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:
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.
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