Latest Columns

Angle

Getting to Know Your Website Visitors
Most customer journeys these days begin on companies' websites. So it's more important than ever that businesses make the most of the time visitors are there.

Angle

Getting to Know Your Website Visitors
Most customer journeys these days begin on companies' websites. So it's more important than ever that businesses make the most of the time visitors are there.

Angle

Getting to Know Your Website Visitors
Most customer journeys these days begin on companies' websites. So it's more important than ever that businesses make the most of the time visitors are there.

Angle

Getting to Know Your Website Visitors
Most customer journeys these days begin on companies' websites. So it's more important than ever that businesses make the most of the time visitors are there.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Like Sands Through the Hourglass...
Customer service is a funny term. It's two words but, when you look at the past 30 years in the customer service industry, the focus has typically been on the customer service provider and its technology - the service side of the term. From the early days of telemarketing and CTI to predictive dialers, IVR, and integrated CRM and from IVR and businesses have consistently sought the create process efficiencies that would enable them to respond to more customers more quickly.

Ask the Experts

Ask the Expert: Remote Agents
This article was initially published in the May 2007 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. Interactive Intelligence would like to say congratulations, and thanks, to TMC on its 30 years of promoting the contact center industry.

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Hello, Good People
This is a strange example, I know. But my point is that what my pals and I remember best about this experience is not so much the crazy apartment as the kind gentleman who showed it to us. (And had he offered a similarly charming product, we probably would've taken him up on the offer.)

Publisher’s Outlook

Oracle President Hurd Says New Customer Experience Revolution is Coming
Having followed the contact center and contact management space since 1982 I have seen countless changes in the market. Perhaps none was more profound than in the mid-1990s when the term CRM started to be used to refer to solutions in the customer relationship space.

High Priority!

How to Make Your Customers Want to Schedule Service Appointments
One of the common complaints is always the four-hour window given for service and delivery calls. Why four hours, especially early in the day? And why can't they confirm a more exact time later in the day, considering techs and delivery drivers all check in after each appointment.

Ask the Experts

Hosted Contact Center Solutions: Setting the Record Straight
Hosted contact center infrastructure solutions such as software as a service and communications as a service are gaining ground in enterprises of all sizes, and in a variety of public and corporate verticals. There are several good reasons why. In addition to the minimal cash outlay they require, hosted solutions provide quick deployments, scalability, agility, and a reduced maintenance burden. Vendors also continue to expand hosted functionality with product enhancements and improved deployment and integration models, all with the opportunity to try before you buy. The collective result is rapid and quantifiable ROI, as well as ongoing investment protection.

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Smartphones Change the Face of Customer Interaction
Indeed, Confirmit's Dave King, executive vice president of mobile solutions, who's featured in a Q&A in the same CIS issue, says that: "Thanks to the increasing adoption and capabilities of the smartphone, companies now have a dynamic and sky's the limit platform for interaction with audiences that far exceeds any other customer feedback channel previously available."

Publisher's Outlook

GM to Facebook: Your Ads Don't Work
What this tells us is Facebook is just becoming a driver of the Splinternet or another Internet which advertisers and developers need to take into account. While having free content is great for Facebook and, moreover, GM will no doubt continue to drive massive web traffic Zuckerberg's way, the challenge becomes how to monetize it all.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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New Rules
There have been several significant developments of late related to regulation as it applies to the customer interactions solutions space - some good and some (if you're in this industry, anyway) not so good.

ASK THE EXPERT

A Realistic Look at Social Media and the Contact Center
Twitter and Facebook have given customers new ways to connect with businesses, get information, voice opinions - positive and negative - and generally assess and comment on companies and the products and service they provide. In enterprises wanting to make top-level service and support the standard for social consumers, integrating social media with the contact center is a practical way to do it.

Publisher's Outlook

Vocalocity: One Cloud Provider's Path to Growth
Cloud computing providers are all the rage these days and cloud communications is no exception. Witness the growth of 8x8 as well as the M&A interest in the space evidenced by the recent acquisition of M5 Networks by ShoreTel, and the acquisition of Aptela by Vocalocity.

