NEI Q2 Call, LTE Market Forecast, Call Center Hiring, SugarCRM, CallFire API

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NEI Q2 Call, LTE Market Forecast, Call Center Hiring, SugarCRM, CallFire API

NEI, a provider of appliances and services for software developers and OEMs, will announce financial results for its fiscal second quarter, the period ended March 31, 2010, on Thursday, April 29, 2010, prior to the market open.

Following the release, Canton, Mass.-based NEI management will conduct a conference call at 10 a.m. ET to discuss the company's operating performance. Company officials say management also anticipates providing the financial outlook for its quarter ending June 30, 2010.

The conference call will be available live via the Internet by accessing the NEI web site at www.nei.com on the investor relations page.

To listen to the conference call via phone, dial 1-877-407-9039 or 1-201-689-8470. For those who cannot access the live broadcast, a replay will be available by dialing 1-877-660-6853 or 1-201-612-7415, entering account number 3055 and entering the passcode "349412" from three hours after the end of the call until 12 p.m. on May 6, 2010.

Read more here.
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The LTE market is accelerating, forecast to top $11 billion by 2014. Well of course - now that the Chinese are on board.

Market research firm Infonetics Research has released its LTE Infrastructure and Subscribers market size and forecast report, which tracks Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network macrocells (a.k.a. enhanced NodeBs), evolved packet core infrastructure and Long Term Evolution subscribers.

"Despite NTT DoCoMo's shift in topology aimed at cutting LTE deployment costs by using the existing W-CDMA footprint with remote radio head-based expansion, there is no slowdown foreseen in the LTE market, only acceleration," the report finds. Full speed ahead, captain.

Last September TMC reported Alcatel-Lucent's prediction that "LTE can enable sustainable and profitable business models while supporting the increase in network usage. In fact, LTE subscriptions globally are predicted to grow at a rate of more than 400 percent (CAGR) over the next four years."

Read more here.
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Research from FurstPerson's 2009 Contact Center Recruiting and Compensation Survey, released in December, show that turnover alone costs organizations $4,284 per agent on average.

And when you factor in the possibility of poor performance, that multiplies this cost by a factor of five to ten times, depending on your industry and call type, according to FurstPerson officials.

Generally the use of pre-hire assessments, supported by empirical based research, job analysis, and validation analysis, can help improve the quality of hire of new call center agents, FurstPerson's research shows.

But recent research reports discussing call center attrition have focused on using one assessment -- a personality inventory -- to combat attrition. FurstPerson officials say they find that while "the Big Five is a well established model of personality profiling that has been shown to predict turnover in contact centers," it's not enough to have just the right personality profile: "Applicants must also have the right skills and abilities to perform well."

Read more here.
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"Ease of use." It's the new mantra for open source CRM provider SugarCRM's latest CRM release.

"This is really focused on speed and simplicity," Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and vice president of products told industry observer Rick Whiting recently. Sugar 6 is now in beta and is scheduled for general availability in July, Whiting noted.

Sugar 6 sports what Whiting describes as "an overhauled user interface -- the first significant update to the UI since the product's initial release more than five years ago -- and other improvements such as a shortcut bar at the top of the window that makes it easier to navigate through the application in fewer clicks," citing Oram's description.

SugarCRM officials think that simplicity "will be a big selling point for SugarCRM's 250 channel partners," according to Larry Augustin, SugarCRM's CEO, in an interview with Whiting at SugarCon, the vendor's recent customer and developer conference in San Francisco.

Read more here.
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Voice broadcast
 & auto dialer system provider CallFire has just released a new API that allows you to search through their inventory of toll free and local numbers, and "enable the purchase of the numbers of your choice," company officials say.

In a statement the company lists the parameters for searching phone numbers. You'll have to go to the site for the code, but the apikey is required - "This is your account api key," and the npa is optional, the Area Code for a local number search.

The "is Toll Free" is optional, needs to be "true "if you want to search for Toll Free and list size is also optional, as the number of results to list is 50 maximum.

Earlier this month, TMC's Kelly McGuire wrote that "events are taking place all over the world in efforts to be on the heels of all the mobile news, and the May 7th ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, will be sponsored by many companies in the industry, including auto dialer and voice broadcast provider CallFire."

At the summit, topics including mobile social networking, geo-location services, and the difference between native applications versus browser-based apps will be discussed, she said:

Read more here.


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