CRM Week in Review: Five9 Intros Web University, NICE & Microsoft Team Up, VoiceXML Portfolio Gets Boost

Welcome to the week in review for the customer relationship management, or “CRM,” industry. Below are some of the top stories that came across the TMCnet news wires this week.

In the beginning of the week, Call center on demand and hosted contact center provider, Five9, has launched an online portal offering training and certification for users of Five9 virtual call center software.

Known as 'Five9 University,' the first curriculum is now available immediately. Call center administrators that want to validate their proficiency at running a Five9 virtual call center can register with the portal to get certified.

Jim Dvorkin, chief technology officer of Five9, said that the new university allows its customers to build more call center expertise in-house and ultimately make them more successful.

Interested students can enroll for the courses offered by the Five9 University via the Web all the year-round, 24 hours per day. The new Five9 online portal provides all the relevant training materials, test preparation and certification exams.

On Wednesday, workforce optimization and advanced customer interactions systems provider NICE Systems announced an agreement to work with Microsoft to help Microsoft (News - Alert) Communications Server “14” customers optimize the value of customer interactions.

NICE, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a global provider of advanced solutions, also helps enterprises and security organizations to drive business performance, reduce risk and ensure safety.

Collaborating with Microsoft and extending the partnership will give NICE customers the added benefits of its real-time, cross-channel interaction analytics. Eventually, this will impact customer interactions as they occur and deliver insights to improve organization’s business performance.

Also announced this week, Interact Inc., a VoiceXML provider, has announced the availability of Interact’s Network Status Application, or “INSA,” a Web-based graphical user interface. This Web-based graphical user interface has been designed to monitor Interact VoiceXML (News - Alert) and Real-Time Billing and Rating solutions, according to company officials.

Company officials told TMCnet in a recent interview that the main difference between this new interface and the Interact’s recently announced monitoring tool is that INSA provides a graphical user interface for the management of Interact solutions, which can be accessed anywhere via a secure webpage.

Thanks to INSA’s monitoring capabilities, multiple Interact systems across local or wide area networks, such as LAN or WAN -- also remote standalone Interact systems -- can now be monitored and controlled at a single point, said company officials.

That’s the top CRM News for this week. Check back next week on TMCnet for more breaking news in the CRM industry.