HIgh Priority!

CRM: Putting the RM Before the C
rizon and AT&T both began using terms like 4G and LTE in their advertising well in advance of network and device rollouts, preparing customers for the next great thing in communications. Remember the HTC Thunderbolt ad that was initially launched without the "coming soon" moniker at the end? (http://tmcnet.com/59102.1)

News

Kunnect FREE Delivers Gratis Call Center Functionality
Google and Skype have found great success based on business models involving providing free tools to the populace. Now Kunnect is following those examples by introducing a free call center solution.

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Customer Service: The New Marketing
These words were uttered by Jerry Maguire, the title character played in the movie by Tom Cruise. Like the couch-jumping actor himself, this fictional sports agent became a cautionary tale of what can happen when you lose your bearings, even temporarily, in the business world. But, in the end, Jerry also demonstrates what can happen when you truly dedicate yourself to the customer. That is, you get a friend for life.

Ask the Experts

Kyle Lyons,managing director at Ponvia Technology, and Gina Clarkin product manager at Interactive Intelligence.
Give contact centers credit. In their effort to improve customer service and increase the effectiveness of how service is provided, many centers have made significant investments in technology as well as people. One payoff has been contact center automation and the efficiency it produces for managing customer interactions. Yet, bottom line, the pressure remains to improve service processes overall and reduce costs at the same time.

Publisher's Outlook

Will Nimble 2.0 Take Social CRM Mainstream?
But while it is understood by many web-savvy companies that social is important - how many of them are embracing social CRM? My informal analysis shows the numbers are very low, meaning there could be huge room for growth.

Ask the Experts

The Evolving Role of Process Automation and the Customer Service Experience
Give contact centers credit. In their effort to improve customer service and increase the effectiveness of how service is provided, many centers have made significant investments in technology as well as people. One payoff has been contact center automation and the efficiency it produces for managing customer interactions. Yet, bottom line, the pressure remains to improve service processes overall and reduce costs at the same time.

Ask the Experts

The Business Value of Consolidating and Centralizing Communications
Increasingly powerful servers. Robust IP infrastructures. Innovative design. Call it the new roadmap to consolidated contact center architectures and more centralized configurations. Along with reducing the number of applications and physical boxes to be administered and maintained, consolidation can potentially reduce the number of system and user licenses necessary in a contact center. Consequently, cost savings is an achievable and evident benefit.

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Proposed Legislation Would Discourage Call Center Offshoring
If a bill introduced last month by U.S. Reps. Tim Bishop (D, NY-1) and Dave McKinley (R, WV-1) is passed, domestic companies that locate their call centers overseas would lose the ability to get federal grants and loans, would be kept on a list at the U.S. Department of Labor, and would have to be able transfer callers to onshore call center representatives upon customer request.

High Priority

Social Media is Responsible Business
I recently had a conversation with Christian Goffi and Andrew Maher from Avaya (see my story in this issue, titled Making Sense of Social Media). Among the key takeaways from that conversation, corroborating my own previous beliefs, was the notion that, while not every business has to implement a social media strategy right away, they must understand their own social media presence, both from an internal and external perspective. In other words, they have to address the question of social media rather than ignoring it.

Publisher's Outlook

Plantronics Headset Line Exudes UC Dominance
Back in 1982 when my company TMC (I am CEO) launched the first magazine in the call center space, Plantronics was one of the few companies in the market, and almost 30 years later they have evolved into an organization delivering unified communications endpoints for virtually every segment of the market.

News

New Interactive Intelligence Quick Spin Cloud Contact Center Trial Portal
Coming off the first six months of 2011, Interactive Intelligence enjoyed cloud-based revenue growth numbers of 58 percent while orders increased a whopping 146 percent during the same period. Moreover, the cloud accounted for 26 percent of the company's total new order dollar volume in the first half of 2011.

