TMC (News - Alert) this year celebrates 30 years of covering customer interaction – which means it couldn’t be a better time to look at where we’ve been with customer service and where we’re going. We’re also rebranding our contact center and customer experience effort.

In this installment of our CUSTOMER coverage, we talk with Kristen Jacobsen, director of marketing at Calabrio (News - Alert), which provides workforce optimization and analytics software for contact centers of all sizes in a wide variety of industries. The company, which was established in 2007 as a result of a spinoff, specializes in Cisco and Avaya (News - Alert) centers. As an aside, Calabrio is offering a speech analytics white paper at this link.

What has been the most important development in the recent past related to customer interactions?

Jacobsen: I think the most interesting development has been a trend toward modernization of contact centers in the recent years, with the expansion of multiple channels of communications into the center, including chat and social media. That’s driven contact centers to modernize their capabilities with more flexible software solutions to manage customer interactions and more automated analytics tools to manage the growing complexity of customer interactions.

How is WFM changing?

Jacobsen: Workforce management has certainly been impacted by the complexity of multi-channel customer interactions. Not only must centers think about how to manage multiple skills for phone-based transactions, but also different channels into the center. As channels become increasingly complex, the software that manages schedules must make it easier for contact centers to ensure the right staffing levels to support optimal service levels.

What new tools and practices are businesses using to better leverage their own and/or outside data to target, engage with, and deliver product/service/support to the customer?

Jacobsen: Analytics is becoming more essential to stay on top of customer interaction data. It isn’t practical with traditional manual quality, compliance and marketing analysis for contact centers to get a true perspective of what’s happening in their business. A combination of speech, text and desktop and other BI provide more data from more sources to pinpoint trends and opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed. This holistic view helps business focus in on what’s happening inside and outside of their business to deliver excellence – from the products they deliver to the service they provide to their customers. 

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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