Brendan Read
TMC
10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2
Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here. In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is...
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CloudTC and N-Able Acquired
"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...
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ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0
In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...
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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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10 Lessons from Volleyball
I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...
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Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...
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NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...
Full Story »The IP Contact Center Technology Pioneers
July 7, 2006The July issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine will cover the winner of the IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Awards. For a sneak preview of who the best of the best are in this marketplace, visit
Congratulations to the winners!
TES
Customer Chaos: DirecTV
June 26, 2006I live for these kinds of customer service stories. I learned this just today from my friend Lisa who lives in Austin, Texas.
The set-up: Lisa's brother used to live with her in house in Austin. When they decided to get DirecTV for the household, the account was put under the name/account info of her brother Dan. To make a long story short, when Dan moved out, Lisa decided to get the account switched over to her own name.
Nosy Neighbors
June 26, 2006If you ever doubted the value of the Internet for being a busybody when it comes to your neighbors, doubt no more.
Web site Zillow.com keeps tracks of estimated home values all over the U.S. You can see what your house is worth as compared to your neighbors. Not only that, you can drill down and find out what your neighbors paid for their houses and when, exactly how big their houses are, and how the houses have lost or gained value in the past years.
The sobering part is...they can do this to you, as well. I guess deep down, we're all curtain-twitching Gladys Kravitzes.
TES
House Arrest For Lewis The Cat
June 20, 2006I just spotted this article about the fate of Lewis the Cat, the "psycho kitty" of Fairfield, Connecticut: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13441225/
It seems that Lewis has been given house arrest and his human (everyone who has cats knows that cats own you...not the other way around) has been given probation.
This has not a thing to do with call centers, CRM or IP telephony, but I feel the need to weigh in on it since Fairfield is both my childhood home town and my university alma mater.
I also heard the Talking Heads song "Psycho Killer" on the radio during my morning drive today, and MSNBC's branding of Lewis as "Psycho Kitty" has merged with the song in my head in an aggravating way.
Personal Trainer Via Podcast?
June 19, 2006If you're thinking that what you need to get you motivated is a personal trainer, but don't relish putting yourself into spandex in front of a set of washboard abs, you now have a choice: you can get yourself a virtual personal trainer via Podcast.
Wake me up when the day comes when technology allows us to "virtually" do the exercise and see the results without having to actually do the exercise.
TES
Outsourcing To Egypt
June 13, 2006In response to my article of earlier this week entitled "Egypt Aspires To An Offshore Outsourcing Crown," I had an e-mail from Adel Radwan from Xceed, Egypt's largest call center outsourcing provider. Adel pointed out to me that in addition to being the largest call center services provider in Egypt, the company is the first to become COPC certified and offers services in 8 languages. Thanks for your response, Adel.
TES
Teacher-Proof Ring Tones
June 12, 2006If you're an adult who feels disadvantaged over the fact that teenagers know more than you about technology, here's a story to make you feel over-the-hill.
It turns out, teenagers are now downloading a ring tone for their phones for incoming calls and text messages that is pitched too high for most adults to hear. If you've ever been near one of those devices that people install in their gardens to keeps critters from digging, you'll know that most adults over 30 cannot perceive the sound due to age-related hearing degradation, but most young people in their teens and early to mid 20s can hear acutely, even painfully. Some shopping malls today even project the sound in places they don't want teen mall rats to congregate.
Military Data Theft Debacle
June 8, 2006Media sources today reveal that the theft of a laptop from a U.S. government employee's house last month may have compromised the personal information of not only veterans since 1975, but as much as 80 percent of active duty military personnel, which leads to concerns about not only identity theft, but the safety and security of those military service people. (Why would anyone with a brain store that much sensitive data on a single laptop that could not only be stolen, but left on a train, a taxi or the counter of a coffee shop by a single employee???)
MSNBC states that, "Montgomery County police released a description yesterday of the stolen laptop and its external hard drive because they said it may have been purchased by someone who does not realize the value of its content. 'It could have shown up at a yard sale or a secondhand store,' police spokeswoman Lucille Baur said.
Veteran ID Theft
May 24, 2006Because I wrote a few articles on credit freezing back a few months ago, several veterans who suspect their info was among the 26 million names on a stolen VA official's laptop have contacted me asking what their next steps should be.
The VA has set up a special call center and hotline for veterans, as well as an FAQ page: http://www.firstgov.gov/veteransinfo. I hope they have staffed it sufficiently. The potential for 26 million phone calls is very high.
