How Voice Biometrics Can Improve Customer Service
Voice biometrics is the solving customer experience problems by creating a faster and more efficient authentication process for the everyday customer.

How Voice Biometrics Can Improve Customer Service
Voice biometrics is the solving customer experience problems by creating a faster and more efficient authentication process for the everyday customer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Communications Solutions 2011 Product of the Year Award Winners Announced
Norwalk, CT (August 1, 2012) - TMC, a global, integrated media company helping clients build communities in print, in person and online, announced today winners of its 2011 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TMC Congratulates CRM Excellence Award Winners
And while many CRM systems traditionally have targeted the largest companies, new solutions in this space now speak to the needs of small and medium businesses, which require more ease of use, and low-cost or no-cost upfront fees.

Contact Centers, Unified Communications, the Cloud and You
In contemplating the transformation of contact centers from their traditional roles as customer touch point corporate outposts to being core components in business process optimization, the list items have never been more relevant. Indeed, in the era of the cloud, the delivery of computing and communications as services, the intense focus on these items has become paramount as enterprise strain to keep up with dynamic market changes that are forcing technology purchasing to reach tipping points.

WFM Solutions May Be More Beneficial & Attainable Than You Think
Almost two-thirds of North American call center respondents have yet to adopt workforce management software to schedule, monitor and report on agent activity, according to a recent survey by Noble Systems Corp. That's not good news for them, as workforce management solutions can help both lower internal costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Radialpoint Helps Carriers, CE Outfits Support the Networked Home
For years telephone companies and other interested parties have talked about the placement of the demarc - or demarcation point - and where it should be. The demarc is the point at which the telco's reach and responsibility ends. For telephone service, that point traditionally has been at the NID, or network interface device, attached to the outside of the home. That was pretty cut and dried, and it made things relatively easy for the service providers.

OAISYS Talks Multichannel Session Recording
Whether it's to improve customer service, employee performance or simply to have a record on file for posterity, call recording is getting a lot of uptake these days. One of the key players in the call recording space is OAISYS, and the company's president, Brian Spencer, recently spoke with Customer Interaction Solutions magazine about his organization, its products, and trends and developments in the multichannel session recording space.

The Virtual Call Center: What's New in AI, At-Home Agent and Cloud-Based Offers
The definition of a virtual call center is different depending on which camp you ask. For some, it means a call center that relies on remote, as opposed to on-site, workers. For others, it's about putting call center functionality in the cloud. And for still others it can involve virtualizing call center reps.

Customer Interaction Solutions' 26th Annual Top 50 Inbound Teleservices Agencies Ranking
At the start of the second quarter of each year since 1986, Customer Interaction Solutions has delivered its Top 50 Teleservices Agency Ranking. True to form, for the 27th time, we present our rankings.

Driving Performance with Technology to Engage and Train the Agent
Managers in any field must understand how to engage, train and motivate their employees effectively. This challenge is none more important than in contact centers, where agents are measured against daily performance metrics while managers must make adjustments throughout the day to meet service goals. Agent skill levels can vary greatly in every contact center and even more so now as the Generation Y workforce enters, armed with tech-savvy capabilities. As a contact center's workforce optimization strategy evolves, it's important for managers to explore and consider new ways to revitalize their efforts to drive the performance improvement process between managers, supervisors and agents.

How to Use Customer Lifecycle Analysis to Build Loyalty
Your customer calls, tweets, or sends a web form about an issue with service or billing. How you deal with that customer at that moment affects whether that customer will recommend your business or plaster the web with negative reviews.

Home Agent Programs Are a 'Win-Win'
InfoCision Management Corp.'s partnership with the Cleveland Sight Center, through which it employs sight-impaired individuals as part of its call center business, has been such a success that the center's new facility will house an InfoCision call center.

