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David Sims
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Eliminating Outsourced Call Centers, Barging in IVR Menus, Best Call Center Customer Experience, Virtualized E9-1-1

March 9, 2012

It's a welcome trend, obviously, that call centers are beginning to see the advantages of repatriating some of those jobs. Wouldn't it also be nice if they made using them more, well, user-friendly?

A recent Tech Journal South report tells of 3CLogic, which provides a cloud call center offering promising " a new level of sophistication" for cloud call centers, which as TMC's Susan J. Campbell notes, "could quite possibly eliminate the need for outsourcing call centers and will actually save companies money."

The trick, according to company founder and chief executive officer Raj Sharma, is to keep the product relatively inexpensive while hitting the sweet spot for call centers -- reporting options. 3CLogic has loads of reporting features, prepared and customized. 



Aspect and Nexidia Partner, Acme Packet and HP ACI, Hamad Call Center Improvement, Restaurant Order Call Centers

March 6, 2012

Recently Aspect, which sells customer contact and Microsoft platform products, announced a collaboration with Nexidia to "integrate speech analytics into its interaction management and workforce optimization" offering, with the idea to provide a tool to improve customer service.

The way Aspect officials explain it, their optimization platform will work with Nexidia’s Evaluate platform to help companies break down and sift customer-agent dialogue and analyze what are the most relevant customer inquiries, issues or initiatives. Adding Nexidia Evaluate, Aspect officials say, the tool's users "can also betteruse speech analytics across the entire enterprise.

Read more here.

Email Marketing, CRM L.C. and Social Media, Citizens As Customers, 'Customer Service Hero?'

March 2, 2012

Oh -- you thought email marketing was dead? Sorry to disappoint you. Not even close.

According to Kate McKinney and Kiran Ross, writing in the Kansas City Business Journal, "It is perfectly possible to use email marketing without appearing spammy and annoying your users.

Enterprise Call Recording, Oz Banking Customer Service Improvements, Social Media and Customers, India Turning From Call Centers?

February 28, 2012

 

You probably don’t think of yourself first and foremost as a customer when you show up for a dental appointment, but in reality that’s what you are. So there’s no reason why dentists shouldn’t get in on all the fun of customer marketing leads and enterprise call recording just like the rest of us.

In fact, officials of the Internet Dental Alliance have announced Total Lead & Call Tracking, what they’re calling a “core feature” of the alliance’s New Patient Marketing Machine and based on its LeadFire technology.

Not what you normally think of when you think of dentists, but they’re trying to run a business as well, so why not?



Improving Customer IVR, Customer No-Nos, Voice Biometrics, Call Center Advantage - Remote Monitoring

February 24, 2012

The thing about Interactive Voice Response is that while, yes, it does save businesses a lot of time and money, it also saves the customers time too, when used correctly. Frankly this reporter prefers automated interactions when it’s simple information that’s needed.

But too many IVR systems are one size fits all, instead of having the capability to tailor to the customer. That’s the contention of IVR industry insider Jason Andersson, who wrote recently that it’s highly possible “self-service applications, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions are looking at a slow painful death because of lack of innovation.”

Take grocery shopping. Wouldn’t it be nice, Andersson says, if you could walk into a grocery store arranged for you to fast-track your trip, with all the things you normally buy in the same place up front?



Tracking Customer Keywords, TeleTech and Satmetrix's CEM, Call Center Software Awarded

February 21, 2012

 

What many businesses want are completed sales. They aren’t really interested in how many clicks they get with online advertising, what they want to know is if there are any particular keywords that are leading to completed sales.

That’s where Calltracks.com sees an opportunity.

Email Marketing Mistakes, SatuitCRM and Alpha, KeyBank Customer Satisfaction, CloudCRM

February 16, 2012

Email marketing is kind of like a souffle -- so effective and impressive when done correctly, but so easy to do wrong.

We don’t know how many ways there are to screw up a souffle, no doubt imaginative klutzes are coming up with more each day, but CustomerThink has done a good job listing five fairly common ways to lower the effectiveness of email marketing. Oh a fallen souffle is still edible, and you’ll get some response from your email marketing even if you’re committing some of these “facepalms,” as CustomerThink columnist Yo Noguchi calls them.

But you’re not using email marketing just to be passable, are you?



TeleTech and Satmetrix in CEM Deal, IVR Auto Attendant, Women Car Customers, CRM at Cloud 2012

February 14, 2012

This past week TMC’s Michelle Amodio noted that TeleTech and Sametrix, two well-known names in Customer Experience Management, have partnered to work on a beefed-up suite of CEM offerings.

As she wrote, TeleTech is now the only BPO provider using the Net Promoter approach to improve their CEM. The idea behind CEM is to take steps to both retain customers and increase profit margins associated with each customer.

"We've reached a tipping point in the customer revolution.

Cloud CRM and Forecasting, Bad Customer Silos, Videoconferencing, Email Marketing

February 9, 2012

You know, of course, that done correctly, sales forecasting can do Very Good Things for your business. But you want more than just “Oh it’ll be good, trust us.” How, exactly, does it help? After all, you’ve got a presentation to the CEO; you can’t go in with “It’ll be really cool.”

Soffront, which sells CRM, recently wrote a good blog post focusing in on just that very question -- what specific ways does sales forecasting help your business?

The basic idea behind forecasting is that it would be great to be able to see into the future.



Cloud CRM, Auto Attendant Voices, Email Customer Lists, Protecting Customer Passwords

February 7, 2012

“It's only very recently that the CRM ideal has been rendered realistic due to the advent of cloud-technology and the introduction of advanced CRM software,” writes The Independent, which defines CRM as “organizing interactions with customers, particularly sales transactions and client communication, using facilitating software.”

Cut those last three words off that sentence and it’s a fair definition. Adding anything about the tools one uses to interact with customers introduces a dangerous mindset that CRM is “about” the technology, not the needs and strategies which dictate the choice of technology.

You do not need software to do CRM correctly. Sure in most cases it really helps, but all software does is act as a tool to accomplish the job of CRM.



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