Since customer service is an aspect of every business’s core strategy, advancements in the call centers impact almost every segment of the market. While they may not seem like a behind the scenes component, they have a direct bearing on customers. Given the pace with which call center services evolve, it’s important for those in the industry to keep abreast of trends emerging throughout the week. This week we saw new partnerships and software advancements both designed to help more people more effectively.
InContact has been selected by another major U.S. specialty retailer as the solution to its customer service strategy. The undisclosed company will be using inContact’s full line of contact center tools including agent optimization, routing and CRM products in two of its offices. Together these offices employee around 200 agents and a strong suite of tools is imperative to the success of their communications operation. InContact provides one of the most comprehensive hosted solutions currently on the market and has been a standard choice for many looking to expand their customer service strategy without breaking the back.
Well known online currency broker PayPal has also taken up a new call center solution adding support for a desktop manager to help its agents process requests faster and more efficiently. Phoenix-based software developer SmarterTools Inc. announced PayPal (News - Alert) has adopted the SmarterTrack help desk solution to manage internal support and customer service issues for thousands of agents in PayPal's European and North American operations centers.
In other news gaps in network performance have been reported to be reducing among major telecom service providers. This means that the efficiency of account teams and customer service representatives has emerged as a key differentiator in customer satisfaction. The report was filed by J.D. Power and Associates.
According to the report, short- and long-duration outages have declined significantly in recent years. The average number of short-duration outages experienced by customers during the past six months has decreased by more than 22 percent, to 4.6 incidents in 2011 from 5.9 in 2010.
Join us again next week for another run down on the biggest call center service stories.
Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Follow him on Twitter @cpdimarco.
Edited by Rich Steeves