Brendan Read
TMC
Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead
By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent
Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.
When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.
The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.
Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.
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Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
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NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
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SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market
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Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB
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Full Story »Bell Deal to 'Take A Walk In The Snow'?
November 26, 2008'To take a walk in the snow' is a Canadian expression meaning stepping down or that a deal is dead. It dates back to when former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stepped out into a typical winter day in Ottawa, the nation's capital, and when he came back decided to resign.
The phrase is appropriate today as there are published stories swirling amidst falling snow throughout Ontario and Quebec that a leveraged buyout (LBO) of Montreal-based Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), the country's largest communications carrier, scheduled to close Dec.11, 2008 may be doomed.
The Globe and Mail reported an announcement by Bell that it had obtained a 'preliminary view' from KPMG that the accounting firm does not expect to deliver opinion by the close whether the deal would meet the solvency tests.
Proposal Software Simplifies RFP and RFI Responses
November 25, 2008Responding to requests for proposals (RFPs) and requests for information (RFIs) can be a time-consuming pain in the netherparts.
I know; I helped the team at the teleservices firm that I had worked with on a few of them. One cannot help thinking how many more leads, sales, and revenues via other channels could have been received, followed up on, and brought to profitable fruition during the same period for an equal amount of effort.
So when I came across a report on the latest version of Proposal Software's PMAPS ® 2008 RFP/RFI management application I smiled: there is help at last for firms like my old teleservices company.
Taking The Lead Out of Economic Doldrums
November 24, 2008
Contact centers have always to do more with less, and not surprisingly they have been on the practical edge of technology solutions and practices including e-learning, IP telephony, IVR/speech rec, monitoring, telework, and workforce management. Tools and techniques spearheaded by contact centers, such as the shift to home-based workers, are according to the Telework Coalition being watched and adopted by other sectors.
It is a welcome sign that the Obama Administration is tech savvy, which will encourage development of new technologies and methods that will help contact centers, and all other business functions and sectors, become even more productive and efficient. As noted in Rich Tehrani's recent blog "you begin to realize there could be a massive shot in the arm for the tech sector next year."
Our sector has to do our part, instead of relying totally on government.
Aid For Unemployed Contact Center, Communications Pros
November 14, 2008These are tough times for many people in the contact center, communications, and technology industries in this difficult economy: those who have just been laid off and for those who are fearful that they are next.
I don't have to imagine the anguish and fear being felt by individuals and families. I've been laid off three times in my career, juggling with keeping my family fed and a roof over our heads. My father, an engineer working in the electronics industry, was downsized just months after moving to another community to take a new job and buying a house, and my mother was pregnant.
Rx for Nortel?
November 13, 2008Nortel is a proud company with an excellent reputation for innovative products, especially in the contact center and wireless spaces. Unfortunately the firm has for some years been in rough straits, with what seems to be a sadly neverending stream of cutbacks and downsizings. I live in a town where Nortel has a plant whose size, say longtime residents, is just a fraction of what it used to be.
In what seems to be an insulting blow, an analyst from RBC Dominion Securities in Canada, where Nortel is HQed, has cut its stock target to $0, reported the Globe and Mail.
Wanted: A New Customer Service Solution
November 11, 2008
The recent Forrester Research Customer Service Software Solution WAVE™ Q4 2008 study points to a strong need for a new customer service solution: one that bridges the three silos of interaction-, record-, and process-centric customer service products.
Forrester says that a complete customer service solution includes three key components to provide great customer experiences:
1) An interaction layer to manage all customer interaction channels and underlying knowledge management, workflow, and business rules engines
2) A customer record repository to aggregate customer information and manage more complex contract and entitlements
3) A business process automation to streamline common cross-departmental tasks
"Customer service app vendors are beginning to develop applications that deliver multichannel experiences, tap into multiple business processes, and access multiple data sources," says the report. "However, most have been developed from one of these three heritages and still deliver functionality that is skewed toward one of these three components. Until vendors provide a new type of cross-component architecture, Forrester will continue to divide customer service vendors into three categories to help businesses understand the current choices, their pros and their cons."
That's your challenge, solutions vendors.
When Buying Solutions Look at Corporate Stability
October 28, 2008I came across a fine in-depth report from Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave™:
Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008
The study has an excellent premise: how the technology can help companies provide better customer experiences. Its author, Dr. Natalie L. Petouhoff, Forrester Senior Analyst, says "before a company even thinks about a software vendor they need to define their customer strategy, what they want their customer experience to be and how they want to provide service to their customers."
Then I saw the writeup on Entellium, which has been having its fair share of troubles lately, and I began to wonder: should such reports look at the vendors' financial and legal history and stability? That has a big impact on whether their technologies will deliver the goods; if the suppliers have gone belly-up who will be there to support the solutions and keep them updated? New owners of the firms or the patents may, or may not, decide to buy and continue to support all product lines and their customers.
Syntellect Acquires Envox
October 21, 2008The acquisition of Envox by Syntellect for $14 million is the latest in a series of smart and timely consolidations in the maturing contact center/CRM solutions space, others being Verint and Witness and Aspect and Concerto (this juror is still out on the Convergys/Intervoice deal announced earlier this year).
The Syntellect/Envox deal appears to be an excellent and complementary match of two fine companies. Envox brings to Syntellect's table a global reach and technology heft, not to mention a $16 million per annum revenue stream: very handy in an uncertain marketplace. The menu of Envox's powerful communications platform, IVR, CTI, and Voice XML tools may well enhance Syntellect's flagship Customer Interaction Management suite.
Attention Outsourcers and Clients: It's The Service, S*****
October 9, 2008When I saw the press release from the American Teleservices Association and DialAmerica reporting that most major teleservices clients would leave their outsourcer vendors because they were dissatisfied with them i.e. the service they were getting, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or curse or all three at the same time. Naturally I turned this into an article that I put on our site.
After all, what are teleservices firms in the business for, except to deliver services?
IP-enabled iPhone: The Ultimate Contact Center Handset?
September 25, 2008Imagine being able to take and make calls, receive e-mails, IMs, and SMS, and at the same time manage web-enabled applications like hosted CRM and workforce management in a convenient, go-anywhere, user-friendly wireless appliance.
Imagine no more being tangled up in cords, or fiddling with multiple (and expensive) gadgets.
Imagine having at last a truly usable phone for home workers, including contact center agents and supervisors.
The hard reality is that when you are working from home you do get interrupted, like for deliveries, plumbers, other contractors, family responsibilities: which beats productivity and cost-wise having to leave early/arrive late to handle when working in a traditional office.
