ac2: The Next Generation Workforce Management

CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — May 2011

SIP Print's On-Target Contact Center Applications

Most firms that are small-midsized businesses or SMBs have to be lean, flexible and very responsive to customers' needs to survive and grow…

Feature Articles

Call Center Technology

Recording The Developments
Call recordings are at the core of ensuring contact center performance, productivity, profitability and compliance through the vital information they collect and store from customer interactions. To help centers decide on recording solutions and strategies, Customer Interaction Solutions reached out to several industry experts and firms and asked them questions on:

CRM, BPO & TELESERVICES

Changing Needs, Changing Shores
Where to land contact centers and programs - onshore, nearshore or offshore - is becoming less of a strategic permanent commitment to any one place and more of a tactical decision, and for good reason. Each locale's labor costs and quality, infrastructure, currency, security and stability must be carefully weighed against the caveat that these factors can quickly be altered, as economic conditions and political events and disasters graphically (and tragically) illustrate.

Operations and Management

Tuning Up Workforce Management
If there ever is a time for contact centers to tune up their workforce management to ensure that the right agents with the right skills are available at the right time, that time is now. There is a growing focus on efficiently delivering higher quality service to retain customers and attract new ones. That is on top of generating more income from interactions directly via sales and collections and indirectly through service. More contacts are now going through nonvoice channels.

Awards and Recognition

Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine's 12th Annual CRM Excellence Awards
For the 12th consecutive year the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions have dared firms to prove that their companies have what it takes to win the coveted CRM Excellence Award.

Columns

Publisher’s Outlook

Amazon EC2 Outage: What the Experts Tell Us
The recent outage of Amazon's EC2 service affected a number of leading-edge companies, which, in some cases, used the fact that they housed little to no infrastructure on their premises as a selling point to investors…

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Getting It Right on Social Media
Contact centers are conservative organizations for good reason: they have to get it right on their tasks, whether customer service, support, sales, or billing and collections, as they are on the corporate front lines, interacting with customers…

HIGH PRIORITY!

What's the Best Time for Customer Surveys?
There is no question customer surveys are a fantastic means of collecting information and evaluating service levels and overall customer satisfaction - and we all know customer satisfaction drives business success. Consider the retail space. Customer surveys are a fantastic mechanism for improving facilities, enhancing service levels, and determining overall satisfaction levels. The question, though, is how to best implement them in order to solicit the highest response levels.

Ask the Experts

Jumpstarting your Contact Center with Communications as a Service (CaaS)
Hosted contact center infrastructure solutions, also referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS), are steadily gaining ground in enterprises of all sizes and in a variety of public and corporate verticals. Hosted solutions are reaching unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction because of the minimal cash outlay required, quick deployments, rapid and quantifiable return on investment, scalability and agility, ongoing investment protection, a reduced maintenance burden, and the opportunity to "try before you buy." Vendors also continue to expand functionality through product enhancements and improved deployment and integration models.

Innovation Solutions: Knowlagent

Every Minute Counts: Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Web-Generated Leads?
The passage of time poses a real problem in the sales world. A couple quick ticks of the clock can mean the difference between acquiring a new customer or losing it to a competitor. This time crunch is further amplified on the Web, where users expect even greater immediacy. While it may not be uncommon for organizations to wait days to respond to Web-generated leads, it is certainly detrimental to their ability to qualify and convert those leads.

Case Study

The UC Taste Test
The right technology solutions can improve contact center vitality by permitting them to meet customers' and business' needs more effectively. Unified communications (UC) is one such example, as it seamlessly integrates contacts from multiple channels to agents wherever they are located.