PUBLISHER'S OUTLOOK

Gary and Mary West: Improving Health Care Through Disruption
For years, Americans have prospered like people in no other country on earth because our class-free society allowed virtually anyone with a good idea to launch a company, hire, prosper and keep the majority of the fruits of their labor. A competitive entrepreneurial culture further fostered an environment in which successful businesspeople went from being entrepreneurs to serial entrepreneurs.

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Customer Interaction Space Sees Consolidation
The last few months of 2011 were an active time for consolidation in the customer interaction solutions space. News broke in mid October of Alcatel-Lucent's selloff of its Genesys customer service solutions. Shortly after that, Oracle revealed plans to acquire RightNow Technologies.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Five Things Customer Service Operations Need to Improve
As another year comes to a close and I think back to what was the year 2011, we've certainly seen some remarkable changes in the contact center and CRM industries, not the least of which is the elevation of social media to a legitimate part of the customer engagement exercise. The fact is that most companies are now at least considering what social media means to them and how they should handle it.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Does Your Brand Have Friends?
Do you know what else half of them do as part of their social networking activities? They connect to brands like yours (or your competitors), and 36 percent have posted some form of content on their social networks about those brands (according to InSites Consulting).

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Considering the Customer Experience
Despite the significant investment in customer experience management made by telecoms, banking, retail and IT, customer experiences with these organizations remain largely poor. That's the word from Beyond Philosophy, which recently released its 2011 Global Customer Experience Management Survey.

PUBLISHER'S OUTLOOK

Marketing Consistency is Key in Building Brand, Business
As I look out at the technology landscape, I find it surprising that replacements of marketing personnel - whether initiated by the company or people resigning - seems to be near an all-time high.

Ask the Experts

Home Agents: The Big Game Changer
When organizations successfully reach beyond the confines of bricks and mortar sourcing, they tap into a vast labor pool filled with unprecedented talent. And when they re-engineer their scheduling models to enable more flexibility, employee satisfaction climbs and the customer experience improves. So says Michele Rowan of At Home Customer Contacts, in the first of a three-part series with Interactive Intelligence on the growing home agent trend.

Cover Story

What Contact Centers Can Learn From Behavioral Science
Busy contact center managers often overlook their customers' feelings. They tend to focus on easily quantifiable metrics such as abandonment rates, service levels, staffing levels, etc. While these metrics are important to the bottom line, there is also tremendous value in focusing on the consumer's experience. This is where behavioral science comes into the picture. Businesses can leverage psychology to improve customer service in contact centers.

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Bring It on Home
Hello CIS readers. I suppose the first order of business for this issue's Logout column should be an introduction. As you may have noticed, I'm a new face at Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. In fact, I'll be heading up the editorial effort at CIS from here forward.

Publisher's Outlook

What's New in Speech Technology
For example, Jeff Schlueter of Nexidia told me his company's speech analytics solutions have been in greater demand in this current economy as the desire to control costs has led to increased adoption of speech analytics. The company has released version 9.0 of its Enterprise Speech Intelligence product suite which cuts the TCO in half and allowing for customers to handle even larger amounts of data.

Ask the Expert

Cloud-Based Communications: Trends, Benefits and Drivers
If functionality, flexibility and innovation are important keys to your business needs, then Communications as a Service (CaaS) is right for you. Learn about trends, benefits and drivers for cloud-based communications from Richard Snow, Vice President & Research Director for Ventana Research and Joe Staples, Chief Marketing Officer for Interactive Intelligence.

High Priority

New Kids on the Contact Center Block
It's time. Your existing communications technology is reaching end of life, the service costs are exorbitant, and you just don't have access to the kind of feature richness that can keep your business competitive. It's time to migrate your enterprise communications infrastructure to an IP environment.

HIGH PRIORITY

Is it Time to Cut Down the IVR Tree?
Several times over the past few years, I've detailed in this column the good and the bad about customer service experiences - and ways the bad can be transformed into the good. One of the most common technologies for enhancing service quality, especially in a time when many customers prefer self-service alternatives to having to wait in queues for agents to solve routine problems, is IVR functionality.

