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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

As usual in the Contact Center Solutions Community there was a little something for everyone this week, ranging from new capabilities to M&A activities with some advice and industry recognition tossed in for added flavor.

New capabilities is a good place to start with the announcement from Acqueon Technologies, a developer of software solutions used for customer collaboration, that its U-Nexis outbound solution integrates with the new Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 10.5 platform.  It also was of note that while it may be a little thing, it is critical to contact center performance, and the announcement from Logitech of its USB headset H570e, designed for use with UC platforms on a variety of devices is something of note.

On the mergers and acquisitions and partnering front there were several items of interest this week. They included:

• eGain, a provider of customer engagement solutions, is acquiring Exony Limited, an innovative contact center software provider.   
• Rimhub Holdings has announced that the company has acquired Systems Integration, Inc. (SII), a company that provides contact center and IT help desk infrastructure solutions to U.S. Government agencies and commercial enterprises.
• Talk2Rep, Inc., a national business process outsourcing (BPO) provider based in Florida, has entered into a strategic partnership with Lighthouse Works. This partnership offers improved job opportunities for people who have poor vision.

Customer implementations of state-of-the-art contact center solutions also were featured this week.

• Community host Interactive Intelligence got kudos for helping the California Association of Realtors increase their responsiveness to realtor inquiries while reducing their operating costs using Interactive’s flagship CIC software suite.   
• Micromax Informatics, a large and fast-growing India-based mobile handset manufacturer upgraded its data center and contact center operations based on a next generation data center solution from Brocade.
• Market research firm ORC International recently deployed SpeechStorm's Interactive Voice Response (IVR) phone-based solution to easily conduct employee engagement research surveys, without spending too much costly paper and web-based methods. 

As to advice and industry insights, if nothing else, the title, How A Complaining Customer Can Be Your New Best Friend, should make you want to click and read.  Plus, while country specific, there are important lessons to be learned from a survey done in the UK by WebHelp, which found that businesses in there are ignoring the potential social media can have on their inbound and outbound efforts to better engage customers.

As noted, there was also some recognition this week. It came in the form of Sitel, a company that handles outsourced customer services for some of the world's top brands, being named a Top 10 Outsourcing Service Provider by Information Services Group (ISG).

Weekend Reading

The weekend can be a great time to play catch-up on industry news and insights. If you have time, the community home page is the fastest and best way to get up to speed as it is your gateway to constantly updated eBooks, whitepapers, videos, demos, etc.  In fact, I particularly recommend the white paper, Contact Center Metrics that Matter.  Yes they do and knowing which one and why could be invaluable.

Plus, by all means visit our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology —which contain news and insights on specific areas  of interest. 

Finally, if you were unable to join us recently for the popular webinar, “Business Process Automation Best Practices For Improving Customer Complaint Resolution,” you can click on the link and view the archived version of the event.