BroadVision Expands Enterprise Social Networking Solution
BroadVision Inc. has expanded its enterprise social networking solution on a number of fronts. New are collaborative workspaces called Conduits, a social analytics module, and SharePoint integration. Conduits are virtual spaces within a Clearvale network where external users, such as suppliers, customers or partners, can interface with a business and conduct their interactions in total privacy

Next Generation 911: A Unique Vertical for Unified Communications
The National Emergency Number Association has described Next Generation 911 as having "the ability to support interactive text messaging, policy-based routing using location and several other factors, such as call type, target PSAP status, network status, and automatic acquisition of supportive data and its use within the system to control routing and other actions prior to delivery to the PSAP."

Avatars, Training Bring New Twist to Outsourced Call Center Solutions
Organizations that outsource their call centers to specialists in this realm can get the latest and greatest when it comes to things like agent training and interactive web responses.

Invodo Promotes the Power of Video in Customer Interaction Solutions
The world has gone multimedia, and video is a growing part of that. But this goes much further than just video for entertainment or videoconferencing. As Invodo explains, more companies are now leveraging video to help educate and inform their customers, often increasing customer satisfaction in the process. Customer Interaction Solutions magazine recently interviewed Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, about the power of video.

Industry Veteran Genesys Has New Beginning
Genesys has long been a fixture in the communications space, and it's ownership over the years has not been unlike a game of musical chairs. Now Genesys is once again a stand-alone company, and the company's management and new owners say it is uniquely positioned in the customer interaction solutions space of today.

Customer Interaction Solutions' 27th Annual Top 50 Teleservices Agencies Ranking
At the start of the second quarter of each year since 1986, Customer Interaction Solutions has delivered its Top 50 Teleservices Agency Ranking. True to form, for the 27th time, we present our rankings.

Just Getting the Job Done is Not Enough
Delivering exceptional customer service requires more than just getting the job done. You must also make the service experience itself easy and effective for the customer. Recent research suggests that minimizing a customer's effort during the service experience has the greatest impact on customer loyalty.

Self-Realization: A Key Ingredient to Effective Call Center Management
For standard information-based development we create training curriculum, analyze results, evaluate accuracy and performance and, occasionally, we may even coach. When dealing with behavioral issues, however, we often miss the one area that makes affecting change more easily attainable. Helping agents become self aware is often the key.

Time to Brush off Your Disaster Recovery Plan?
As I write this, the top news story is about a cruise ship that ran aground in the Mediterranean. Reports are that the captain and officers did little to help passengers get off the ship safely. Hearing about this type of tragedy gets me thinking about how well any of us are prepared to deal with disruptions of smaller magnitudes.

Multimodal Mobile Apps, Cloud Services, and UC VARs Make Telephone Contact Centers Grow Up
Unified communications is complex because it covers all forms of contact with a person, whether the person is initiating the contact or is the recipient/respondent to a contact. Inasmuch as organizational call/contact centers deal with communication technologies from both perspectives, as well as with automated self-service applications, they can benefit the most from UC-enabled flexibilities. It is therefore time for legacy call center technology silos to grow up and become multimodal through UC-enabled applications.

Servion Gives the Age of Social Networking a Voice
There is a lot of talk right now that online chat, social media, e-mail, and other new technologies will replace voice communications when it comes to customer contact and service. David Baker, vice president of Servion, does not agree. In fact, he believes that voice will become increasingly critical for large and small companies around the globe. And his company is currently working in 20 of those countries. Baker recently shared the thinking behind his views in a Q&A with Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

Customer Interaction Solutions Announces MVP Quality Awards
Each year, award winners represent the best of the outsourcing community, setting new standards for service quality and customer care by integrating the latest technology trends with time-tested practices for exceeding customer expectations.

Intelliverse Makes a Comeback with New ION Platform
Intelliverse has been relatively quiet in terms of company messaging for the last three years. But the company recently opened the kimono on its new initiative called ION, which supports all Intelliverse services, including interactive voice response, automated call distribution, and VoIP.

