7 Tips for Building the Contact Center of the Future. As consumers rapidly embrace the web and mobile devices for fast answers to questions, is the contact center finally on its way out?

When your website does a poor job of resolving customer service issues, the escalation costs that ensue are truly astounding. Our latest report, based on published data from Forrester Research, gives you an eye opening look into these runaway costs and how you can stop them.

Aberdeen Group’s recent research on Next-Generation Customer Experience Management highlights the recent trend in the customer-company relations and the challenges companies face with their customer experience management (CEM) efforts across multiple channels. The results of this research will be included in this soon-to-be-released whitepaper.

Some of the findings and insights that will be included in the upcoming whitepaper are:

• The primary reasons companies struggle in adopting a data-driven approach to manage their customer interactions
• How companies are adaptating to the new dynamics of the "customer era."
• The performance gains Best-in-Class organizations realize as a result of their ability to convert data into actionable insights

WebRTC has been the biggest topic of conversation in the telecommunications industry for a couple of years now. Not surprisingly everyone is trying to figure out what it means to them and where it can be used to improve user experiences and extend the use of the value creation capabilities that exist in todays Service Networks. This paper offers a perspective on how WebRTC will evolve to interwork with and extend Service Networks today.

The contact center is becoming increasingly complex. The days of simple telephony interactions are long gone. Managers struggle to contain costs while handling multi-channel communications with customers and prospects who expect speedy resolution and instant gratification. Traditional live agents alone just can’t meet the demands of today’s contact center. Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence are offering an ideal solution to this escalating issue. Virtual call agents can deliver the speed and precision of an automated technology, along with the good manners and problem-solving capabilities of a human agent. The valuable time of human agents can be reserved for the more challenging, complicated issues while virtual call agents deal with the more straightforward, repetitive queries. This approach not only cuts costs drastically, but is also proven to enhance customer satisfaction and boost employee morale.

Download this white paper, authored by chief analyst Dick Bucci from Pelorus Associates, to learn about:

• The top benefits and many inbound and outbound uses of virtual call agents
• How virtual call agents help significantly reduce costs while improving customer satisfaction
• How virtual call agents help ensure PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliance
• An ROI comparison of virtual call agents vs. other self-service and contact center technologies

If you’re looking to improve customer lifetime value the best place to start is with your agent experience and productivity. Most organizations are stuck in the old paradigm of contact center technology where best of breed systems force agents to toggle back and forth between multiple windows resulting in frustration for the agent and a poor experience for the customer.

The connection between agent experience and customer experience and its bottom-line impact has been inferred over the years, but a new study conducted by LiveOps and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff’s Customer Experience Research Group looked more closely at this impact on both operational costs and revenue generation in the contact center. Click here to download this compelling whitepaper and learn how technology affects agent happiness and productivity and can result in increased subscriber revenues and better customer lifetime value.

The evolution of customer communications from telephony to multichannel interactions, including IM and chat, SMS, email, and social media, have created a new era in the relationship between businesses and customers, once which is based upon each customer’s preferred communications modality. This evolution of the call center into a multichannel Customer Engagement Center necessitates a shift in not only engagement strategy to meet customers on the engagement medium of choice, but also an assessment of their communications technologies and CRM software, which must both be able to manage this new customer service model. This Gartner report analyzes the current CEC vendor landscape and the degree to which the market has responded to the social-mobile customer.

Workforce management applications are critical for contact centers. These solutions are the only way to ensure that a contact center has the right level of resources with appropriate skills to handle all inbound and outbound transactions within a pre-defined service level. Workforce management is historically the most disliked application in contact centers because most of these solutions are complicated and very difficult to use with features that are so complex that they can only be used by quantitatively-oriented and technically trained WFM analysts.

However, vendors are finally listening to their customers and starting to deliver enhanced WFM solutions. These new-generation WFM solutions do many of the same things as older versions, but in less than half the time and with a great deal less training and effort. And, like all Web 2.0 applications, the system logic is embedded in the user interface, making these solutions much easier to use and maintain. Download this white paper and learn how workforce management is changing.

Atlantic Tele-Network’s subsidiaries range from a CLEC in New England through to Guyanese PTT, GT&T, each with their own networks, operations and P&L. The company’s policy is to maintain autonomy within its subsidiaries while centralizing where appropriate at a group level. So Atlantic decided to consolidate its national and international voice traffic routing and management to realize synergies across its subsidiaries. The reasons Atlantic chose DIGITALK’s SBC VoIP Peering to meet its needs and the benefits it has achieved from the solution are presented in this case study.

"As an innovative and progressive Tier 1 communications enabler based in the Channel Islands, JT Global was not afraid to consider new and innovative options to expand its wholesale service. While the option for a Cloud solution raised many questions for an operator with 130 years’ experience providing world-class products and solutions, it quickly became apparent that the ability to exploit new market opportunities rapidly, reliably and without disruption to the business was crucial. In this case study, the advantages of the DIGITALK Carrier Cloud to JT's business are outlined demonstrating the value that a Cloud solution can bring to leading wholesale termination providers."

