ClickEquations and CRM, Contactual OnDemand, Virtual Call Center, Angel.com's IVR

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ClickEquations and CRM, Contactual OnDemand, Virtual Call Center, Angel.com's IVR

Recently ClickEquations officials noted -- correctly -- that conversions take place in a lot of places, “in an online shopping cart, on a web form, in the call center, at a physical store, or even in CRM databases.”

But strangely enough, most paid search marketers only measure what happens online. ClickEquations’ new external conversion tracking capabilities seeks to change that.

The company is offering a way to “allow advertisers to track, analyze, and optimize paid search campaigns based on the value realized in any or all conversion points,” officials say, adding that “the result is a more accurate reporting and the ability to make much smarter bid management decisions.”

What is external conversion tracking? According to ClickEquations officials, it “connects keywords from an advertisers’ paid search account with the conversions and revenue realized offline or captured in any external system. The data is integrated into ClickEquations, allowing for complete reporting, analysis, editing and automated bidding with the data.

Read more here.

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Officials of ContactualOnDemand are touting the flexible architecture of their contact center product to “allow you to integrate your headquarters, remote offices, and outsourced locations in to a virtual call center.”

If you’ve been thinking about installing a virtual calling center, with all the advantages it has, this might be something to consider.

Company officials say such virtual operations “operate seamlessly as one team and enable you to access talent outside your geography, eliminate overtime costs, and reduce overhead.”

Traditionally deploying a call center across multiple sites and geographies required long lead times, additional specialized infrastructure, and a dedicated IT staff. As those who set them up are too well aware. “Through our innovative call center software,” ContactualOnDemand officials say, “we make it fast and easy to deploy a virtual call center – agents simply need a phone, an Internet connection, and a web browser to get started.”

The point of a virtual call center is to let organizations easily and cost-effectively manage multiple, geographically dispersed agents. It also helps organizations achieve business continuity and customer service resiliency in the event of a network outage, natural disaster or some other unforeseen event.

Read more here.

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“Call it what you will -- a support center, help desk, travel desk, benefits desk -- but, in the end, it’s a customer service center.”

Refreshing realism from a company in the industry. Exactly right -- whatever the method of delivery, what you’re providing is customer service. Let’s try not to forget that.

That’s according to a recent blog post on Contactual OnDemand’s Web site. “It’s the place your customers -- internal or external -- come to get the help they need, whether it’s solving a problem, ordering a product, booking an airline ticket or inquiring about a benefit,” the post notes.

And as the company notes, “integrating your CRM with your call center app is truly the missing link in providing a 360-degree view of your customers to your call center agents. That missing link now exists in the form of the cloud computing applications.”

Read more here.

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Recently TMC’s Erin Harrison had the opportunity to sit down and interview Angel’s Jason Hochman, Director of Enterprise and Channel Sales, at the IT Expo West 2010 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Hochman said Angel was founded about ten years ago with the goal of bringing voice products to SMBs. In the past couple years, he said, “we’ve begun to expand into the enterprise space, developing applications for pharma, finance and online retail. We decided it was time for a rebranding,” he said, so the company could go after the enterprise space, and meet their needs “in a different way than you meet the needs of SMBs.”

The company was founded in the ‘90s and originally named Angel.com, but that felt “very 90s,” Hochman said, explaining why it’s now known as simply Angel: “In today’s world, ‘dot com’ has the opposite connotation it had ten years ago.”

Still, rebranding or no, the trick for an IVR company is to differentiate themselves in what is a crowded market. Hochman said Angel knows there are lot of companies that sell IVR, and a lot of the platforms do the same things, quite frankly. He said Angel seeks to present a “caller first” philosophy, the idea being that if you offer the caller a pleasing experience, they will actually opt in to the system, actually use it, which will result in a better customer experience for them and a lower-cost transaction for the company.

Read more here.



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