In Focus
Approaching The Location Of International Call Centers From A Secure Perspective
By Ed Pennington, ONE NorthEast
Today's call centers are, in many cases, international, multichannel and media- and service-provider-dependent. The importance of today's call centers makes it crucial to take the proper steps to ensure that they are established correctly. This article highlights the issues involved in the establishment of a quality, cost-effective and low-risk international call center.

Teleservices Outsourcing
Internet Customer Service: Is Your Pharmaceutical Call Center Prepared?
By Amy S. Abrams, Telerx
Health care is the fourth most popular Web topic with 40.9 million adults engaged in health-related activities on the Web in the first quarter of this year. For a growing number of Americans, the Internet convinces them -- more than any other medium -- to ask their doctors for a brand-name prescription. But how do these sites rate in terms of customer service? The results of one study are presented here.

Customer Relationship Management 
Leveraging Customer Metrics For Strategic Decision Making
By Dennis Sparacino, AlphaBlox and Cindy O'Reilly, ThinkFast Consulting, Inc.
The ability to leverage customer-related metrics can give any telecommunications company a significant competitive advantage. Customer information is the focal point and primary enabler of competitive differentiation and must be created, maintained and protected as a valuable corporate asset. The customer knowledge base must be complete, accurate, current and made accessible to all appropriate organizations and functions within the company.

Customer Information: Integration Before Management: New CDI Technology Leads To Successful CRM (Sidebar)
By Steve Brighton, Acxiom Corporation
One of the major barriers to successful CRM implementation has been the absence of an effective customer data integration (CDI) technology that can fully integrate the customer information isolated in multiple databases and then deliver it to all points of customer contact in real-time. This is essential because you cannot manage all your customer information unless you can see it all at once.

E-Sales--E-Service.com
Can The Internet Bring Back The Village Market?
By Erik Lounsbury, Editorial Director, [email protected] CENTER CRM Solutions
Five experts relate how the Internet is changing how businesses relate to their customers. The author traces the growth of trade from the early medieval marketplace to today's Web-enabled commerce arena and finds some notable similarities between the two environments.

What's In Store For Communications
Providers? (Sidebar)
The author speaks with Tom Pike of Andersen Consulting about the future of communications providers and CDSPs (content delivery service providers).

Move It, Don't Lose It: Use Proven Assets And Transform Into A Web Leader
By Gail Greener, CNT
In their haste to implement a Web solution, some established companies are overlooking the one asset that could put them light-years ahead of any newborn Internet vendor: existing customer relationships. The information obtained from these relationships is a key competitive differentiator in the crowded Internet marketplace. Making effective use of customer information is often the difference between an established company at the forefront of the e-commerce race and an established company that can only watch from the sidelines.

Building The Perfect Call Center
Has The Internet Killed The Call Center Star?
By Bruce Tsuji, Mitel Business Applications
The days of the standalone call center operation that is expected to put through a maximum number of calls in as little time as possible are, at best, numbered. Today, companies want to learn more about customers, they want to use the philosophies of CRM to focus on high-value customers, and they want to provide customers with as many convenient ways to access their products and services as possible.

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TMC LABS
Our TMC� Labs engineers recently visited Dictaphone Corporation's facility to learn more about the company's Freedom QMS product. They found that the best attributes of this product were that it was easy to implement and simple to use. Read on for more details about this user-friendly product.