You may recognize a trend in some of the news in the Contact Center Solutions Community this week. In fact, here is a spoiler alert. Talent, both agent and supervisor, and how to keep your people up to speed on best practices in terms of being trained and managed has moved to the community forefront.
In fact, here are the items that fall into that category:
There were also two recognition items of interest. Convergent Outsourcing using Touchpoint One solutions were named finalists in ICMI's Best Use of Technology Category. And, Connect First Safe was recognized with the 2014 PACE Technovation Award.
As usual the community continued to show its robustness in terms of growth prospects and new capabilities. Regarding the former, from the “Land Down Under”, e.g., Australia, came news about how Interactive Intelligence is growing fast in the region and is focusing on continued growth this year as interest remains high for its cloud (CaaS) solutions. Also highlighting the global interest in next generation contact center solutions was the news about the Abu Dhabi Executive council allowing the Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Center (ADSIC) to establish a new governmental contact center that will be used as a main point of contact and provider to the facility. And, Canadian outsourcer3C Contact Services was in the news with its deal to help Zero to Hero Fitness centers personalize their customer interaction experience.
In terms of new capabilities and partnerships, there was an interesting mix. For example, while there is not too much information available you may wish to surf over to CallRed, a start-up that has positioned itself as an intermediary between customers and customer service organizations to expedite end users getting the needs met faster. This is clearly going to be something to keep an eye on.
Ever wish when you make a call and the person on the other end of the line does not speak your language that there was near real-time translation available? Well there is, and the partnership between Telinta and Lexifone will allow VoIP service providers to offer innovative automatic in-call translation service.
There are insights to be gained from the new CGS report, The Battle for Agent Supremacy -In-house Vs Out-house. The debate is not new, as to whether in-house agents are better than their out-house compatriots with the at-home evangelists advocating the in-house model. While it cannot be denied that at-home agents are faster and cheaper and in many cases better , the question begs as to whether the out-house model is really the best one for the client, agent or customer at the other end of the line. And, there was also a cautionary note in the posting, Heavy Accents Lead to Call Center Job Loss in India.
Weekend Reading
Before getting to this week’s weekend reading, I wanted to call your attention to two important community events that you should be aware of. First, mark your calendars for an interesting webinar to be held on April 29 on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) which members of the Accounts Receivable Management (ARM) part of the community are going to wish to participate in. The reason is not just to hear about the issues of complying with TCPA, but also having the opportunity to ask questions of the industry’s leading subject matter experts. Plus, if you have not already entered the Interactive Intelligence Customer Experience Makeover contest you still have time. Remember you have to be in it to win it, and there is a lot of functionality that is going to be somebody’s to enjoy.
As noted, by all means if you have time this weekend, our newly re-designed home page is the way to get easy access to the constantly updated new eBooks, whitepapers, videos, demos, etc. And, check out our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology — for news and insights on specific areas that you wish to explore.
Finally, at the risk of being repetitive I continue to recommend the recent webinar Key 2014 Contact Center Trends and Priorities: How you can be ready, as one for downloading if you were not able to participate.