This article originally appeared in the Sept. 2010 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions

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.

Reflecting the high level of innovation we are seeing, we have nearly doubled the number of winners to a total of 19 (See Chart 1 below) in 2010 from 10 in 2009. They cover hot areas including business intelligence, hosted contact centers, desktop virtualization, social media, smart design and workforce optimization. The awards are broken into two parts to fit the highlighted write-ups (full reports on each can be accessed at [insert URL]). The first part (this issue) starts with Amdocs and ends with Interior Concepts. The second half (October issue) will start with Knoa (News - Alert) and end with VanillaSoft.

Here are the highlights of our winners:

Amdocs

Smart Agent Desktop

www.amdocs.com

Amdocs Smart Agent Desktop provides a task-based, unified agent desktop across all lines of businesses, interaction channels and customer-facing processes. Smart Agent Desktop reduces the number of screens/clicks required during the course of an interaction with a customer. This enables agents to focus on the customer, which can lead to higher job satisfaction and lower agent churn rates for the contact center. One of the distinctive features of Amdocs Smart Agent Desktop is the ability to integrate multiple back end applications through a single unified desktop allowing access to these applications within the context of the agent desktop directly or as an integrated application that can mask the complexity of these back end systems. Smart Agent Desktop incorporates over 100 service-provider-specific best practice business processes out of the box.

Cicero

Cicero XM Suite

www.ciceroinc.com

Cicero XM is a customer experience management (CEM) and business intelligence (BI) solution for contact centers and the enterprise. Cicero XM simplifies workflow, automates tasks, and automatically shares data between any applications from back office to desktop servicing solutions. It differs from competitors’ various unified desktop concepts in that Cicero XM does not require taking away or hiding users’ access to existing applications but rather simplifies, extends, and automates processes using those applications while allowing new applications to be simply and rapidly integrated. Cicero XM enables creating a modular, customizable interface, scripting or user guidance, screen pops, new composite applications and features a powerful toolbar.

Cincom Systems (News - Alert)

Cincom Synchrony

www.cincom.com

Cincom Synchrony provides a single location for managing the incoming flow of various customer interactions, and intelligent routing that connects customers to the most appropriate available agent. It also includes an integrated document automation component. At the end of a customer interaction, Cincom Synchrony automatically generates a follow-up correspondence (to be delivered by e-mail, fax, chat or even postal mail) that documents the discussion details and provides additional relevant resources based on the context of the interaction. Cincom supports fully hosted as well as a hybrid model where it does the application hosting only, but the customers’ database and/or PBX/ACD environment runs locally. This can be a traditional PBX or a VoIP-based solution. When Cincom is hosting the telephony services it can support both environments.

Coveo

Coveo Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS) 2.0

www.coveo.com

Coveo Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS) retrieves and indexes information from the entire knowledge ecosystem (an unlimited number of systems which may include CRM, knowledge bases, e-mail, desktop content, archives, file shares, intranet, ERP systems and social networks). It then presents the information in role-specific dashboards for agents, managers, executives and customers alike – without requiring moving any data to a central knowledge base. This eliminates the need for support agents to switch between multiple systems/screens to efficiently resolve customer issues and presents a holistic view of a customer account. Coveo also enables customer self-service information access via a Web portal.

Eagle Conferencing

Eagle Conferencing

www.eagleconferencing.com

With Eagle Conferencing’s new offering, users can log into their conference call account directly from their Outlook or Web browser toolbar and manage their conferences in real time. All dial-in numbers and pass codes are stored in each individual’s Outlook toolbar and calendar; a toolbar is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. During the conference call, the toolbar will give live conference control and management capabilities to the moderator by providing a dashboard view showing the number of callers on line. In addition to an Outlook toolbar, Call management software is over the Web, call control, hang up, add, and delete functions can be easily managed from any Web browser. Host/moderator has complete visibility in the call so they see the caller ID of each participant, build a database for all callers for future marketing campaigns, drop annoying callers from the bridge, and more. Other useful features include presence and call recording.

Epicor Software Corporation

Epicor Manufacturing Express Edition (Epicor Express)

www.epicor.com  

When Epicor Express was created Epicor looked at the whole Epicor 9 product suite and simplified the solution by pulling 20-plus modules and hiding functionality that was overly complex for small manufacturers.

They explained: “Epicor Express includes customer relationship management, financial management, production, product and material management functionality, as well as business intelligence, business process management, and the Epicor ICE business architecture featuring Epicor True SOA to drive internal process efficiencies, user productivity, and ultimately enhance bottom line profitability.” Epicor Express is accessed through a Web browser or Smart Client interface, which is downloaded onto a user’s workstation.

Five9

Five9 Cloud Computing Platform for Call Centers

www.five9.com

The Five9 Cloud Computing Platform enables advanced integrations with their call center applications. The Five9 Cloud APIs consist of a CTI (News - Alert) Web Services API that is designed for computer-telephony-integration (CTI) on the desktop and a Configuration Web Services API that is designed to integrate common administration functions. The CTI Web Services API can be used to connect the Five9 Web-based softphone to other business applications used by call center agents, such as home-grown CRM solutions, billing or order entry systems, and agent scripting applications. The Configuration Web Services API provides developers with access to Five9 User, Calling List, Contact, and Campaign Management.

inContact

inContact

www.incontact.com  

inContact sells all-in-one cloud-based solutions including ACD/CTI, eLearning, IVR/speech recognition and workforce management/scheduling to contact centers in companies of all sizes, from mid-market to the enterprise. It also has built-in feedback/survey to gather customer opinions immediately following a call and use this feedback to directly measure customer satisfaction levels and drive business improvement. Agents and managers have Web-based applications to handle contacts and to manage contact center settings. All calls in progress as well as those in queue will failover to another server if there is a failure on the system.     

Interior Concepts

Call Center Furniture

www.interiorconcepts.com/call-center-furniture/

Interior Concepts designs and manufactures call center furniture, and recently adopted ICE solutions to create an interactive quoting and design program capable of presenting custom furniture products in an understandable way to clients. Interior Concepts’ system automatically engineers the product, determines material needs, and generates paperwork and computer code to facilitate the manufacturing process. These factors improve quoting and presentation of projects, and reduce engineering time resulting in quotation revisions 75 percent faster, improvements to engineering time by more than 500 percent and reductions in machine programming time for manufacturing by 200 percent. The software is also a great marketing tool because with it Interior Concepts can show clients what the furniture will look in a facility before it is manufactured. In addition it allows the company to post animated virtual tours of designs which they have placed on their website.