PUBLISHER'S OUTLOOK

Latest Trends in Speech Technology
At the recent SpeechTek 2011 conference in New York, I gained some great insight into the state of speech technology. For example, Jeff Schlueter of Nexidia told me his company's speech analytics solutions have been in greater demand in this current economy as the desire to control costs has led to increased adoption of speech analytics.

LOGOUT

Cleaning Off Telemarketing's Tarnish
This, specifically our, industry has long had a deservedly tarnished reputation on two scores. First: with many consumers and their advocates and lawmakers for pushy, annoying and sometimes lawbreaking live agent and automated messaging calling on behalf of its clients. Second: with communities for being terrible employers with low pay, minimal or no benefits, poor training and lousy supervision leading to high turnover, who shutter their doors as soon as the contracts end and/or the taxpayer-financed location incentives runs out.

PUBLISHER'S OUTLOOK

Marketing Goes Almost Painfully Local
One of the most memorable business stories I have heard was when a consultant friend of mine flew to a large customer to quote on a substantial project. He was traveling with his business partner and happened upon a shuttle bus to the rental car company with his competitor and a partner. None of these consultants had ever met, but my friend and his partner had the luck to keep quiet as he overheard the other two people on the shuttle bus finalizing their pitch and setting the price for the project. My friend priced his proposal under the competition and got the project. Now, that's the sort of thing you want to overhear.

HIGH PRIORITY

The Power of Mobile Apps as a Customer Feedback Tool
Never has the nature of interactions between customers and vendors been so easy, yet so complicated, thanks to the rise of social media. I've written previously about the need for companies to monitor social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+, and how they can mine those social media interactions to improve their businesses.

COVER STORY

ITEXPO West 2011 Preview
Some of the hottest issues facing contact centers include handling the rapidly-becoming-vital social channel, managing and working with cloud/hosted-based applications and with home-based agents. It is a new world out there, with customers who can influence others and raise issues and opportunities worldwide at the speed of light, with applications running, updated and supported on servers offsite and with hiring and managing team members who are out of sight but definitely not out of mind.

ASK THE EXPERTS

Q&A on CIC 4.0
VInteractive Intelligence's (www.inin.com) new Customer Interaction Center (CIC) version 4.0 is the latest release in the firm's long line of innovative contact center solutions. CIC 4.0 will give contact centers and enterprises significantly increased scalability, reliability and speech analytics capabilities, among other features.

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The (Social) Customer Isn't Always Right
There appears to be a tendency with social media as a new and highly visible channel to overstock the value of the sentiments expressed in posts and tweets, that these truly represent the collective voice of customer and that the comments and complaints are factual, well-founded and sincere. And that those who made them must be supplicated to keep them as customers, lest they tell hundreds of others never to do business with one's company ever again.

Cover Story

Calabrio's App-Based Performance Solutions
There are new ways of enabling contact centers to provide superior performance through technology. The first is cloud/hosting delivery that offers flexibility and upgrades at low or no capital costs. The second, which is starting to happen, is the app model that is taking its cue from the mobile web. This is an integrated platform that is individual-user-customizable via small-footprint subapplications, or "widgets", for specific needs.

Publisher's Outlook

Avaya's Support Strategy Emulates Successful Cancer Diagnostic Systems
It is an unusual occurrence for me to receive a call from any company to discuss their support. Generally, the media gets all warm and fuzzy about tangible things, like new product launches, scoops and items you can put in the category of breaking news. Ironically, though, if you ask most companies what differentiates them from the pack, service and support is typically the most common answer. Yet, I can't remember other companies asking me to meet their new head of global services.

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9-11-01 to 5-01-11…
We were commuting from our then-home on Staten Island to midtown Manhattan, riding on the M6 bus from the ferry when the driver stared through his rear view mirror and screamed, "The World Trade is on fire!" We ran to the left side of the bus, craned our eyes upward and saw the smoke billow from the north tower. I got out near my office in the Flatiron District, staring down Sixth Avenue at the towers with the hordes of others, listening to a radio in a white van, trying to figure out what was going on…and then we watched the second plane crash into the south tower. In the meantime my sister-in-law heard a loud bang as her subway train passed beneath the site.

