How Mobile is Impacting Customer Interactions, and How Companies Can Respond

CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — May 2012

What to Consider in Launching a Social Care Program

Social customer service is rapidly becoming the new, critical channel to drive satisfaction and loyalty. Some organizations are using this channel to listen to customers to improve marketing, products and support. Others are engaging with customers to address individual issues and reduce the volume of traffic to other support channels...

What's on the Cover

COVER STORY

Is it Time to Meet Your Customers on Social Media?
Studies of customer contact organizations I've been seeing lately show that only about half of the participants are actively involved in social media. Another 30 percent are waiting in the wings. And experts say that we've moved beyond the stage of early adoption for social media. What does this mean for your organization - especially if you've just been dipping your toe into social media.

Video Chat Meets Customer Service
To even further speed up the whole process, Ping An's video-based customer service uses a fingerprint verification platform to identify the client quickly and accurately. Provided by Genesys technology, the video-chat service travels over a SIP-based architecture. Romano Valussi of Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell says "Providing high-quality customer experience is the key to winning customers. We are building a business-critical contact center solution that gives Ping An of China a strong competitive differentiation to provide superb customer care for its market-leading financial and insurance services."

Feature Articles

CALL CENTER TECHNOLOGY

The Virtual Call Center: What's New in AI, At-Home Agent and Cloud-Based Offers
The definition of a virtual call center is different depending on which camp you ask. For some, it means a call center that relies on remote, as opposed to on-site, workers. For others, it's about putting call center functionality in the cloud. And for still others it can involve virtualizing call center reps.

Contact Centers, Unified Communications, the Cloud and You
In contemplating the transformation of contact centers from their traditional roles as customer touch point corporate outposts to being core components in business process optimization, the list items have never been more relevant. Indeed, in the era of the cloud, the delivery of computing and communications as services, the intense focus on these items has become paramount as enterprise strain to keep up with dynamic market changes that are forcing technology purchasing to reach tipping points.

OAISYS Talks Multichannel Session Recording
Whether it's to improve customer service, employee performance or simply to have a record on file for posterity, call recording is getting a lot of uptake these days. One of the key players in the call recording space is OAISYS, and the company's president, Brian Spencer, recently spoke with Customer Interaction Solutions magazine about his organization, its products, and trends and developments in the multichannel session recording space.

CASE STUDY

Getting Your Goat: Interactive Intelligence Takes Interesting Approach to Grab Attention
In January, I did a feature on the Interactive Intelligence Goat Program being done in conjunction with the international charity Oxfam. The program is simple.

CRM, BPO & TELESERVICES

WFM Solutions May Be More Beneficial & Attainable Than You Think
Almost two-thirds of North American call center respondents have yet to adopt workforce management software to schedule, monitor and report on agent activity, according to a recent survey by Noble Systems Corp. That's not good news for them, as workforce management solutions can help both lower internal costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Radialpoint Helps Carriers, CE Outfits Support the Networked Home
For years telephone companies and other interested parties have talked about the placement of the demarc - or demarcation point - and where it should be. The demarc is the point at which the telco's reach and responsibility ends. For telephone service, that point traditionally has been at the NID, or network interface device, attached to the outside of the home. That was pretty cut and dried, and it made things relatively easy for the service providers.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

TMC Congratulates CRM Excellence Award Winners
And while many CRM systems traditionally have targeted the largest companies, new solutions in this space now speak to the needs of small and medium businesses, which require more ease of use, and low-cost or no-cost upfront fees.

Columns

Publisher's Outlook

New Tools and Data Help Carriers Address Customer Care
Wireless carriers spend millions on contact center calls related to device questions from their subscribers, and to lean more Amdocs recently commissioned a survey that shows that while 83 percent of the 2,900 consumers surveyed are aware of self-service options, only 37 percent of consumers use them.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Being Something Special to Your Customers
All the social media monitoring and response isn't going to make up for negative impressions and low C-SAT. Monitoring will let you know it's out there, and will allow you the opportunity to make amends, but it doesn't change what has happened, especially when customers have had a less-than-satisfactory encounter. That's why it is paramount for customer service staff to be at their best from the moment an interaction is transferred to them.

Ask the Experts

Humanizing Business Process Automation: Optimizing Performance for Employees and Customers
Improving the delivery of products and services should be an ongoing focus in business. In particular, if your firm isn't considering how to make its products and services available at a competitive price - and how to reduce time-to-market response times to customers - your competitors certainly are. Just as certainly, and especially on social networks and the web, consumers are constantly evaluating your company's service, pricing, product quality and reputation to gauge value overall.

Logout

Take a Number
Call recording and monitoring are "at the forefront of the battle to improve quality and thus customer satisfaction and loyalty," according to the U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide, issued by ContactBabel and Zeacom . The guide draws on information gathered from surveys of 210 contact center managers and directors between November 2011 and February 2012.

High Priority

10 Questions to Ask When Developing a Social Media Response Strategy
Social media has been the fastest growing communication category for several years now. Whether MySpace early on, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn more recently, or the latest social craze, Pinterest, users have flocked to social applications at a furious pace. Which of these do you use? Odds are, more than one, if not all of them in some capacity.