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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review: New Report Looks at Omni-Channel Challenges

This week’s Contact Center Solutions Community highlight is that LCP Consulting’s new report confirms omnichannel (aka, omni-channel, and at some point the industry needs to decide which one to standardize on) techniques helped retailers grow in the past year.  And, while clearly omnichannel is going to increasingly be an important part of the news, it was and will be only a part of the immense diversity of community interests and activities.

With all of the bad news in the world in general these days, a good place to start is with some good news in the form of recognition. The first item in this category had to do with Diligent a company that claims to be the creator of the world's most widely-used board portal for company directors, was recently named a category finalist in The Independent's U.K. 2014 Peer Awards for Excellence. The company was among the top three in the customer service category in the Customer Engagement Peer Awards.  In the second, Bright Horizons’ Colorado contact center was recognized for excellence for the fourth year in a row by BenchMarkPortal. 

Where there was lots of news this week was in regards to expanded contact center operations in the U.S. by companies and outsourcers, and some a few interesting deployments. 

Expansion and hiring news included: 

• BPO firm Sitel is adding positions at it Oak Ridge,TN facility in support of loan acquisition provider.   
• There will be new temporary hires at a Sacramento, CA contact center to handle Covered California healthcare traffic increase. 
• Reflective of the trend of bringing contact center jobs back to the U.S.,  the State of Georgia has been a beneficiary including the announcement that the Americus-Sumter Payroll Development Authority (PDA) is opening a new contact center complex that will house a number of different companies

Customer related activities included:

• Creative Virtual installing its V-Person natural voice-based self-service solutions for a software company with the installation involving a deep integration with customer’s cloud-based CRM system.  
• From the land down under came news that St. John Ambulance in Western Australia selected community host Interactive Intelligence’s CIC on-premise solution to replace a legacy PBX, and will sync the new system with its existing systems such as its Computer Aided Dispatch System.
• Speaking of replacements and upgrades of capabilities to omni-channel, large U.S. retailer Talbots chooses Omni-Channel CloudBlu from Cameo Global to enable enhancement of their customers’ experiences whether in a store or online.

Biztec, a AVOXI channel partner, migrated clients to the AVOXI Core, and a construction equipment company also is relying on an AVOXI solution to improve its customer experiences by allowing its two offices located in two different stated to function as if they were one.  

There were also new products and capabilities to report this week. Featured were:

• Fourworkx partnering with Shinetech Software on a new workload and staffing solution that is aimed at enterprises with agile applications development environments who are looking to enable through their contact centers the abilities to be to be fast to market and adaptable in the market.
• 3CLogic and IntelaCloud have gotten together to offer single cloud-based solution combining hosted PBX and contact center capabilities. 
• Plantronics is out with a new line of very comfortable and high-performance headsets and digital audio processors designed to improve agent and customer experiences. 

We always like to include some advice every week and this week it comes from CorvisaCloud and Sound Telecom. CorvisaCloud is out with its second annual customer service survey. While it reported an improvement in customer service since 2013, it noted that even though businesses profess that 'the customer is king', they don't seem to be doing enough to really wow them.  As to Sound Telecom, it has an article that points out the benefits of multilingual answering services. 

Weekend Reading

As is customer in this space, if you need more news and insights and have the time to catch up this weekend, start with the community home page and literally go from there. It is the way to easily access 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.

Finally Interactive Intelligence hosted a webinar on September 30^th you should view if you did not have a chance to participate live 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.   And, another webinar you may have missed, Creating an Effortless Customer Engagement, is also a great investment of time.