Driving Customer Loyalty in a Mobile World
In the last recent months, we've all watched as the mobile world rode out a roller coaster of announcements and technology glitches. It all began with the release of the iPhone 4s and Siri, which were met with mixed reactions yet high demand by consumers; then the RIM/BlackBerry outage that affected thousands of smartphone users; finally, the data problems with the iOS 5 software updates took hold of the media and consumers. One overarching issue that resonated: the need for quality customer service.

TMC, Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine Congratulate CIS Product of the Year Award Winners
Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and its parent company, TMC, are proud to announce the winners of the CIS Product of the Year Awards.

Making Sense of Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn… everyone is on them, or so it seems, using these social networks to share their pictures and experiences with friends, family, colleagues, and by extension, the world. But what happens when those experiences are commentary on products or services from your business?

IvyTalk Spreads the Message
It you run an organization in which everybody is not on e-mail, you probably know just how difficult it can be to reach your employees quickly and easily should an urgent matter arise. However, a new company called IvyTalk - whose founders have roots in the cellular service provider and software worlds - aims to make it easier for businesses to communicate with their own employees, as well as with their customers and their suppliers.

Arcaris 'Gamifies' the Call Center
How do you engage call center workers and get them to give the job their all? The answer, according to Arcaris, is to make work like a game.

The Case for Remote Agents
Changing customer expectations require new ways of providing customer service. Companies are finding that using remote agents allows them to be more flexible, recruit highly-skilled agents, and save money. Technology exists to enable any company, of any size, in any geographic location, to utilize remote agents - it can require as little as a high-speed Internet connection, a computer, a phone, and a quiet environment (the last requirement may be the most challenging).

Fast, Cheap or Good - Pick Two?
In the past, picking two was good enough, but today's demanding consumers expect all three. In these times of tight budgets and entitled customers, how can we add real value to each customer interaction?

A Customer IP Communications System Roadmap
Several enterprise communications innovations are now in the development or just-released stage, and one such solution worth note is business process automation. In essence, BPA is the automation of multi-step people-centric processes (document management included) using enterprise telephony, unified communications and contact center technologies and practices to distribute work. An IP communications system is actually a sound platform for BPA with its inherent SIP/SOA capabilities, interoperability with third-party applications, and ability to support BPA's objectives of reducing the latency, human error and costs associated with communications contacts and the flow of information.

Listening on All Channels
Whether you're designing a mobile app, redesigning an IVR or an agent desktop, you know that understanding - and using - voice of the customer is critical for effective solutions. But you don't have budget or time for focus groups, surveys and all that entails, you say.

Innovating the Back Office
Contact centers have been in the forefront of advancements in telecommunication, collaboration and customer service, being first with contact routing based on skill and experience, enterprise presence and instant messaging, recording, coaching, softphones, reporting, administration, social media integration and so on.

Hold-Free Aims to Improve Customer Service
Customer service has become a joke to most consumers, but not a particularly funny one. In recognition of that fact, many businesses are working to make improvements on this front. But that can be an expensive proposition. To help make better customer service more easily attainable, Hold-Free Networks recently launched SaaS-based services that put "a pretty face on customer service".

Working Backward Toward Social Media
A few months ago the world lost Steve Jobs, a man who will very likely be remembered as one of history's greatest innovators and entrepreneurs. The influence of Apple's founder extended well past hard technology. He changed the way we listen to music, communicate with friends, and interact with our colleagues. In short, Steve Jobs used technology to transform how we connect as human beings.

CIS Congratulates TMC Labs Innovation Awards Winners
We are proud to bestow this award to 17 worthy companies, listed in full in the September issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and online at TMCnet. CIS divided between two magazine issues the detailed write ups of the winning products and services. You can find the first installment in the October issue of CIS magazine. Here is the second installment.