Learn how to better manage an effective and efficient call center with a predictive dialer/call center solution from MDLsolutions.

Many mid-sized companies find themselves sacrificing either affordability or ease-of-use when selecting call center solutions. MDLsolutions has developed a software-based solution that is affordable, scalable and easy to install and maintain. The solution/predictive dialer is also feature-rich and comes with U.S.-based support.

Download this supplement to learn how MDLsolutions can get you on your way to a more productive call center.

A constellation of business requirements places new demands on IT professionals. The rapid speed with which the corporate operating environment moves has been well documented. Messaging middleware has transformed the way applications communicate and exchange information. Application integration has brought about significant advantages; however it has also brought about a need to track intangible, transient digital assets – business transactions. As the IT complexity grows, compliance and integration needs have also evolved.

Since IBM released two versions of WebSphere MQ in close proximity to each other, it is important to understand how to best utilize the benefits of both versions and how to get them to work together with previous versions. This white paper will give you a better understanding of how to get them to all get along.

In the Overview white paper, we discussed the key highlights of multiple version support for WebSphere MQ 7.1 and 7.5. In this paper, we are going to go into more detail. Let’s review the meaning of coexistence multiple installatioon. The key component is that you can install multiple versions of WebSphere MQ on the same server at the same time. This is something that you could not do in the past.

WebSphere MQ was developed in the early 1990’s to fill a need in many applications for Asynchronous Application to Application Communication. This concept is still a primary requirement of many applications, including Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud computing. Much like email provides asynchronous communication between individuals, WebSphere MQ provided the ability for applications on disparate platforms to communicate easier than ever before, even across companies. Many applications were designed to leverage the wealth of data stored on legacy systems without needing to rewrite the interfaces to that data or to disperse it to multiple systems.

Over 95% of the Fortune 1000 companies use WebSphere MQ for their messaging system. In fact, it is the most popular system for messaging across multiple platforms (85% market share). This paper reviews and summarizes the highlights of the recent releases of IBM’s WebSphere MQ 7.1 and 7.5. It is the first in a series of papers around the current changes in WebSphere MQ.

DevOps is a hot topic right now, and for good reason. Today’s application environments have become far too complex to deploy and manage with silo teams and stand-alone tools. Instead, they require coordination and collaboration across virtually all silos, and this is typically accomplished with teams of senior specialists with skill sets spanning Development and Operations. Tools play a key role in DevOps, as the right tools can be a bridge supplying a “common language” across teams with diverse skillsets and “technology languages.”

The complexity of one management system per messaging infrastructure is too costly and when these infrastructures are interconnected, the management systems become ineffective. These firms require one place to monitor, visualize and analyze the status of applications and services shared across the enterprise environment. However, the skill set required to manage each middleware technology is often different and a single business flow can traverse multiple different transports and support teams. This makes unified monitoring of messages across the infrastructure and the ability to track them and rapidly identify and correct problems anywhere in that flow an essential element in improving service and reducing cost—perhaps, even a necessity for survival

For Enterprise organizations, utilization of software as a service (SaaS) applications means easier budgeting, faster deployment, and reduced risk. For cloud service providers and established on-premise software publishers, SaaS presents a new opportunity to give customers what they want—while ensuring recurring revenue streams and exploring new markets. The future of software delivery is clear. It’s the path to software monetization in the cloud that becomes foggy for both cloud service providers and established software publishers. While delivering software as a service opens many doors for software vendors, it also presents a new set of challenges. This paper explores the top six challenges software publishers are faced with, and presents a quick and easy way for SaaS providers to define their service catalogs, provision and control user access at the feature level, measure service usage for billing and business intelligence purposes, and instantly adapt their service catalog to embrace new and evolving market opportunities.

Collections contact centers and Accounts Receivables Management (ARM) firms face a constant challenge: being able to maximize payments while staying compliant and up to date with new rules and regulations. Speech analytics can help ease this challenge by analyzing every agent contact – either during or after the call – to eliminate compliance risk, improve agent performance, and increase recovery rates. This case study highlights how one ARM firm was able to leverage speech analytics to proactively reduce complaints and prepare for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) audits.

Scale-out storage technologies have rapidly gained popularity over the past several years, successfully crossing the chasm from niche technology to mainstream enterprise solution. As this shift occurs, an increasing number of enterprises are seeking to understand the advantages of the newer technology when it comes to the storage of exploding amounts of unstructured data.

Today’s enterprise faces a myriad of choices when selecting storage technologies. For a large and quickly growing segment of storage applications - those characterized by the need to reliably store large volumes of unstructured data - an increasing number of enterprises are turning to "scale-out" storage technologies.