The growth in “second screen” usage—interacting with smartphones, tablets or PCs while watching television—is one of the major customer interaction shifts we are witnessing. While watching the Olympics the next two weeks, you might wish to use that second screen to review the news and take advantage of the resources of the Contact Center Solutions Community.
In fact, as usual the community was buzzing with developments this past week, starting with news involving host Interactive Intelligence. First, there was channel partner Adapt Telephony Services being selected by California-based Travis Credit Union to deploy Interactive’s flagship CIC solutions not just for use as their contact center platform but also as the credit union’s PBX.
In addition, Interactive Intelligence recognized Avtex, a company that provides professional services and strategic consulting, as a 2014 Platinum Elite Partner. And, speaking of the CIC, Ingate Systems’ SIP Trunking has been validated for use with CIC.
As is the custom in TMC’s look at the community there were several items that provided insights and advice that caught attention this week. These included:
This week also saw some milestones as well as industry recognition. On the former front, custeomer care provider Zendesk revealed that it has now onboarded 40,000 customers in 140 countries who touch 300 million people. SYSPRO, a provider of on-premises and cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, has been named a finalist for an American Business Award ("Stevie") in the category "Customer Service Department of the Year Computer Software 100 or More Employees." Officials from SYSPRO said that such recognition is due to the company's 98-percent customer retention rate. And, AT&T ranked highest in J.D. Power’s 2014 Wireless Customer Care Full-Service Study Volume 1, J.D. Power ranked it highest in that category for the second consecutive year.
Two other items were of note this week as well. The first was Actuate Corporation, a provider of customer communications management (CCM) and analytics solutions, saying its Actuate CCM recently launched the BIRT iHub 3 deployment platform. And, while I hate to end on a downer, the phone can be used by bad actors to create a lot of trouble. In fact, Microsoft South Africa asked its customers (on the htxt.africa website) to be on the lookout for local phone call scams targeting Windows users. This is not the first time that cyber security issues are reported across Africa; in fact, as per the newly established Cybercrime center at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., cybercrime has been a huge problem in Africa for some time now. Obviously this is not the type of outbound contact center campaigns we all like to hear about, but kudos to Microsoft for getting the word out.
Weekend reading
As noted at the top, no doubt readers are going to be spending some quality time in front of their televisions during the Olympics, and will likely be doing so with a personal device in hand or on a lap. If the events being shown are not that interesting you might find the resources available through links on the community home page more to your liking. They are constantly being updated with new eBooks, whitepapers, videos, demos, etc. Plus, for detailed information on specific areas of interest, our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology — are places to visit frequently and bookmark.
Finally, if you missed it, the webinar Key 2014 Contact Center Trends and Priorities: How you can be ready, is one you really should consider downloading, and by all means find out what a distinguished group of industry experts had to say about the future of customer service at our recently concluded ITEXPO event.