Enhancing Agent Communications
The advent of new communications methods offers innovative ways that companies interact with their customers. Many simple transactions or straightforward phone calls that used to be the bulk of the call center interactions are increasingly handled effectively through self-service channels. What remains are often more challenging or complicated queries. In addition, centers are increasingly focused on improving first call resolution - being able to address effectively the caller's issue without callbacks or delays.

Call Center, CTI Pioneer Kuhn Offer Perspective on Industry Trends
Envision is a pioneer in delivering team coaching and performance improvement products and services to the contact center. The company's Click2Coach integrates quality monitoring and management, e-learning, automated coaching, and analytics and performance management capabilities. Click2Coach and Envision Workforce Management are offered via that Envision Centricity web-based workforce optimization platform.

DVS Helps Organizations Leverage the Contact Center as a Competitive Differentiator
As companies like Apple teach us the value of customer experience, more companies appear to be looking inward to figure out how they can improve both their products and their outward-facing operations and brands. Yet when it comes to customer interaction solutions, many businesses to date seem to have put more emphasis on cost cutting via automated systems and offshore call centers than on how to harness new solutions to meet and exceed customer expectations and drive new revenues. If this sounds familiar, perhaps it's time to take a closer look at your customer contact strategy.

Capturing the Value of Voice, E-Mail Information
Organizations are losing loads of important and actionable data that is communicated during conference calls and other interactions that never make it into databases, or is stored but is not easily accessible. However, there is a movement afoot to capture such information and put it to good use.

Cutting Customer Churn in the Collections Business
For a long time, building customer loyalty was arguably the business world's equivalent of the weather. Lots of people talked about it, but very few seemed committed to doing anything about it. In the presence of an increasing number of well-managed customer retention programs, research confirms that customers who are targeted by a retention program demonstrate higher loyalty to a business.

CIS Congratulates TMC Labs Innovation Awards Winners
This year marks the twelfth installment for the prestigious TMC Labs Innovation Awards in Customer Interaction Solutions, for which TMC Labs analyzes dozens of applicants to find the most unique and innovative products. Contact centers are constantly looking to increase agent productivity, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction through the utilization of innovative products - from all-in-one suites to targeted add-ons.

Critical Considerations When Developing the Channel - Looking Beyond the Technology
For any enterprise, the success of their unified communications or contact center solution hinges on the insights and skills of their solution and service provider (aka integrator). The integrator is the critical link that brings together the customer's business, its goals, its infrastructure, with all of the various multi-vendor technology components that need to work together to meet those objectives. As a contact center technology vendor, we've found the sales and integration channel to be an extremely important extension of our business. From our years of experience in developing our channel, we've determined four critical considerations when evaluating an integrator that can be valuable to the end user too.

Sales Mobility: What Your Sales Reps and Customers Need
The sales industry is constantly on the go and let's face it, selling is not a some of the time thing. It's an all the time thing. Sales executives are expected to always be upselling existing customers and finding new customers. Selling is in your blood, and sales people know it is most effective when they are out on the road selling.

Forming Holistic Customer Interaction Solutions
Nearly two decades ago Vinton Cerf, who's considered a founding father of the Internet, drew headlines when he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the saying: IP on Everything. Apparently he did, er, that happened, as the Internet protocol has seeped into virtually every nook and cranny of communications. Now the same seems to be happening with cloud computing and social networking - and the contact center is no exception to the rule.

CRM for Small Fry
Due to the cost and the technical prowess required to employ them, customer relationship management solutions used to live solely in the domain of the large enterprise. Today, however, CRM is within reach of a much broader array of organizations as a result of new pricing models afforded by the introduction of software-as-a-service offers, and just the competitive nature of the customer relationship management space at large.

2011 Customer Interaction Solutions TMC Labs Innovation Awards
This year marks the 12th installment for the prestigious TMC Labs Innovation Awards in Customer Interaction Solutions, where TMC Labs analyzes dozens of applicants to find the most unique and innovative products. Contact centers are constantly looking to increase agent productivity, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction through the utilization of innovative products, from all-in-one suites to targeted add-ons.

