clicking on the links on the community home page to access valuable content, which is constantly being updated, with videos, white papers, access to demos etc. And as always, I recommend that, 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.