IBM Expands Efforts in Big Data, Analytics

CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — June 2012

IBM Expands Efforts in Big Data, Analytics

IBM has helped organizations manage data for many decades by providing them with relational databases. But in the last year or two there's been a data boom, and lot of the data cropping up as part of that doesn't fit neatly into relational databases....

Other Items

Innovation Solutions: Infocision

Employing Creative Ways to Enhance Recruitment and Retention
In the call center industry - or any industry really - recruiting and retaining top talent is critical to success. People are the heart of our business, so attracting the right candidates can make all the difference. Holding on to top performers is equally important, enabling a company to avoid knowledge loss and attrition costs that can hinder growth.

Feature Articles

CALL CENTER TECHNOLOGY

Social Media Creates a Stream of New Opportunity
Social media is impacting the customer experience in important new ways. Customer Interaction Solutions recently interviewed Jason Brennan, co-founder of advertising agency Stream Companies about how one discount apparel retailer is leveraging social media.

What's New in Social CRM
Aegis has been focused specifically on being a contact center company for most of the 25 years it's been in business, says Anil Modi, chief marketing officer for Aegis, and president of its Middle East North Africa region. But in recent years Aegis has looked at how customer relationships are changing, how different companies' product offering and pricing across specific verticals are often very similar to one another, and how it can help client companies differentiate themselves through user experience.

Health and Wellness Distributor Realizes $500K in Savings Using ShoreTel
Several customers are using the ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center solution in conjunction with a virtualization platform, and MonaVie is one of them. MonaVie, a multi-level marketing and community commerce organization that sells supplements and weight loss products, has employed ShoreTel technology to connect remote workers in its multiple contact centers internationally by email and chat.

Ergonomics in the Contact Center: Interior Concepts Offers Guidance on Reducing Worker Fatigue, Increasing Productivity
Working in a call center can give the brain and the mouth a nice workout, but it's not always so great for the rest of the body. That's why it's important to design call center workplaces to maximize productivity by reducing user fatigue and discomfort. To get more details on how organizations to achieve all that, Customer Interaction Solutions magazine recently interviewed Jennifer Way, marketing manager of Interior Concepts.

IVR Tips and Trends
When it comes to designing and implementing an IVR system at your business, simplicity is key. Self-service solutions leveraging IVR can offer great value if they're easy to use from the customer perspective, and easy to adopt from the business perspective.

Call Center Headsets: Why These Tools are the No. 1 Factor in Creating Good Contact Center Work Environments
A recently study from Frost & Sullivan and Jabra revealed that 73 percent of contact center managers surveyed believe quality headsets is the most important way to create a good work environment.

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

First Contact Resolution in a Multi-Channel World
In the past, looking at phone calls may have been enough, but in today's multi-channel world measuring FCR is much more complex. A customer who goes to a website and opens an account or books a flight has achieved first contact resolution.Yet in many organizations this is not captured as a customer service success, a FCR.

How to Drive Improvement through Automation
In healthcare and in business, data insight typically leads to improved outcomes. In order to capture and enable the use of data, organizations need to extend their staffs' skills by giving them high-performance tools that can accelerate mission critical tasks through automation. Automation is an opportunity, not a threat.

CRM, BPO & TELESERVICES

E-mail Marketing, Optimized:The Case for Outsourcing Your Solution
Sending unwanted e-mails to consumers is certainly not going to do your CRM strategy any favors, and repeated use of bad or abandoned addresses can also damage your company's reputation at receiving ISPs, so authentication and whitelisting (getting clearance from e-mail clients to send messages) are very important tasks. But list housekeeping can easily become overwhelming, especially because in-house IT resources are always limited. With an ESP, it's easier to monitor actively deliverability issues, automatically identify and remove addresses that are repeatedly bouncing and address spam problems quickly.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

CIS, TMC Announce IP Contact Center Pioneer Award Winners
This month, Customer Interaction Solutions magazine is happy to congratulate the winners of TMC's IP Contact Center Pioneer Awards.

Columns

Publisher's Outlook

GM to Facebook: Your Ads Don't Work
What this tells us is Facebook is just becoming a driver of the Splinternet or another Internet which advertisers and developers need to take into account. While having free content is great for Facebook and, moreover, GM will no doubt continue to drive massive web traffic Zuckerberg's way, the challenge becomes how to monetize it all.

HIGH PRIORITY!

10 Questions to Ask When Developing a Social Media Response Strategy
Social media has been the fastest growing communication category for several years now. Whether MySpace early on, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn more recently, or the latest social craze, Pinterest, users have flocked to social applications at a furious pace. Which of these do you use? Odds are, more than one, if not all of them in some capacity.

Ask the Experts

Humanizing Business Process Automation: Optimizing Performance for Employees and Customers
Improving the delivery of products and services should be an ongoing focus in business. In particular, if your firm isn't considering how to make its products and services available at a competitive price - and how to reduce time-to-market response times to customers - your competitors certainly are. Just as certainly, and especially on social networks and the web, consumers are constantly evaluating your company's service, pricing, product quality and reputation to gauge value overall.

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Take a Number
Call recording and monitoring are "at the forefront of the battle to improve quality and thus customer satisfaction and loyalty," according to the U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide, issued by ContactBabel and Zeacom . The guide draws on information gathered from surveys of 210 contact center managers and directors between November 2011 and February 2012.