The Home Agent Handshake
The key to having hands shook on any deal is conclusively answering the objections by those whose buy-in is sought. This is especially critical when the agreement involves radical changes by the prospective customers in how they do business - to overcome their built-in inertia.

Continuing the Service
Contact centers are moving from the periphery to the core of organizations, serving as their interfaces with customers, thereby enabling them to stay in and grow their businesses. It is becoming increasingly imperative then to continue service to customers and if that is not possible to inform them what is happening when disasters threaten and strike. This is on top of protecting employees' lives in the event of such events. Together that means firms may have to look again at their business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategies.

2011 Speech Technology Excellence Awards
Customer Interaction Solutions has always encouraged and recognized technology innovation, seeking to highlight those technologies that drive increased customer satisfaction through efficient customer communication. In this issue, we present the winners of the 2011 Speech Technology Excellence Awards, recognizing vendors that have proven their commitment to the speech industry and are driving the evolution of speech applications.

The Analytics Analysis
Customer Interaction Solutions magazine recently interviewed experts from a wide array of leading firms in the analytics space to get their insights and analysis of contact center issues and needs and how analytics solutions can assist centers in meeting them. They report for example that operational efficiencies, sales and cross-multichannel engagement needs are driving analytics demand. The comprehensive in-depth interviews appear online at (insert URL).

Watching (and Preventing) the Hidden Crimes
The criminal and security threats that are the most worrisome are not the ones carried out with guns and explosives to get at bank vaults or cash drawers but hidden, over IT networks, to access databases containing customer information and to disrupt communications. There have been, as examples, high profile data breaches at well-known companies such as Citibank, direct marketer Epsilon (which has a large client list of household names) and Sony.

Leasing the Contact Center Vehicle
If contact center managers are the centers' professional drivers, then their vehicles are the IVR/speech recognition, dialing and outbound solutions, for these are the technologies that move the centers forward. And just as organizations have shifted from owning to leasing vehicles, as they have with the buildings that house contact centers, more are doing likewise with these key solutions through leasing them, specifically cloud hosting.

The Coming of Social/CRM Convergence
A little over a decade ago e-mail, chat and the Web became viable customer interaction channels and impacted CRM, classified as "eCRM". They offered an exciting and useful new interaction option to phone calls, faxes, "snail mail", paper catalogs and in-person retail and meetings. Yet while these text-based "e" means took over some of the customer conversations, most continued on the other channels - the newer and older methods gradually became integrated, and with this eCRM converged with CRM.

Creating Winning Performance
Contact centers need to work even harder to create winning performances. A slow-growth economy, financial pressures and rightfully demanding customers are forcing the bar upwards. To coach the centers, Customer Interaction Solutions interviewed several leading experts and firms, asking questions on:

Serving The Empowered Customer
Today's customers are empowered; they control the business conversations with vastly increased ability to find out information on products, services and suppliers and, through social media, to influence others' buying decisions, not just their own. They know they are invaluable and cannot be ignored by companies in today's slowly growing economy. Therefore they want - and rightly so - high quality service in realtime.

2011 IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Awards
Customer Interaction Solutions realizes that technology is the key to success of every contact center, and we have been editorially detailing the evolution of contact center and CRM technologies for our readers for the past 30 years. We also realize that, with an ever-expanding range of new products and services in the contact center space and new categories of them, it can be challenging for our readers to keep up with the latest and greatest in these solutions.

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.

News Briefs
Anametrix (www.anametrix.com) has released Anametrix InstaVista 3.0, which provides interactive visualizations of online and offline information. These include web analytics, point of sale, social media, search engine marketing (SEM), video and audio, e-mail campaigns, market research surveys, CRM applications and loyalty programs. The release also features real-time uploads from Microsoft Excel data, along with download to Excel options for every data source. The solution enables correlations and amortizations across an entire user base.

