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Interactive Voice/Video Response (IVVR): The Next Great Breakthrough in Customer Self-Service
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 2:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT
In the constant battle to contain costs and allow customers to help themselves rather than engage with an agent, IVVR enables the delivery of exceedingly complex instruction sets to the user (Resets, Assembly, Repair) without the assistance of an agent. There are other opportunities when IVVR can be used within the enterprise, such as Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP), and Employee Training which will also be discussed in this webinar. In addition, we will cover how adding general video support to a contact center can create new up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, boosting agent productivity and utilization.
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From The Expert Corner
June 07, 2010
Tablet Buzz Displaces "Smartbook" Trend
Whatever became of “smartbooks”? At last January’s Consumer Electronics Show, some big hardware companies were using that name to describe new low-end computing devices that look like small laptops but use different chips and software. But that was before the iPad.
Now industry buzz has shifted pretty dramatically away from smartbooks to forthcoming slate-style devices that are expected to challenge Apple’s ( News - Alert) latest hit. “It’s fair to say the iPad and tablets are resetting everybody’s roadmap and forcing them to think about they are going to do next in a different light,” says Henri Richard, senior vice president and chief sales and marketing officer for Freescale Semiconductor ( News - Alert), which has been marketing chips for smartbooks.
But backers of the concept say it’s not so much that smartbooks are stalled. Rather, there are simply so many new hardware and software options–and consumer preferences are so uncertain–that it’s too early to tell exactly what the most popular designs will be and what people will wind up calling them.
“This market between the phone and the laptop is an area that is undefined,” says Steve Mollenkopf, a Qualcomm ( News - Alert) executive vice president who is also president of its chip unit. “You will see a proliferation of different devices.”
Whether there is a single tablet category or possibly multiple categories, or whether tablets simply reshape existing categories, is yet to be determined. What does seem to be clear is that all the devices are intended to be “always connected.”
From a suppliers’ perspective, companies that make cellphones or components for them want to expand their turf into larger products. That includes companies like Qualcomm, Freescale, Nvidia and others that have offered chips for the handset market based on technology from ARM ( News - Alert) Holdings. They can’t offer the ability to run conventional PC programs, but can boast long battery life and stress the “instant-on” nature of their machines–two of the chief selling points of smartbooks.
At the same time, makers of conventional laptops and their suppliers are trying to get into smaller devices. Chip giant Intel, for example, has helped popularized low-priced laptops called netbooks that mainly run Microsoft Windows. Intel has also been talking for some time about an even smaller, keyboardless category called MIDS, or mobile Internet devices–a term that seems to have been overshadowed by small-sized tablets.
But another way to look at the situation stems from what tasks a user is tackling. For example, touching the screen is the most efficient way to get some kinds of things done; for some chores–like composing a long document–a physical keyboard is the way to go.
Either way, at least for the moment, tablets have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Marisa Torrieri
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