High Priority!
FrontRange Makes A Strong Showing In The SMB Marketplace
By Rich Tehrani, Group Editor-in-Chief,
Technology Marketing Corp.
FrontRange Solutions has a reputation for being a dynamic organization. The company is a market leader in IT service management, customer relationship management (CRM) and voice applications for the mid-market and distributed enterprise. It has never been one to sit still and let the industry evolve around it.

Customer Inter@ction News™

Last Call
Speech Self-Service Encroaches On Carbon-Based Life Forms
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions
When I first heard someone mention that someday, self-service would replace humans in the call center, I think I snorted coffee out my nose. It was almost a decade ago, and my skepticism on the topic was high.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
The Nine Circles of The IVR Inferno
By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor
There are lots of reasons to make your IVR (interactive voice response) system as efficient and customer-friendly as possible. You can rattle
off most of them: 'Yeah, yeah, improved customer satisfaction, better efficiency, blah, blah, costs savings, yada, yada, heard it all before.'

WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION
Outbound Technologies Roundup
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions
Call centers are ever on the alert for new ways to increase efficiency, keep costs down and at the same time improve the customer experience.

MANAGEMENT SCOPE
First Call Resolution: Good For You, Good For Your Customers
By Tracey E. Schelmetic Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions
It's a generally accepted piece of conventional wisdom that in the call center, what's good for you ' lowering call handle times, offloading more live calls into indifferent, inexpensive and generic self-service, replacing skilled agents with anything that can be loosely considered a carbon-based life form with a pulse, offshoring customer care to foreign lands where call center workers are happy with less salary than it would take for a U.S. agent to feed the cat with ' is not good for the customer.

OUTSOURCING TELESERVICES
Twenty-Second Annual Top 50 Inbound Teleservices Agency Ranking
This is the twenty-second year Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine brings you its "Top 50" Teleservices Agency Ranking. In this issue, we're presenting the "Top 50" inbound portion of the ranking. (The outbound portion of the ranking was highlighted in the March 2007 issue.) Since its inception in 1986, our "Top 50" ranking has been used as the benchmark for choosing large-capacity/sized teleservices agencies.

CONTACT CENTER TECHNOLOGY
Routing: The Foundation For Contact Center Optimization
By Katrina Howell, Genesys
Increasingly, contact centers are shifting focus from cost-containment to strategic goals such as improved customer loyalty, superior quality
and revenue generation. To realize these objectives, contact centers must first gain greater visibility into their customer base.

IP CONTACT CENTER
Building A Distributed Call Center: Three Things To Look For In A Virtual Phone Solution
By Greg Brashier VirtualPBX
It's no secret nowadays that one of the greatest challenges to running a contact center is complying with demands from executive company management, which usually involve trying to find a way to increase call center efficiencies and reduce costs while raising customer service quality to increase customer retention and loyalty.

ASK THE EXPERT
With Tim Passios, Director of Product Management, Interactive Intelligence
There seems to be a lot of talk about the benefits of using at-home or remote agents as additions to the physical contact center. Are those benefits tangible? Is the technology available to effectively implement a remote agent strategy? Are companies deploying remote agents successfully?