Teleservices Outsourcing
Teleservices Agencies 2000: Who's Who
With the growing pressures both internal and external to hold on to your current customers as well as acquire new ones, and the amount of customer interactions increasing daily through e-mail, Web chat and voice over IP, it's no wonder that your internal call center may be overloaded. If so, outsourcing to a teleservices partner may be the answer to your prayers. Learn who's who in the industry and use this guide as a resource to help you find the outsourcer to best fit your business' needs.

Customer Relationship Management 
CRM Throughout The Enterprise: How To Make It Happen
By Tim Guleri, Octane Software
We are all familiar with the reasons for getting closer to our customers to improve their satisfaction and retention -- the costs of acquiring a new customer far outweigh the costs of retaining an existing customer; decreasing customer defection by as little as five percentage points could double profits. To achieve high customer retention rates, companies have been striving to reconnect with customers to build personal relationships with each customer.

Raising The Standards: A Commitment To
Multivendor CRM Solutions
By Kim Mackay, Lucent Technologies
Overarching business strategies like CRM focus on bringing the intellectual capital of an entire enterprise to bear on customer interactions, so they must have flexibility and diversity at their very core. To properly align the many disparate departments within an enterprise -- from the back- office through multiple customer interactions to final product or service fulfillment -- requires the use of flexible, open-standards-based technologies that work easily within existing infrastructures in all areas of an enterprise.

E-Sales--E-Service.com
One Very Happy Customer
By Marc Robins, Associate Group Publisher,
[email protected] CENTER CRM Solutions�
We have often written in the pages of this magazine about the many challenges facing a company looking to provide a first-rate e-sales and e-service experience for customers. We have covered the bad and the ugly, detailing the e-sales disservices of e-commerce companies that, by all appearances, seem intent on providing the worst customer experience imaginable. [email protected] CENTER CRM Solutions� Associate Group Publisher would like to bring to light one company that has perfected the customer experience. 

E-Sales -- E-Service.com News

Internet Telephony Transforms The Call Center
By Sandra Reese, Natural MicroSystems
The call center is currently going through an "e-volution." Call centers are beginning to expand their service beyond providing or taking information. The ultimate goal of these new customer contact centers is to interactively service the customer and make every interaction a positive, responsive experience -- to create what might be termed "customer joy." To achieve this level of customer service, next-generation customer contact applications and services must bridge existing internal networks, including traditional PBXs, with the vast Internet world.

The Next Wave: Internet Technology In The Call Center
By Murray Bookman, Cisco Systems, Inc.
To meet growing customer expectations for multimedia interaction -- and remain competitive -- your company's call center operation must ride the wave of Internet technology change. Internet communication channels such as Web collaboration, Web callback, chat, e-mail and video kiosk are available today and fast becoming mainstream interaction channels.

Building The Perfect Call Center
The Evolution Of The PBX In The Call Center
By David Perez, COM2001.com
Today's fast-paced, mobile workforce has needs that go well beyond the conventional digital PBX. Workers must be able to access and manage their communications on the fly, and at a moment's notice -- from anywhere in the world. But it was not always so. The author looks at the telephone systems of yesterday, today and tomorrow. 

CRM Excellence Awards
TMC� Award Winners Celebrate At Communications Solutions� EXPO
At the recent Communications Solutions EXPO in Washington, D.C., Technology Marketing Corp. (TMC) hosted a dinner to honor recipients of the first-annual CRM Excellence Awards. The award is designed to honor companies with innovative products that have furthered Customer Relationship Management.