High Priority!

Why Your Business Must Form a Social Media Strategy Today
There has been an unworldly volume of social media related content filling the pages of media sites of late - and you've certainly read a fair amount within the pages of Customer Interaction Solutions as well over the past 18 months. Many arguments have been made for why social media should be part of customer service organizations, and how, particularly on the inbound side. But, one of the reasons social media can be such a tremendous asset is its nature as a two-way medium, allowing businesses to follow a basic principle of marketing: In order to succeed, your brand must be where your customers are because that's where the power lies.

Ask the Experts

The New Customer Service Model in Insurance: Enabled by Unified Insurance Solutions
Some insurers are able to realize service excellence in one line of business or in a single functional area. The key to "great" customer service, however, is being able to effectively provide it across the the entire business with consistent, timely communications between policyholders and the organization. Do so, and customer retention improves. A unified customer service capability readies the organization to execute quickly when opportunities arise to enter a new market or launch a new product. Insurers must build a unified organization, and the best first step is to take an outside-in view of their organization and assess interaction capabilities from the customer's perspective.

Other

Service Providers and the Smartphone Culture
It seems like only yesterday that I got my first cell phone. It was big, clunky, shaped like a brick - and probably weighed that much - with terrible reception and voice quality. But, boy, was it cool. Waxing nostalgic like this makes me realize just how much I have come to rely on my cell phone for survival. It has become more than just a convenience; it is now an integral part of my work environment. It is no longer my cell phone, it is now my smartphone. I recently sat down with Pascal Dore, the mobility product manager at Media5 Corp., to discuss how mobility has changed the way we work today.

Ask the Expert

Cisco and Interactive Intelligence: The Value of a Combined Solution for Enterprise IP Telephony and Customer Care
Over the last few years a growing number of businesses have standardized on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) for IP telephony. For good reason. Cisco Systems is a trusted name, and CUCM is a flexible and effective voice solution for the enterprise. Yet many of these same businesses are at a solution cross-roads for their contact center operations and customer care - and face a key decision. "Do we expand our investment in Cisco to the contact center? Or do we look for an alternative contact center solution that can integrate with CUCM and, at the same time, simplify our IT infrastructure and better meet the needs of our business as a whole?"

High Priority!

Tweeting Isn't Just for Birds
Whether positive or negative, one tweet can say a lot about customers' experiences with products and services. Social media has transformed how we interact with our friends and families - as well as our colleagues in many cases. For the hundreds of millions of social media users, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social tools are a way of life, largely because they are able to easily communicate their thoughts to large groups of friends and followers in seconds, from wherever they are, thanks to the availability and ease of use of these services on mobile devices.

Publisher's Outlook

Will Contact Centers Boost U.S. Employment Again?
It was 1991. The U.S. was in the midst of a recession and economic development agencies worldwide started to court the editors of this publication to write articles about their locations as attractive places to start a new center. In that year, my fist article-writing assignment outside the U.S., in fact, was to attend an IDA Ireland event in Dublin. At the time, call centers were seen as the perfect job creators, as the skills needed to work in them were limited. Moreover, they didn't require massive amounts of water or electricity like the manufacturing space. You could drop them anywhere and they would just create jobs - sometimes by the thousands per center.

Feature Story

ExtremeTix's Well-Timed Disaster Response
Business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) is about staying in operations during and after disasters and knowing how to rebound from them. Effective BC/DR strategies require having, knowing how to use and actually applying the right methods and tools, and the ability to adapt on the fly as situations change.

Call Center Technology

Anytime, Anywhere Any Channel Support
Organizations and their employees are rapidly moving away from the traditional fixed, employer-provided working environment connected by typically just three channels -voice, e-mail and IM. They are increasingly instead carrying out their tasks anytime from anywhere over a widening array of other media, most notably the social channel.

