Welcome to the week in review for the customer relationship management, or 'CRM,' industry. Below are some of the top stories that came across the TMCnet news wires this week.
Early this week, call center on demand and hosted contact center software provider, Five9, has announced the New York Daily News has deployed Five9 on-demand call center software that integrates Salesforce CRM with the Five9 software to increase advertising renewal rates.
The New York Daily News relies on the Five9 Virtual Call Center for its classified ad sales agents who contact advertisers as their ad approaches expiration. Agents have been able to dramatically increase their productivity by using Five9 call center capabilities built into their Salesforce CRM interface. They now enjoy click-to-call functionality and timely screen-pops with relevant advertiser records from Salesforce.com.
"Our classifieds agents were dialing manually before," said Chris Thompson (News - Alert), director of Advertising Administration and Financial Operations for New York Daily News in a statement, "and tracking renewals to properly credit our agents was next to impossible. With Five9, we have full tracking and management capabilities on all agent activity and all orders.
Also this week, Provider of IVR, enterprise focused, cloud-based, customer engagement solutions Angel.com has announced the success of its customer experience lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's, or "MIT (News - Alert)," School of Engineering.
Through a course, entitled "Engineering Innovation and Design," MIT students were tasked with identifying a real-world problem to solve using voice applications. In addition, they were asked to build a business case, and design a voice solution to solve that problem.
In this semester's class, some of the solutions developed include automated voice applications to find the best parties and nightlife in town, manage to-do lists via the phone -- complete with speech to text -- and steer remote-control cars, all via a phone call.
Company officials said that the "MITchell Partymann" Facebook (News - Alert) Party App enables students to invite a virtual MIT party character to their party within Facebook, and then others can call the Partymann phone number to have relevant data on local parties read back to them over the phone.
In addition, PortaOne (News - Alert), a global communications and billing software company, has announced a new partnership with TelcoBridges, the maker of the Tmedia VoIP gateways. This partnership was formed after successful interoperability testing was completed between Tmedia products and PortaOne's PortaSwitch VoIP call control and billing management software platform.
Made at International Telecommunications Week 2010, this announcement assures telecom service providers of the seamless operation between the products, as well as a combination of reliability, scalability and system flexibility that will appeal to today's most demanding network and market requirements.
TelcoBridges (News - Alert) developed Tmedia, positioned as the industry's highest density VoIP gateways designed to deliver exceptional performance, energy efficiency and interoperability.
That's the top CRM News for this week. Check back next week on TMCnet for more breaking news in the CRM industry.
Kelly McGuire is a TMCnet Web editor, covering CRM and workforce technologies, and anchor of its daily TMC Newsroom video broadcast. Kelly also writes about eco-friendly "green" technologies and smart grids, compiling TMCnet's weekly e-Newsletters on those topics, as well as the cable industry. To read more of Kelly's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Internet Telephony Magazine
Click here to read latest issue
CUSTOMER 
Cloud Computing Magazine
Click here to read latest issue
IoT EVOLUTION MAGAZINE
