High Priority!
Spanlink Is On A Mission
By Rich Tehrani, Group Editor-in-Chief,
Technology Marketing Corp.
BS: Spanlink’s mission is to leverage unified communications to drive transformational business success for our customers. Customers need to understand that unified communications and IP telephony present an opportunity to make service improvements, realize operational savings and grow revenue. Our mission is to help our customers understand and achieve that.

Customer Inter@ction News™

In The Queue
I Was An Outbound Call Center Agent
By Patrick Barnard, Associate Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions
There. I’ve said it. And let’s face it…in the 1980s, the job of outbound call center agent ranked right up there with cleaner of public restrooms on the job appeal scale. But there is a bright side: little did I know then that it would end up becoming useful in my role as associate editor for this magazine.

Last Call
Fun Things To Do With Your IVR
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions
Today, many people are in the enviable position of having to figure out what to do with their legacy IVRs. Some suggestions include door stops, booster chairs for small children and boat anchors.

INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FROM THE EXPERTS
Building The Perfect Customer Experience
By Steve Boyazis, InfoCision Management Corp.
The one real exception is direct marketing. The beauty of the theory of direct marketing is that it is completely transparent. With every conversation or contact, you have an immediate answer. It’s truly the perfect environment to test and model every aspect of building a client relationship.

How Much Is Superior Customer Care Worth?
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
Research consultancy Bain & Company recently conducted a survey of several hundred customer-facing companies. The companies were asked if they provided a superior customer service experience to their customers. Eighty percent of the companies surveyed were confident they did.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Customer Interaction Solutions' Eighth Annual CRM Excellence Awards, Part Two
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
For the eighth consecutive year, the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions dared readers to prove that their companies have what it takes to win the coveted CRM Excellence Award.

OUTSOURCING TELESERVICES
Business Case for Bangalore: Pros and Cons of Relocating a Contact Center to India
Just as computers and the Internet revolutionized the business world in the 1990s, globalization will have an even greater impact on businesses in the first 10 years of this decade. In 2000 and beyond, globalization in politics, business and culture is having a profound effect on our work lives and on our personal lives.

INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FROM THE EXPERTS
Call Centers Are The Communication Nucleus Of Any Business Create A Nimble, Reactive Call Center To Gain An Advantage
A Special Editorial Series Sponsored By Strategic Communication Systems
What do they have in common? Both Fred and Ann are trying to find a way to retain qualified staff while cost-effectively meeting internal and/or external customer demands. Ensuring high-quality performance while minimizing risks and balancing the budget is not a simple task even for a multi-talented professional.

For Today's Call Center, Flexibility Is Not Just 'Nice To Have'
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
Let’s face it. The call centers of 20 or even 10 years ago operated in one way only. Agents were hired and trained in the same way, the parameters for call recording had been set in stone years before, IVR menu trees were set up once and the call center was expected to bend to the IVR rather than the other way around. Dialers operated the same way every day and scripts were cumbersome to change.

WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION
Calculating The Return On Investment Of Workforce Management
By Rick Seeley and Rick Glew, IEX'Corp.
Vendors know how important proof of return on investment is to the success of a workforce management project ' and, ultimately, to the success of the proposal they put on the table and the company's willingness to make a commitment.

IP CONTACT CENTER
Five Steps To Securing Data In The Contact Center
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
Contact centers can take proactive steps to safeguard customer data by protecting information stored in millions of agent-customer recorded interactions. Demand to share the voice of the customer with enterprise decision-makers and increasingly high agent attrition rates have made this a necessity.

SPEECH TECHNOLOGY
An Update From The VoiceXML Forum
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
MR: The VoiceXML Forum is an industry organization whose mission is to promote and to accelerate the worldwide adoption of VoiceXML and VoiceXML-based applications.

What Every Call Center Needs To Know About Speech Analytics
By Patrick Barnard, Associate Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions
Unlike the speech analytics solutions of a few years ago, which were mainly used to perform simple 'word spotting' in recorded conversations, today's solutions can identify the context of what is being said, giving organizations the ability to more accurately categorize calls and gain new insights into customer and agent behavior.

ASK THE EXPERT
With Tim Passios, Director of Product Management, Interactive Intelligence
We’re hearing more about software as a service (SaaS) lately, and see it as a good option for our company. But we’re curious: What’s the difference between a SaaS provider and an application service provider (ASP), and what should we be aware of in selecting a SaaS vendor?