Special Focus

Improving Productivity Via Simplified Self-Service Authentication
IVR and web self-service systems have long been excellent contact center productivity-enhancing tools by handling calls that would have been answered or made by live agents at a fraction of the interaction costs. They can boost customer satisfaction by providing queueless responses.

Operations and Management

Finding Productivity Opportunities
Every organization has the same goal, which is doing more with the same, or less such as boosting productivity. The pressure to reach that objective is intensified when the economy is slow and resources are tight.

Cover Story

A Peek at the New Customer Interaction Center (CIC) Version 4.0
Contact centers are looking for ways to better serve their customers over multiple channels while increasing productivity without high costs.

Feature Story

Knowlagent on Productivity
Contact centers are under the gun in today's slow economy to do more/with less and boost productivity. Matt McConnell, president and CEO of Knowlagent (www.knowlagent.com) had these questions posed to him on contact center productivity trends, issues and solutions:

Feature Story

Does Your Customer Service Need an Upgrade?
Every time a person receives outstanding customer service, their threshold for anything less becomes smaller. A hundred years of "the customer is always right" has slowly but steadily raised expectations for customer service, and it is our job as professionals to see that those expectations are met or even exceeded. Our goal should be to create a top-notch customer experience that is consistent across every single interaction.

CRM, BPO & Teleservices

The IP Switch
In buying voice services contact centers are gradually switching from PSTN/TDM to Internet Protocol (IP), most commonly using session initiation protocol (SIP) or SIP trunking. The day that PSTN's copper-intensive hardware will join cordboards and electro-mechanical switches as museum pieces is not too distant.

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In Hiring, To Avoid 'Big Brother' Quit Being 'Nasty Sister'
"In order to be prepared to complete our online pre-screen questionnaire and application you will need your address history for the past seven years…"

Publisher's Outlook

Amazon EC2 Outage: What the Experts Tell Us
The recent outage of Amazon's EC2 service affected a number of leading-edge companies, which, in some cases, used the fact that they housed little to no infrastructure on their premises as a selling point to investors. Certainly, the cloud computing market is in what we could call a post-evangelism phase, where there seems to be universal agreement that the cloud has a role in most organizations - at least to help with some tasks - if not all. We know the concept of hosted solutions isn't new - many companies outsource payroll, for example, or tax preparation.

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Getting It Right on Social Media
Contact centers are conservative organizations for good reason: they have to get it right on their tasks, whether customer service, support, sales, or billing and collections, as they are on the corporate front lines, interacting with customers. There is little room for error but when these occur-which are inevitable even in the best of outfits-they hear about it ASAP.

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Demolish The Call/Contact Center?
I must confess to never hearing or using the term "call centers"-now multichannel contact centers-when I first started covering them in the mid-1990s. Instead I knew and referred to them by function, i.e. "billing", "canvassing", "collections", "customer service", "fundraising", "order entry", "polling", "research", "reservations", "tech support" and "telemarketing".

High Priority

What's the Best Time for Customer Surveys?
There is no question customer surveys are a fantastic means of collecting information and evaluating service levels and overall customer satisfaction - and we all know customer satisfaction drives business success. Consider the retail space. Customer surveys are a fantastic mechanism for improving facilities, enhancing service levels, and determining overall satisfaction levels. The question, though, is how to best implement them in order to solicit the highest response levels.

Publisher's Outlook

Noble Systems Launches Noble Messenger EC
Outbound broadcast messaging such as for credit card fraud, class changes, emergencies, flight delays and outages has become a key contact center tool as it improves service by alerting customers and others while obviating costly inbound calls. The challenge is to have a messaging solution that is easily expandable to meet needs and which is cost effective.

ASK THE EXPERTS

Jumpstarting your Contact Center with Communications as a Service (CaaS)
It's a balancing act for contact center executives everywhere: improve the quality of customer interactions, but minimize expenses to do it. Ok, how? With advanced applications like intelligent ACD routing and quality monitoring to improve the customer experience, and especially with its pay-as-you-go approach for minimizing startup costs and ongoing expenses, many contact centers are turning to Communications as a Service, or CaaS. Moreover, in a dynamic business climate, contact centers are also discovering how flexible CaaS is, and how rapidly it allows them to adapt to whenever needs dictate.

