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 »Needed: Improved Data Management--Forrester
March 25, 2009To get a full view of your customers to utilize your CRM systems so you can retain and obtain more value for them, especially in this challenging and highly competitive economy you need realtime access to complete quality data on your customers.
Yet for too many organizations this may not be happening. And the reasons lie in both too-complex processing and in the sometimes inaccurate customer information that these systems have to work with i.e. "garbage in..."
One of the biggest barriers to getting value from CRM initiatives is this need for improved customer data management, according to William Band, Vice President and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research.
Needed: A Contact Center Makeover?
March 20, 2009Contact centers seemed to have weathered the downturn better than most sectors thanks to the need for firms to retain and attract scarce customers and their wallets with quality service, the unfortunately growing demand for collections, and in a slowdown in and in some cases a reversal of outsourced nearshoring and offshoring.
These are also excellent times for contact centers to expand. Retail closures and layoffs have created plenty of available customer-service-skilled people and modern, well-situated buildings. The financial services industry meltdown has led to similar opportunities, including vacant, well-wired, move-in ready contact centers.
Nortel May Be Split, Sold To Avaya, Nokia Siemens, Siemens Enterprise Communications
March 12, 2009Remember the last time you played Monopoly (TM) when a big player in the game who owned Boardwalk and Park Place went bankrupt, and how you and your friends couldn't wait to buy these nice assets for dimes on the dollars?
That's what may be in the process of occurring to Nortel right now. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that the communications firm, which is under creditor protection, has attracted several possible purchasers of its high-value enterprise and wireless equipment businesses.
According to The Canadian Press, the WSJ's website named Avaya and Siemens Enterprise Communications as potential purchasers of Nortel's enterprise product line according to well-placed sources.
Security Concerns And BPO/Contact Center Locations
March 9, 2009Research firm Datamonitor recently came out with an intriguing report about Sri Lanka as a potential business process outsourcing (BPO)/offshore contact center hub.
Intriguing in that there may be a strong case for that island nation to become a BPO center despite its small (relative to neighboring India) population of 20 million. Â Intriguing is that it has been the media lately on account of an ongoing civil war: which is not exactly the kind of development that assures potential investors and clients.
Datamonitor points out that Sri Lanka shares many of the attributes that has made India such an attractive location for BPO including an affordable and a plentiful pool of educated and English-speaking workers, high literacy levels, and a legal system that is based on a Western model.
Attention Airlines: To Avoid Calls and Customer Losses, Keep Washrooms Free...
March 4, 2009One of the more sensible new mantras in the contact center field is call avoidance: namely taking steps to prevent calls from customers from occurring. Call avoidance saves money and bolsters revenue by reducing contact handling costs and by improving customer satisfaction and retention by tackling their issues head on before they become problems.
Outbound messaging and notification, which will be covered in the April issue of Customer Interaction Solutions is one technique.
Another, and much more effective, is discovering and preventing the problems and issues that prompted the calls in the first place.
Offshoring and Homeshoring
February 26, 2009There has been a lot of fanfare lately of contact center work being brought back to the U.S. from other countries, most notably India. Yet unless the additional demand is managed effectively, the result could be higher costs, less service, and more automation and fewer jobs.
The key reason for this return is the apparent inability of offshore agents to provide high quality customer-satisfying-and-retaining service that trumps cost arbitrage.
Wired Best Option For Rural Broadband?
February 20, 2009Now that some $7 billion+ will be spent on rural broadband expansion, thanks to President Obama's just signed $787 billion economic stimulus package, the interesting question becomes which broadband technologies, wired or wireless should be supported i.e. subsidized to deliver it.
To get at the answers let's look at the two key benefits of this program:
1. It opens the door to truly effective e-commerce to residents and businesses, thereby increasing the availability of competitively priced products and services, and enhancing the economy, and to more information and services like distance learning and telemedicine.
Good News/Bad News from United (and other airlines)
February 12, 2009There has been some good news on the beleaguered U.S. domestic contact center front, courtesy of United Airlines.
The good news is that the air carrier will be opening 165 seats at its Chicago and Honolulu facilities, reports the Associated Press and carried in BusinessWeek, to handle written (e-mailed/letter mailed) customer commendations and complaints (CC&C): work that had been managed offshore in India. Those positions will, however, be filled internally.
Smoot-Hawley...It's Baaaack! Will It Infest Tech And Destroy The Economy?
February 2, 2009The ghost of Smoot-Hawley is baaack...and it is a real horror that spread misery worldwide, and could do again unless elected officials have the guts to drive a stake in its latest resurrection.
Smoot-Hawley is shorthand for the infamous tariff brought in the honorable Senator Reed Smoot from Utah and the honorable Representative Willis Hawley from Oregon, both Republicans, signed by GOP President Herbert Hoover in 1930. Infamous because economists then warned the President that that passage would worsen what became the Great Depression, and they were right, for it sparked a zero sum trade war whose net outcome left even those who would benefit with less and in too many cases with nothing.
The spirits of Sen. Smoot and Rep. Hawley appear to have taken over the bodies of North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan from North Dakota and Representative Peter Visclosky of Indiana, this time both Democrats.
Forrester's Practical Solutions To Growing Business and Cutting Costs
January 30, 2009There has been much and understandable wailing in the current economic climate about 'yes I need to retain and grow customers but my CFO has axed my budget'.
Now Forrester Research has come up with five practical, leading-but-not-bleeding edge recommendations that will make CFOs, CMOs, and ultimately CEOs happy by shrinking costs and increasing business.
This advice, contained in a new report covered on TMCnet, The Economic Necessity Of Customer Service by Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D., Sharyn Leaver, and Andrew Magarie in summary are:
* Deploy proactive chat. It reduces online shopping revenue loss as well as shrinks the need to call the contact centers, thereby slicing operational costs
* Empower sales agents with co-browse tools to help customers through web interactions, and avoid calls and shopping cart abandonments
* Explore unified communications (UC) and with it presence.
