IBM Expands Efforts in Big Data, Analytics

CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — July 2012

The Dawn of the Call Center Industry and a Brief Biography of the Industry Founder, Nadji Tehrani

It seems as if it was yesterday when I was sitting in my office and trying to figure out how I could possibly increase the effectiveness in the sales and marketing area. In 1979, TMC which was a fledgling start-up company, we only had four publications in the energy efficient non-polluting and material efficient technologies.

Other Items

What's on the Cover

The History and Advancement of the Contact Center and the Customer Experience
This year marks the 30-year anniversary of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. Well, that's not altogether accurate. What 2012 actually marks is three decades of TMC, our parent company, covering the call center space.

Five Call Center Technologies No One Foresaw 30 Years Ago
When I first joined Customer Interaction Solutions in 1998, the industry had advanced quite a bit. Computer-telephony integration was the cutting-edge technology, and TMC had launched a magazine by that name not long before. While CTI is still relevant (is there any element of call center business now that doesn't involve integration between telephony and computers?), the term has long since fallen by the wayside. Soon after I joined TMC came the launch of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, a bold move that seemed by some to be far ahead of its time. I recall a friend employed in the IT industry asking me, "They're going to base a whole magazine on that?"

CRM: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
This year marks the 30-year anniversary of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. Well, that's not altogether accurate. What 2012 actually marks is three decades of TMC, our parent company, covering the call center space.

Feature Articles

CALL CENTER TECHNOLOGY

The Evolution of Self Service
We can go back to voicemail in the early 1980s. It enabled a caller to record a voice message rather than speak with an operator and leave a callback number. In the manner of true self service, it allowed people to actually complete an interaction, ("Hi this is Rick, will you fax me the Everett contract? Thanks.")instead of playing phone tag. As facilitator of a now defunct group promoting better voicemail customer experience (though we didn't call it customer experience back then), I authored a booklet titled Making the Most of Voice Mail with all sorts of guidelines for making the experience top notch.

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

The History of Support Services: And the New Requirement for Collaborative Workflow
In the 70s, a company's IT needs were housed at the data center, and it wasn't until the early 1980s that the IBM PC was introduced to the industry. The new technology shifted computing responsibility away from large data centers and placed it in the hands of the company's workers.

CRM, BPO & TELESERVICES

InfoCision Shares 30 Years of Call Center Wisdom
In putting together this, our 30-year anniversary issue commemorating three decades of covering the call center and customer experience space, TMC contacted one of our favorite sources, InfoCision. And we discovered that InfoCision is also this year celebrating 30 years in the call center industry.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

CIS, TMC Announce Speech Technology Excellence Award Winners
The 2012 Speech Technology Excellence Awards recognize companies that have made significant contributions to improving speech applications for their clients. Speech technology has become more prevalent in both wireline and mobile applications.

Columns

Publisher's Outlook

Oracle President Hurd Says New Customer Experience Revolution is Coming
Having followed the contact center and contact management space since 1982 I have seen countless changes in the market. Perhaps none was more profound than in the mid-1990s when the term CRM started to be used to refer to solutions in the customer relationship space.

HIGH PRIORITY!

Like Sands Through the Hourglass...
Customer service is a funny term. It’s two words but, when you look at the past 30 years in the customer service industry, the focus has typically been on the customer service provider and its technology – the service side of the term. From the early days of telemarketing and CTI to predictive dialers, IVR, and integrated CRM and from IVR and businesses have consistently sought the create process efficiencies that would enable them to respond to more customers more quickly.

Ask the Experts

Remote Agents
This article was initially published in the May 2007 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. Interactive Intelligence would like to say congratulations, and thanks, to TMC on its 30 years of promoting the contact center industry.

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Hello, Good People
This is a strange example, I know. But my point is that what my pals and I remember best about this experience is not so much the crazy apartment as the kind gentleman who showed it to us. (And had he offered a similarly charming product, we probably would've taken him up on the offer.)