Increase Satisfaction, Put Scheduling in the Hands of Your Customers
TMC's Juliana Kenny recently discussed the inability of service providers - cable operators, specifically - to provide quality customer care, putting them in danger of losing more and more subscribers to alternative Internet-based video services (www.tmcnet.com/58837.1).

The Cloud Ascendancy
A growing range of increasingly sophisticated applications are ascending to the cloud. Among this ever-growing list are business intelligence, call recording, CRM, CTI, customer support, hiring and training, IVR/speech recognition, recording, routing and predictive dialing, unified communications (UC) and workforce management.

The BI Formula
The interface allows users to ask questions in three parts: "what am I measuring, how do I want to organize and group the information and what filters do I want to apply?" This tool permits analysts to be used for more productive endeavors like diving into the data at a deeper level to better understand the "whys" - why are the results what they are and how can they be improved if they are not satisfactory.

Making Homes for Contact Centers
Chad Lyne, director of corporate strategy at Alpine Access echoes this, based on his firm's experience and on anecdotal evidence from Fortune 500 companies. He points to research by Datamonitor that estimates home agent growth at over 20 percent annually, while his firm grew over 90 percent in the fourth quarter 2010 alone.

Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine's 26th Annual Top 50 Inbound Teleservices Agency Ranking
Our "Top 50" rankings are based on extensive detail gleaned from an exhaustive application process, in which inbound teleservices vendors quantify their service delivery in terms of minutes' usage in their various call center locations. Through more than a quarter century of consistency in processing and evaluating applications, the Top 50 ranking has become the benchmark for businesses seeking high-capacity teleservices agencies.

Analyzing the Conversations
Healthcare Revenue Recovery Group (HRRG), a division of TeamHealth, a large healthcare professional staffing and administrative services firm, provides medical debt collections services. HRRG has 74 agents, split between contact centers in Lathrop, Calif. and Plantation, Fla. Its focus is on improving revenue recovery while retaining patient customers.

Navigating the Compliance Rapids
If complying with laws and regulations can be likened to navigating a rapids-strewn river, there is a confluence of long-running currents and fast new streams and obstacles that are making the journeys more treacherous for contact centers. Do Not Call (DNC) and call abandonment regulations are mixing in with new rules written and proposed in response to criminal and consumer harassment threats arising from the inevitable misuse of new technologies.

From Foe to Friend
Automated voice systems, both DTMF, a.k.a. TouchTone IVR and speech recognition, a.k.a speech rec-based, have had an unfortunate reputation as customers' foes thanks to too many poor implementations. They have driven customers to "zero-outs", resulting in higher expenses and risking decreased loyalty and lowered sales from them and from their friends and followers and others via social media, thereby clawing back the tools' cost savings. Some firms have capitalized on these poor customer experiences by trumpeting that they do not use these technologies; they connect callers to live agents instead.

'Optimizing' VoIP for Contact Centers
VoIP is delivered to customers' premises through SIP trunks over the Internet on broadband or on traditional data T1 circuits, which are significantly less expensive than voice lines or voice T1s. There are a wide range of VoIP providers, with new SIP trunking providers emerging into the marketplace, along with the current major PSTN/TDM carriers.

Entrusting The Technology
Hosted contact center solutions, also known as cloud or software as a service (SaaS), from third party vendors can and does deliver a widening range of functions from ACD to workforce optimization. It does so with minimal or no capital and support costs and with fast ramp ups/downs, ready updates, assured business continuity and heightened security compared with premise-installed solutions while using best-of-breed solutions from OEMs.

18th Annual MVP Quality Awards
Each year, award nominees represent the best of the outsourcing community, setting new standards for service quality and customer care by integrating the latest technology trends with time-tested practices for exceeding customer expectations.

