Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

February 15, 2014

The Contact Center Solutions Community is heating up, despite what has been a very long and cold winter in much of the Northern Hemisphere, although Sochi, Russia unfortunately seems to be stuck in a warm spell as it hosts the Winter Olympics.  Not only were there plenty of new capabilities and partnerships announced this week, but as usual there was also a fair share of advice to be imparted.


Before getting to the harder news, since this will be coming out just after Valentine’s Day, you might wish to warm your heart with the item by ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest Matthew Thomas of CXperience, who had a great piece entitled, “5 Ways to Show Love to Your Customers This Valentine's Day.”

Once you finish Matthew’s suggestions, learn about all of the latest capabilities community members are offering.  Noteworthy news this week included:

  • GENBAND’s  Call Grabber Solution a new tool  designed to improve UC by making call transfers/hand-overs between devices seamless. 
  • Tantacomm has added new to enable contact centers to better track and evaluate disputes.
  • Mitel added new mobile chat and multichannel self-service options in its MiContact solution.
  • Enghouse Interactive released new capabilities in Contact Center Service Provider Platform v6.1.2.
  • 8x8 announced that it has entered into a partnership with Zendesk to develop a bundled cloud-based solution for contact centers.  
  • Bright Pattern and Zingaya announced availability of an integrated solution that combines the functionalities of Bright Pattern's ServicePattern with Zingaya Web-call to enable cross-channel customer experiences and is a tool aimed at allowing website visitors to connect to a sales representative through the contact center.

As noted at the top there were several items that caught our attention in terms of advice that various companies and industry SMEs wished to share.  These included:

  • A preview on an upcoming webinar on how using Big Data can and should be used to obtain more precise customer knowledge in order to help companies improve customer experiences.   
  • ContactCenterSolutions Contributing Editor Susan Campbell looked the importance of and how to create the ideal self-service customer experience. on that would be great. 
  • NewVoiceMedia is out with a provocative survey that found that the digitally adept are more likely to be the most visible and  loudest complainers and most frequent users of social media to give voice to their issues.
  • A recent study from NewVoiceMedia also found what might be obvious but regaining lost business from bad customer service starts with contact center employees.

In other news, as usual it was an eclectic mix.  For example, Avtex will be hosting a series of events, “CRM in the Contact Center,” several U.S. cities to tout the value of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

In our “Wheelings & Dealings” item this week, we noted that Lithium Technologies is rumored to be buying customer experience social media influencer Klout.  Market research firm Frost & Sullivan is out with a report that says the Australian contact center applications market is going to experience significant growth over the next five years. And, XACT Telesolutions announced the signing of a contract with a renowned university to support enrollment advisory services.  

Weekend reading  

Why not take a break from watching the Olympics and check out the resources available through links on the community home page? 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. 





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