Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Center Solutions Week in Review: IBM Digital Benchmark, Sprint Complete Collaboration

December 06, 2014

Thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. this week’s review includes a few items from last week including several related to online shopping traffic which should be more than of passing interest as contact centers get ready for more X-mas and Hanukah related interactions.


In fact, those shopping stats and some advice are a good place to start. They included:

  • The authoritative IBM Digital Benchmark numbers which tracked in real-time transactional volumes on Cyber Monday and Black Friday.
  • Black Friday according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) suggest that there was actually a record number of background checks conducted on Friday, with the total number surpassing the 175,000 mark.
  • Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, in coordination with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations and law enforcement agencies from 19 other countries have seized 292 Web domains that were used for selling illegal counterfeit merchandise, according to a recent statement from Europol. The operation was made part of a larger project called "In Our Sites (IOS) Transatlantic V."
  • Advice on how your sales team can weather the holiday rush.
  • Special guest Sam Ganga, Executive Vice President, Commercial Division, DMI outlined five steps for achieving omni-channel implementation success.

This past week also saw the continuation of a 2014 trend that is likely to pick up steam in 2015 in regards to a broad spectrum of players with an interesting mix for helping customers move contact center and UC functionality to the cloud.  Items that caught our attention included:

There were comings and goings this week, wheelings and dealings and industry recognition that also made news. On the deals side of things, Thinking Phone Networks which has an interesting approach to omni-channel and unified communications landed a significant infusion of money with the successful closing of a Series D round.  Major insurance company Allianz Life promoted Erin Krawiecki to AVP Customer Contact Center and Fulfillment, Enterprise Operations. And, from the “Land Down Under”, customer experience consultancy Fifth Quadrant in conjunction with and Flamingo, an Australian customer journey and analytics software company in partnership with Oracle and CMO Magazine, published its list of the first winners of Australia’s best customer experience companies.

It is difficult to categorize the rest of the week’s news but all of it because of the subject covered are more than worth a read.  Items of note are:

  • An internal report by the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) found that its contact center operations were completely inadequate no matter how you measure it.
  • Support Interaction Optimization (SIO) has emerged as an important and emerging growth area for contact center software and is one to keep a close eye on.
  • Troubled automobile manufacturer General Motors has taken to using social media to reach and interact with people regarding all of the company’s recalls.

And the final items is of interest because it highlights the importance of customer interactions for government in general and law enforcement in particular as a new report from Accenture showed how digital can help police can better serve their citizens using technology.

Weekend Reading

If you are taking a break this weekend from your holiday preparations why not take a break and catch up on your areas of community interest?  The community home page is here as your navigation tool for linking to 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, as a gentle reminder in case you were unable to participate, the archived version of the webinar, How Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud Eliminates Risk: A New Way of Evaluating Cloud TCO, and the webinar Creating Effortless Customer Engagement, are both available for downloading.




Edited by Peter Bernstein



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