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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

It was another eclectic week in the Contact Center Solutions Community to say the least. Not only were there nice to not new capabilities offered, jobs to be had and industry recognition, but there was also a number of items on trends and a large dose of helpful advice.

The item about job expansion is a good place to start. The reason is that it not only is about a lot of jobs being created but the fact that it is in Santo Domingo is of note as it shows how global our community has become and where growth exits.  Indeed, the Santo Domingo government is looking for as many as 5,000 multi-lingual people for a variety of contact center jobs. 

On the recognition side of things, for the second consecutive year, TrialCard's Customer Experience Center (CxC) has earned the Center of Excellence recognition from BenchmarkPortal.

Now to all of those studies and advice:

• ClickSoftware study, administered by Harris Poll in May 2014, suggested that not only are Americans pained by generic on-hold tunes and general incompetence, but we are also losing money to them. 
• Wakefield, MA-based content management company SDL has released the final report of the "Five Truths for Future Marketers" series titled "Channels are Irrelevant" that features results from SDL's global survey of more than 1,800 millennials (ages 18-36). To say the least it contains a lot of food for thought, not just for retailers, but for those throughout the entire customer experience value chain. 
• A new study from Syntec Telecom is showing that there are some breeds of payment options that just don't work for most people, and one that's got a major problem is paying over the phone. 
• A recent survey by Magnetic North, a U.K.-based contact center solutions company, provided some good news in identifying trends as to why companies are looking to the cloud to transform their customer interactions capabilities.

Finally, as to advice, ContactCenterSolutions.com Contributing Writer Frank Griffin provided some thoughts about the need for marketers to embrace omnichannel capabilities and why integration that can extract actionable business intelligence is the key to success for improving customer experiences going forward.  And, you really should spend some time with ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest Ori Manor, CEO of Chekkt, to read his thoughts regarding how to reach new business prospects online via enhanced inbound marketing. 

So what’s new? Quite a bit and here is what made the news this past week:

• Headset maker Plantronics, whose gear has been a staple in contact centers for decades debuted its Plantronics-as-a-Service offering making for an interesting twist on the acronym PaaS, but introducing an intriguing concept into the market.
• Continuing the focus on marketing and marketing automation that is now taking a big role in terms of improving customer interactions, a new Sirius Decisions report pointed out that marketing automation company Act-On is on the right track with its integrated approach. And, Lyris announced a set of mini applications which will ensure optimized data integration, engagement analytics, and email sender reputation monitoring for marketers. 

In other news, GT Software, whose solutions are designed to help business unify their information so they can be more responsive, decided that since it believes customer service comes first than it needed to up its own already respected game in providing world-class customer experiences. In fact, the company used its own benchmark feature to assess its performance in several customer service areas. 

As has been featured in various items over the past year in the community, gamification is becoming an important part of not just customer interactions but also for intra-corporate interactions as well. It is why Findly’s gamification of the employee referral area with its new Swarm product caught our attention.

Lastly, on purpose because it speaks to a real issue in the contact center business globally today was the announcement that Nuance and TRUSTID have joined forces to offer a voice-based authentication solution for contact centers to help prevent fraud.

Weekend Reading

I like to say that weekends can be for clicking, and our community home page is the way to optimize your clicks when looking for contact center solutions information and insights.  It is your gateway to constantly updated eBooks, whitepapers, videos, demos, etc.  Plus, our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology — contain news and insights on specific areas  of interest. 

In addition, if you were unable to join us recently not to worry. You can now register to watch the achieved version of the immensely popular webinar, “Business Process Automation Best Practices For Improving Customer Complaint Resolution.”