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Avoid Lawsuits, Avoid Credit Checking Applicants
While there is little likelihood of major new laws and regulations coming down from the conservative-swaying Congress and state houses, the Obama Administration and many of its state counterparts have given notice that they will enforce existing ones to the max. And that includes regulations impacting on employment.

HIGH PRIORITY!

SMBs are Call Centers Too
There are two approaches to the small and mid-sized business (SMB) market - treat it as a unique market or as a downsized enterprise. It's a dilemma that many telephony vendors have struggled with over the years and, while some have succeeded, many have failed to make a significant impact on the market.

PUBLISHER'S OUTLOOK

The Importance of Quality Interactions
To learn more, I reached out to Chris Coles, President & CEO of HyperQuality, which focuses on helping its customers provide optimal quality experience over the phone, email and chat. The company also analyzes accents and cultural issues with agents in India and other countries. Our interaction provides solid information on how important providing quality interactions is to customers.

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Mining The Social Channel for Customer Gold
Then there is the issue of whether what is said on the social channel fully and accurately reflects marketplace sentiment. Who actually listens and heeds commenters' messages? Are the people who use these tools: leaders and followers alike, also sought-after customers, possessing the right income, interests and demographics? Or are the comments and posts instead examples of "empty cans rattle the most?"

ASK THE EXPERTS

Cloud-Based Communications: Trends, Benefits and Drivers
If functionality, flexibility and innovation are important keys to your business needs, then Communications as a Service (CaaS) is right for you. Learn about trends, benefits and drivers for cloud-based communications from Richard Snow, vice president and research director for Ventana Research and Joe Staples, CMO for Interactive Intelligence.

PUBLISHER'S OUTLOOK

Making Social Media Your Business
Paul Dunay is one of the foremost experts in social media marketing. He has been a keynote speaker on Facebook Marketing at a past ITEXPO and, until recently, he expertly handled social media at Avaya. Since I heard him speak, I realized he was someone worth watching in the social space. When I learned he recently changed jobs, I immediately posed a series of questions about why he changed careers and where social media marketing is headed. I hope you find his responses as useful as I have.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Two Sides of Social Media
There has been an incredible volume of discussion about the role of social media in the business world, it's hardly surprising one can't find a common answer to the question. The one consistent response, though, is that social media should have a role.

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To Improve Quality and Profits Get Rid of 'HR'
One of the numbers in the combination that unlocks the door to customers and their spending - the others include effective marketing and supplying the right products at the right price - is the hiring, retaining and properly managing problem-solving-empowered top quality contact center agents and supervisors. They generate superior performance, both in higher profits and lower costs.

Call Center Technology

Hearing (and Heeding) Social Customer Commands
Those companies that pay heed to the royalties' words and welcome their participation will be bestowed with riches and honors. Woe will befall those who do not listen to or acknowledge their concerns; these procurers will be denounced and banished.

Case Study

Workforce Management That 'Flies'
Scheduling contact center agents can be compared to scheduling flights. Too few at peak periods or the wrong aircraft assigned can lead to frustrated patrons - who may go to competitors - while too many will waste scarce resources.

Ask the Experts

Hosted Versus On-premises Contact Center Solutions
In today's contact center solutions marketplace contact centers have a choice between hosted and premise-licensed delivery. This has naturally raised several important questions that must be answered so that the right method for the right product is selected that best meets your contact center needs. Roe Jones, Product Manager, Interactive Intelligence, takes a hard look at some of these issues.

High Priority

Is Social CRM a Byproduct of Business Ignorance?
Business success equates to the ability to excel at customer service and at worst, meeting customer expectations while, at best, exceeding them. Of course, in order to accomplish that feat, businesses must be aware of customer expectations, which isn't always as easy as it might seem. But, it certainly seems intuitive that offering the best available products is part of achieving high levels of customer satisfaction.

