Phone tag? Oh please. It's much worse than that.
"Somehow, the memo hasn't reached salespeople that their prospects hide behind voicemail," says the much put-upon blogger for the Soffront blog. "Here in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of voicemail, people have become adept at ignoring the phone."
According to this writer, who speaks from experience the way survivors of jet crashes do, "it takes an average of 8-14 phone calls to reach a potential prospect, and salespeople must juggle hundreds of contacts who require daily follow ups. How can a salesperson expect to manage their sales process with legal pads, Excel spreadsheets, and sticky notes? That's a perfect example of inefficient CRM software."
You might have thought that's an exaggeration. We don't think so. The Soffront blogger doesn't either, evidently: "The number one failure we identified in our loose study of executives was sales process. Salespeople felt that three messages was the final commitment to the lead or contact. If no contact was made, then these salespeople believed that there was no interest on behalf of the prospect, so it's likely the prospect will never call back."
"Somehow, the memo hasn't reached salespeople that their prospects hide behind voicemail," says the much put-upon blogger for the Soffront blog. "Here in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of voicemail, people have become adept at ignoring the phone."
According to this writer, who speaks from experience the way survivors of jet crashes do, "it takes an average of 8-14 phone calls to reach a potential prospect, and salespeople must juggle hundreds of contacts who require daily follow ups. How can a salesperson expect to manage their sales process with legal pads, Excel spreadsheets, and sticky notes? That's a perfect example of inefficient CRM software."
You might have thought that's an exaggeration. We don't think so. The Soffront blogger doesn't either, evidently: "The number one failure we identified in our loose study of executives was sales process. Salespeople felt that three messages was the final commitment to the lead or contact. If no contact was made, then these salespeople believed that there was no interest on behalf of the prospect, so it's likely the prospect will never call back."
Read more here.
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"Contact centers need to factor in changes on two fronts: New consumer privacy protection regulations are coming into being, and call costs are coming down."
That's from Spescom company officials, who add that what these two seemingly divergent factors have in common is that "they make it important that business risk is mitigated and that governance and compliance requirements are being met within the business."
Spescom DataVoice offers some insight, says Kgabo Badimo, MD of Spescom DataVoice, a South African company that develops proprietary products for the contact center and enterprise telephony market. "At present, a large portion of contact centers' revenues come from direct sales. New privacy laws mean that contact centers will come under greater scrutiny in terms of their interactions with customers, the legitimacy of the data they use and how they use and store that data."
Read more here.
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According to a recent white paper from ECaTS, counties are reporting certain business drivers for ECaTS.
These include providing a clear understanding of call volume across the entire county, the availability of call handling loads at different time intervals which allows, ECaTS officials say, for "better decisions when modifying call routing across the County."
The comparative analysis feature allows the county managers to see their best PSAPs and work with those PSAPs that require more coaching/help, and the validation of funding/position requests are now supported by actual call volume and call handling statistics.
Some users are also saying that the simplicity of data reporting for complex handling and call type analysis is "simplified by a centralized Web-based repository."
ECaTS is delivered to PSAPs, Counties and States as a service with Direct Technology providing managed services, hosting and support for all pieces of the tool. "Every aspect of the application is monitored including data collection and transfer points, the health of our databases, web services," and others, company officials say: "With our 24x7 monitoring and internal helpdesk we guarantee our 0% data loss model."
Read more here.
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Occam Network's Juan Vela will discuss "IP communications in the next decade" at the 2010 Metaswitch Forum, according to Metaswitch officials.
Vela will discuss how service providers can benefit from the combination of Metaswitch and Occam Networks' products when preparing for the future of voice communications, in the partner session "IP Communications in the Next Decade."
As service providers aim to keep up with the latest advanced IP voice and data services, Metaswitch officials say, "network operators must look to strategic vendors as investment opportunities. The compatibility of Metaswitch's core session control, call feature server and media gateway products with Occam Networks' IP-over-Ethernet multi-service access platform allows telcos to deliver a host of voice, data and video services."
Vela will also discuss the signaling protocols that allow the interaction of these next-generation services.
Read more here.
