First Coffee

Hey, take it from Snooozy, “The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person.”

We don’t care what online handle he or she uses, that’s pretty good advice.

Snooozy has some other tidbits for you as well, in case you were wondering just what the advantages of IVR systems might be when it comes to collecting survey information. The fact that yes, it can get a boatload of information pretty quickly is up there, but there are others.

One is that, simply, it can be a critical part of a positive customer experience, and that’s old news -- way back in 2010, TMC noted a survey conducted by Alcatel-Lucent found that “three-quarters of 4,200 respondents said they would continue to business with a company with which they had a great contact center experience.”

In fact, half of all respondents told Alcatel-Lucent they’d dropped a company based on a poor contact center experience.

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Snooozy lists some other advantages of an IVR, besides the fact that it never gets sick, asks for a day off or alienates customers if it shows up to work in a sour mood.

“The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person,” Snooozy notes, and yes, cost aside, this is the number one benefit of an IVR system for customer surveys: “Within two to five minutes after a service interaction is finished, an organization can have feedback from the clients that how their experience was with them and how they feel.”

And that quickly, an administrator can be data mining to see if there are any red flags in that conversation meriting a quick follow-up call to smooth over a problem or suggestive sell a product or service the customer sounds ready to buy.

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About a year ago TMC’s Linda Dobel wrote, “multi-site, multi-source contact centers have, at this point, come to appreciate the many benefits of transitioning to the cloud. Still, the biggest concern, and therefore the biggest hold back, is security.”

Things haven’t changed all that much between then and now. For hosted predictive dialers, that’s still a central issue; the common thinking is that, while cloud computing may be the big disruptor, if that disruption includes security concerns, count us out.

Yealink UK’s managing director, Andrew Roberts, credits the generally poor European economy’s performance-price ratios with how difficult it is to get telecoms and IT managers to commit to new capital expenditure.

In fact, Robert says, these days projects which were essentially rubber-stamped with little debate a few years ago now merit evaluation and scrutiny. As he says, even issues such as longstanding brand loyalty are coming under the green eyeshade exam -- “We’re paying more for this service why, exactly?” is heard far more frequently now.

As Roberts said recently, they’re looking to see if a big brand name really does add value or if they’re perhaps instead simply paying for a costly marketing and operational overhead.

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In these economic times a good way to stand out from the herd of vendors and suppliers is to be “all things to all people,” as a recent blog post from appliance deployment provider NEI points out. In other words, if you can lead on cost, customer service and product innovation in supply chain management, well, that’s a heck of an advantage you’d have over your competition.

At the recent CSCMP conference in Philadelphia, NEI officials saw the 2011 Trends and Issues in Logistics and Transportation Study and gleaned three trends they see as becoming increasingly important in “customer-focused” supply chain management:

Segmented Supply Chains.

 “With the new year comes new year's resolutions.”

For Dan Boehm, Vice President of Sales and Marketing forSpectrum Corporation, they do, anyway. Haven’t seen much in the way of a New Year’s resolution around this reporter’s house ever since our young son said “If there’s something you want to do, why do you have to wait for next year to start doing it?”

But it’s cultural, to resolve to stop smoking, lose weight or be a better person, as Boehm says. The gym is busier for the first couple weeks in January, then by about Valentine’s Day attendance is back to normal.

There might be a point to making New Year’s resolutions, though, if you manage a call center. As Boehm says, “one way you can be a better person is to review and change your metrics, thresholds and reports.” And that would make a fine New Year’s resolution.

Smartphones are growing just as rapidly in Britain as anywhere else... well, maybe not as rapidly as South Korea, but pretty rapidly. They’re ahead of Germany but not quite up to France.

And there’s a market for mobile banking via smartphone, although Brits aren’t the most gung-ho when it comes to banking via mobile. Nevertheless, Halifax and the Royal Bank of Scotland see opportunities there, as each have launched mobile banking apps to help customers manage their accounts on-the-go.

More than a third of the people in the UK use a smartphone, but as TMC noted a couple weeks ago, mobile banking is less popular in the UK than elsewhere, with only 27 percent of Brits surveyed reporting that yes, they had used some form of mobile banking in the past six months.

Puneet Jetli, president and Co-CEO of the wonderfully-named company Happiest Minds, recently shared some thoughts around the subject of customer expectations and entrepreneurs.

Specifically, as he put it, “customer expectations are changing,” and entrepreneurs need to catch up. This isn’t a new message, but Jetli has some valuable insights to add to the ongoing discussion.

Disruptive technologies, as he says are always good opportunities for the industry. And whereas grizzled old-timers still sit around campfires at night talking about the Internet revolution in the late 1990s, Jetli sees a new wave around what he calls the "consumerization of IT.”

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Recently officials of Spectrum Corporation featured their call/contact center monitoring software aids in Contact Center Activity Monitoring (CCAM), a subset of Unified Contact Center Reporting (UCCR).