Recently, TMC's Erik Linask was in Las Vegas for Interop 2010, and had a chance to interview Michelle Chan, managing director from Clearhub.
As Linask noted, Clearhub provides a mobility suite similar to that provided by BlackBerry. Chan described it as consisting of push mail, instant messaging and voice SMS, among other services.
"We realize there are a lot of people in the market who are not carrying a BlackBerry," Chan said, adding that maybe they prefer the iPhone, Nokia, Sony Ericsson or another smartphone: "We built a product that can cut across any phone and can be used anywhere. It's just as simple as that."
When Linask asked how they go to market, whether it's through the carriers or not, Chan explained that they don't sell directly, but they do work with partners, distributors, device manufacturers, naming as examples Telecom Italia, various mobile operators in Asia and Chile, Vietnam and elsewhere, "working on a software as a service model," employing a revenue share approach.
"In keeping with our stated goal of becoming the No. 1 wholesale VoIP origination provider in the United States, VoIP Innovations will be introducing a new tiered, domestic origination product this May that will be paired with our new Letter Of Authorization tool," company officials have declared.
What this means, they explained, is that instead of a specific rate deck, "users will be able to purchase a flat-rate, wholesale tiered origination product." Customers will also have the option of choosing from four separate tiers, all of which represent different areas of the United States.
Last month, TMCnet reported that two Pittsburgh-based VoIP providers, VoIPstreet and VoIP Innovations partnered to, "create an all-in-one VoIP provider that offers both retail and wholesale VoIP services and boasts one of the nation's largest networks."
A subsidiary of ABG Capital, VoIP Innovations claims one of the largest nationwide networks in the industry.
"With this new tiered product, we're offering our customers unparalleled control over where and how often they want to call," said VoIP Innovations Product Manager, Jason Tapolci. "This product is going to separate us from our competition."
Shep Hyken's book "The Cult of the Customer" was released in April 2009 and within a week landed on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today's best seller lists.
It expounded on the idea that customer service is driven by the customer experience, and that "The two should not be confused. Service must be experienced, and that experience is provided by the people inside a company."
Customer support software provider Parature has a recent white paper summarizing and excerpting the book, which presents what it calls the "five cults of the customer:"
The Cult of Uncertainty: Unfortunately, this is where most companies are working from. At best, service is inconsistent; sometimes good, sometimes great, sometimes average, etc. At worst, the service is terrible. The bottom line is that the customer doesn't know what to expect.
TMA Resources helps professional and trade associations serve their members and customers better, selling their products to organizations such as the American Marketing Association and United States Tennis Association.
So when the customer service team found it spent 25 percent of its time on manual administrative tasks, time which could have been spent on customer support, Anne-Marie Bitman, senior director of customer service, knew it was time to take another approach.
Previously, when TMA Resources' customers e-mailed the company with questions or problems, it required a multi-step, manual process of assigning issues, and copying and pasting data into a database.
If you always kind of thought that turnover is a consistent problem within the call center industry, you win. Recent research from call center hiring solutions provider FurstPerson shows that turnover alone costs organizations $4,284 per term on average.
According to a white paper from FurstPerson, "Searching for the Silver Bullet: Can One Test Alone Improve Quality of Hire?" factoring in the opportunity cost of poor performance "accelerates this cost by a factor of five to ten times depending on your industry and call type."
Some organizations find that using pre-hire assessments supported by empirical based research, job analysis, and validation analysis can help improve the quality of new employees. But is using one assessment, the so-called silver bullet, the best way to improve quality of hire?
You might have heard of the Big Five model of personality profiling, used frequently to predict turnover in call centers. In addition to that assessment, applicants also need the right skills and abilities to perform well.
