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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review: Interactive Intelligence, BT and Accenture

The future is now, or at least it is coming at us fast in the Contact Center Solutions Community, and there are two great ways to be part of the industry buzz as to what is unlikely to unfold in 2015. The first is to attend ITEXPO East, January 27-30, 2014 at the Miami Beach Convention center. This is a great opportunity to be warm and more to the point, hear, see and discuss contact center issues in person with peers and subject matter experts. 

If you can’t join us in Miami, or even if you can, sign up for the Interactive Intelligence webinar, “What's New for Contact Centers in 2015.” Presenters for this 75 minute webinar include Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for Forrester Research, and Tim Passios, vice president of solutions marketing for Interactive Intelligence. In addition, an extensive Q&A will follow the Web presentation, during which Jacobs and Passios will be joined by industry veterans Sheila McGee-Smith, founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, and Don Van Doren, founder and president of Vanguard Communications to answer live audience questions.

As to the news in the community this week there was a lot of advice and a few really interesting new capabilities introduced.

On the advice and insight side of things, items included:

• Speaking of the coming year, the report by Fjord, Design and Innovation from Accenture Interactive of its “Trends 2015” report, which highlights 9 trends and is a must review item.
• A Cisco survey highlighted the reasons why if you want more digital consumers you have to be ultra relevant when interacting with them.  
• You might get a good chuckle, hear some great music, and hopefully some food for thought in my article about being more respectful of customers’ time. 
• And IDC report is out predicting the trend for the health payer market, which has significant impact for contact centers. 

As noted previously there were some rather interesting new services, collaborations and implementations this week of note:

• The new capability that caught my attention was BT’s launch of new personalized video message service as part of their cloud contact center services.
• VoltDelta's DeltaACD 2.0 Cloud Contact Center got Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle Service Cloud.
• Admin Re, a subsidiary of Swiss Re providing life and health insurance services to the U.K., recently announced the finalization of a $5 million contract with Olive Communications, a cloud-based business communications provider, in which the latter company will provide a cloud-based unified communications (UC) and contact center platform.
• Sitecore is rolling out the Sitecore Commerce 8 powered by Microsoft Dynamics that aimed at retailers to bridge the gap between in-store and online digital experiences.  

Weekend Reading

Just a gentle reminder that the community home page is your gateway to constantly up-dated industry news, eBooks, whitepapers, videos, insights and interesting demos if you are looking to get caught up on industry trends and news this weekend. 

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.