Publisher's Outlook

9 Social CRM Tips For 2011
Facebook just overtook Yahoo by a comfortable amount to become the third largest website in the world according to comScore. The world's leading social networking site attracted 648 million unique visitors in November 2010 and this compares to just 630 million for Yahoo.

ASK THE EXPERTS

The Value of Blending eServices and the Contact Center
In the contact center, particularly, successfully meeting the demand for such eServices comes down to effectively managing electronic channels and the routing, monitoring and reporting processes behind them. First, though, decision makers must determine the right eServices channels to deploy and when to deploy them. They must staff agents accordingly. In blending eServices into their contact center operation, decision makers should understand the dynamics of eServices themselves, if they hope to fully realize their value.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Make Social Media Work for You, Identify the Alpha Males in Your Community
In other words, businesses should seek to identify their most influential customers, ensure they are made aware of the latest products and service enhancements, and let them spread the word virally. Not only is it easier for businesses, but the opinions of peers and family members are likely to have a greater impact on outliers and potential new customers.

CRM, BPO & TELESERVICES

Buying BPO Successfully
Deciding whether or not to contract out (e.g., outsource acquiring, qualifying, selling, surveying, serving, supporting and/or collecting from your customers) and, if so, to which firm(s), is one of the most critical decisions you can make. That is because the contractor, which is becoming popularly known as a business process outsourcer or BPO, will be representing you, on your behalf.

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Before Making Your Contact Center Wish List....
This is the season where individuals-and organizations such as contact centers - make their wish lists. Yet, with budgets, both household and corporate, limited there is no allowance - or tolerance - for unused or misused items. The penalties include reprimands and threats to cut back on how much is given next year.

Publisher's Outlook

Gaming Google with Bad Customer Service
The story explained that the more horrible the customer service level, the more complaints were generated on high-ranking sites such as RipoffReport.com, which increased the ranking of the site.

Publisher's Outlook

Anana Enables Social Networking Dial-Tone
It was only a matter of time - after all, it has permeated so many aspects of our lives - until social networking would be integrated with telephone service like never before, enabling carriers to generate revenue by tapping into one of the most popular phenomena on the planet.

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Curing the Pareto Illness
One of the most serious illnesses to strike organizations is the Pareto Principle: the notion that 20 percent of customers create 80 percent of the value, which is embedded in CRM methodology. To maximize profits the object is to focus resources on retaining and attracting the top 20 while giving minimal least-cost service to the bottom 80.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Winning Business Means Knowing What Customers Are Saying
The relationship between customer and vendor… it's the key to a successful business. In fact, most successful companies spend significant effort and budget dollars engaging their customers, ensuring their customer relationships are well-managed, and coaching and training staff on best practices for ensuring customer satisfaction.

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Is the U.S. Finally Competitive With India?
There is growing evidence showing that when all costs are considered having contacts handled in the U.S. may be finally competitive with offshore outsourcing, most notably to India.

Cover Story

Interior Concepts Equips The Next-Gen Contact Center
The next-gen contact center is one that is multichannel and multimedia, flexible, cost-effective and focused on ensuring performance through effective, work-enabling design.

ASK THE EXPERTS

Optimizing Agent Performance in a Real-time World
The tools and processes to optimize agent performance are multifaceted - addressing the desktop to handle the contact, and performance tools to mea­sure and monitor. The desktop includes knowledge management and scripting, as well as agent assistance tools. A performance tools suite includes quality monitoring, workforce management (WFM), customer feedback, and coaching tools. Another key ingredient is a strong feedback loop that uses those performance tools to drive ac­tions that the individual and team can pur­sue for overall optimization.

Publisher's Outlook

Keeping Up With The Vigilante Consumer
Fripp points to what futurist Faith Popcorn has coined the "Vigilante Consumer" -who want value, service, convenience, choice and lots of attention--and she offers several suggestions to keep up with them. TMC has published Fripp editorial as a guest column on TMCnet.com. Here are the highlights: