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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review: Capgemini on Shopper Journeys and Role of Social Media

September 27, 2014

A good way to characterize this week in the Contact Center Solutions Community is that there was a lot of sage advice to be gleaned. We also saw a projection as to how significant the cloud would be on contact center transformations and the fact that even Apple had its contact center a bit over-whelmed thanks to demand for the new iPhone 6s.


Before getting to the advice, as the headline for this week states, consulting firm Capgemini is out with its second global report on the topic, “Digital Shopper Relevancy Report”, and there are some surprises that retailers literally and figuratively need to take stock of. One of these is that while online interactions are increasingly important for transactions it appears that social media is not living up to the hype.

Now to that advice, where there were several items that talked directly to the multi-faceted challenges involved in enhancing the customer experience. They included:

  • ContactCenterSolutions Contributing Editor Susan Campbell had an interesting piece on how selecting the right contact center solution for your company needs to take into consideration a number of important things and some hard work.
  • The posting by ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest Peter Oxley, VP Marketing at ResponseTek is on Listening to Your Customers: The Key to Omni-Channel Consistency, is one you will want to spend some time with.
  • Essential Steps for Providing a Great Cross-Channel Customer Experience, by Karina Howell, Solutions Marketing Manager at community host Interactive Intelligence, is also one you will want to read and hopefully bookmark.
  • Interactive Intelligence is also hosting a webinar on September 30th you may wish to participate in entitled, How Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud Eliminates Risk: A New Way of Evaluating Cloud TCO. It will focus on how cloud contact centers can actually help divert risks.   
  • There is another webinar that you may have missed, Creating an Effortless Customer Engagement, that you can still review by clicking on the previous link to access the archived version.  
  • Wasting time and money remains a challenge for contact center administrators and we took a look at how to recognize waste and make your operations for efficient. 
  • Watermark Consulting has done an interesting analysis about how companies that have invested in improving the customer experience have seen their stocks out-perform their competitors who have not.
  • ContactCenterSolutions Special Guest Dr. Brooks Mitchell of Snowfly shared his thoughts on his views of why your contact center should not be like the old German Stalag prison camps.

As noted, in other news there was a report out that says the cloud based contact center market is poised to grow to $10.9 billion by 2019 up from roughly $5 billion. And, speaking of growth, it seems that the robust Philippine outsourcing business is busy attracting expatriates back home.

There was also some industry recognition to report this week. It included Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS) Limited's Pembroke, Ontario, Canada site getting the Contact Center of the Year award from the Ottawa Regional Contact Center Association (ORCCA)., and Collection Advisor Magazine naming Interactive Intelligence among its 2014 Top Collection and Dialer Solutions.

In what can be called the odds and ends of this past week, there were a few other items that made some news.  In the first, the location of contact center agents has become an issue, as Australian airline Quantas found itself in the middle of a political problem because of its decision to move its agents from Australia to New Zealand.  In the second, the popularity of new iPhones created some hold times with Apple’s customer support folks as average wait times rose from a typical 3 minutes to up to 20 minutes in the hours after the launch. 

In the final news story, British Telecom launched its cloud contact center platform in Spain which can scale for individual customers from 50 to more than 1,000 seats.

Weekend Reading

If you need more news and insights the weekend is a good time to catch up and the best way to stay current is to use the links on the community home page. They enable you to be just a click away from constantly up-dated industry news, eBooks, whitepapers, videos, insights and interesting demos. 

Plus, 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.  And, don’t forget to register for the above-mentioned webinars. 





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