Unlocking the Feedback
The key to meeting customers' needs and obtaining their loyalty and business both directly via sales from them and indirectly through referrals to others such as social media, is by listening to them and analyzing their comments, i.e. obtaining the voice of the customer, or VOC. The notches on the door that enable it to be opened on the insights within are carefully-crafted questions cut by enterprise feedback management (EFM) software, delivered by voice, e-mail or web and increasingly text-based surveys to customers and employees.

Demanding Customers, Demanding Skills
Contact centers must then make the time and money available to seek out and train those agents, located in employers' premises but increasingly at their homes, with the necessary talents to meet the needs of today's rightfully demanding customers. And while staffing and training properly is expensive, it is a bargain compared with the lost revenues when customers spend less or go to competitors.

Staying on the UC Wave
UC draws its momentum and force from several key sources. It enables improved customer service and retention via presence: the ability to determine availability of and to connect subject matter experts who can readily and directly solve customers' problems. It makes external and internal collaboration such as via conferencing and IM easier and less expensive by having everyone on a single platform as opposed to installing and supporting multiple applications.

Customer Interaction Solutions' 2010 Product of the Year Awards
In the first issue of each new year, Customer Interaction Solutions dedicates a section to the suppliers that have shown a dedication to delivering products and solutions that enable businesses, governments, institutions and charities/nonprofits to become more attentive to their customers and users: and to provide higher levels of customer service than ever before.

Applying CRM Ingenuity
A slow economy has made the ability of CRM to focus resources on the most profitable customers extremely vital. At the same time, rapidly growing use by customers and users of mobile and social channels demands that CRM methods and tools embrace them. Yet, budgets are tight, as are the timelines, to demonstrate ROI.

From QM to QM
In an era of limited resources, where productivity is paramount, and of the "social customer," where individuals' raves or rants to the world can shine or tarnish and make or break brands and reputations, whether fairly or unfairly, every action or comment by contact center agents has to be dead-on. There are few tolerances for missed opportunities, misunderstandings and missteps.

Energizing The Employees
At the same time employees are the most expensive facet of contact centers. Labor costs represent 60 percent to 70 percent of operating expenses and account for nearly all of the technology and infrastructure costs that are spent to support their activities. Contact centers are therefore focused on maximizing agent and supervisor productivity.

BPOs: Doing More With Less
To cut costs clients are focusing more than ever on their core competencies, which has led more of them knocking on BPOs' contact centers. At the same time they are seeking more in the way of service and quality from BPOs at competitive pricing so that they can retain and attract more of their clientele and maximize the value from them: with the limited resources available.

The Contact Center Evolution
If you had walked into a contact center five years ago, chances are that you would have seen agents sitting at workstations with PCs, phones next to the monitors and wearing corded headsets with supervisors listening in from their posts: perhaps on raised turrets overlooking the call floors.

Interactive Intelligence's Vertical Ascent
If you were fortunate to have been able to join us in Los Angeles for ITEXPO West, you already know many of the exciting events that took place, including the highly successful inaugural Social CRM Expo, which was keynoted by two exceptional presenters bookending its opening day, Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara and Interactive Intelligence Chief Marketing Officer Joe Staples.

2010 TMC Labs Innovation Award Winners Announced
Two-thousand and ten marks the 11th anniversary for the prestigious TMC Labs Innovation Awards, where TMC Labs reviews dozens of applicants and chooses the most unique and innovative products and services. The contact center industry is often the early pioneer in creating innovative products since contact centers are always looking to increase agent productivity, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.

So You Want to Be an Agent
One thing to remember is that channel managers deal with the successful agents more often than the unsuccessful ones. My guess is that for every three agents, only one is successful. And by that I mean making sales monthly.

How to Get Customers to Stay in IVR / Speech Recognition
The big challenge with IVR has been to get people to use and stay in the automated self-service systems. Even speech rec can be frustrating sometimes. Therefore automated voice solutions require fine-tuning to maximize their ROI.