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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

This was a rather unusual but very interesting week in the Contact Center Solutions Community. While there were the typical new products and services and industry recognition, what caught our attention the most was the number of interesting reports and surveys which raise and answer a lot of industry questions. They are well worth a read.

In fact, before getting to the hard news, a quick review of all of the advice and insights is in order.  It includes:

• ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest, Bill Sims Jr., President of The Bill Sims Company, Inc., tops the list here because in many ways it is a top challenge for contact center supervisors and you should be interested in his views on the subject in his posting, Getting Your Employees to Commit to Customer Service.   
• For online retailers, first impressions count. A new survey commissioned by Peer 1 Hosting has found that 76 percent of eCommerce "decision makers" said that customers' perception of their brand was determined by the quality of the user experience on their websites.
• In an item of interest for global enterprises, you might wish to know that UK customers are less tolerant than American customers of bad customer service.
• Possibly in recognition of the importance of contact centers, a new study by TeleManagement Search, has found that contact center executive salaries are on the rise.
• And, good news for the industry came in the form of a new IDC study that is predicting strong continued growth for cloud contact center solutions.

On the industry recognition front, Assurant Solutions, a provider of extended service contracts, recently announced that one of the company's top officials won a silver award at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service.  In addition, Forrester Research has recognized Centrify as a strong performer in the emerging critical area of unified identity management across data center, cloud and mobile platforms.

As noted at the top, there were also a few new products and services introduced to the market this past week.  They included:

• ResponseTek, a leading enterprise customer experience management (CEM) software solutions provider, launched updates for its Listening Platform, and achieved a milestone by reaching 250 million consumers globally.
• Firstsource Solutions launched First Smartomation process automation software as part of its suite of customer management solutions.
• Mitel has enhanced its MiContact Center software.  
• A new Nominum solution for marketing and customer care enables the creation of measurable campaigns and allows for in-browser messaging with target customers.
• Carrier iQ debuted algorithms for customer analytics solutions for mobile carriers.  

Finally in other industry news, Folha de S. Paulo, the biggest newspaper in Brazil, recently implemented the new Altitude uCI 8 customer interaction management solution. And, host Interactive Intelligence has broadened its reseller network.

Weekend reading  

For this weekend I would like to suggest clicking on the 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.

And, 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 find out what a distinguished group of industry experts had to say about the future of customer service at our recently concluded ITEXPO event.

I would also be remiss, if it was not mentioned that Interactive Intelligence has released the agenda for its Interactions 2014 event in Indianapolis.  

Edited by Peter Bernstein