CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — JUNE 2011

A Peek at the New Customer Interaction Center (CIC) Version 4.0

Contact centers are looking for ways to better serve their customers over multiple channels while increasing productivity without high costs...

Feature Articles

Call Center Technology

Anytime, Anywhere Any Channel Support
Organizations and their employees are rapidly moving away from the traditional fixed, employer-provided working environment connected by typically just three channels -voice, e-mail and IM. They are increasingly instead carrying out their tasks anytime from anywhere over a widening array of other media, most notably the social channel.

CRM, BPO & TELESERVICES

The IP Switch
In buying voice services contact centers are gradually switching from PSTN/TDM to Internet Protocol (IP), most commonly using session initiation protocol (SIP) or SIP trunking. The day that PSTN's copper-intensive hardware will join cordboards and electro-mechanical switches as museum pieces is not too distant.

Operations and Management

Finding Productivity Opportunities
Every organization has the same goal, which is doing more with the same, or less such as boosting productivity. The pressure to reach that objective is intensified when the economy is slow and resources are tight.

Special Focus

Improving Productivity Via Simplified Self-Service Authentication
IVR and web self-service systems have long been excellent contact center productivity-enhancing tools by handling calls that would have been answered or made by live agents at a fraction of the interaction costs. They can boost customer satisfaction by providing queueless responses.

Feature Story

Knowlagent on Productivity
Contact centers are under the gun in today's slow economy to do more/with less and boost productivity. Matt McConnell, president and CEO of Knowlagent (www.knowlagent.com) had these questions posed to him on contact center productivity trends, issues and solutions:

Does Your Customer Service Need an Upgrade?
Every time a person receives outstanding customer service, their threshold for anything less becomes smaller. A hundred years of "the customer is always right" has slowly but steadily raised expectations for customer service, and it is our job as professionals to see that those expectations are met or even exceeded. Our goal should be to create a top-notch customer experience that is consistent across every single interaction.

Columns

Publisher’s Outlook

Will Contact Centers Boost U.S. Employment Again?
It was 1991. The U.S. was in the midst of a recession and economic development agencies worldwide started to court the editors of this publication to write articles about their locations as attractive places to start a new center. In that year, my fist article-writing assignment outside the U.S., in fact, was to attend an IDA Ireland event in Dublin. At the time, call centers were seen as the perfect job creators, as the skills needed to work in them were limited. Moreover, they didn't require massive amounts of water or electricity like the manufacturing space. You could drop them anywhere and they would just create jobs - sometimes by the thousands per center.

Logout

In Hiring, To Avoid 'Big Brother' Quit Being 'Nasty Sister'
"In order to be prepared to complete our online pre-screen questionnaire and application you will need your address history for the past seven years…"

HIGH PRIORITY!

Tweeting Isn't Just for Birds
Whether positive or negative, one tweet can say a lot about customers' experiences with products and services. Social media has transformed how we interact with our friends and families - as well as our colleagues in many cases. For the hundreds of millions of social media users, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social tools are a way of life, largely because they are able to easily communicate their thoughts to large groups of friends and followers in seconds, from wherever they are, thanks to the availability and ease of use of these services on mobile devices.

Ask the Experts

Cisco and Interactive Intelligence: The Value of a Combined Solution for Enterprise IP Telephony and Customer Care
Over the last few years a growing number of businesses have standardized on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) for IP telephony. For good reason. Cisco Systems is a trusted name, and CUCM is a flexible and effective voice solution for the enterprise. Yet many of these same businesses are at a solution cross-roads for their contact center operations and customer care - and face a key decision. "Do we expand our investment in Cisco to the contact center? Or do we look for an alternative contact center solution that can integrate with CUCM and, at the same time, simplify our IT infrastructure and better meet the needs of our business as a whole?"

Special Focus

Improving Productivity Via Simplified Self-Service Authentication
IVR and web self-service systems have long been excellent contact center productivity-enhancing tools by handling calls that would have been answered or made by live agents at a fraction of the interaction costs. They can boost customer satisfaction by providing queueless responses.

Case Study

ExtremeTix's Well-Timed Disaster Response
Business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) is about staying in operations during and after disasters and knowing how to rebound from them. Effective BC/DR strategies require having, knowing how to use and actually applying the right methods and tools, and the ability to adapt on the fly as situations change.