Customer Satisfaction IVR and Profit, ERP Growth by Gartner, Live Chat Translation, CRM and Spanish Call Centers

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David Sims
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Customer Satisfaction IVR and Profit, ERP Growth by Gartner, Live Chat Translation, CRM and Spanish Call Centers

David Toliver, the director of Corporate Marketing for Angel, recently wrote a blog post noting that Palo Alto Networks’ senior director of Global Customer Support gave a webinar on how they achieved next-gen customer support by “rolling out a new, cloud-based IVR and call center and integrated it with their CRM system.”

 

Of course if you’re not integrating your CRM system with your IVR or call center, one may wonders why to bother having a CRM system in the first place. Chances are you could be doing a better job of it too, as the video can probably demonstrate.

 

Palo Alto Networks had a problem you may be familiar with: Its contact center was heading toward obsolescence, simply not able to keep up with all the work. “Calls would fly in helter-skelter, with 15 support engineers struggling to keep up. When a call came into the support center, 15 phones would ring at the same time, and agents would either rush or hesitate to answer,” wrote Toliver.

 

The temp fix they instituted meant that after five rings, phone calls were forwarded to an outside temp agency, which would take a message and simply keep calling engineers until someone (anyone!) accepted the call.

 

Read more here.

Good news for the ERP software market: Gartner projects growth to increase in 2012, with revenue forecast to reach $288 billion.

 

Indian industry journal Deccan Herald quoted Joanne Correia, managing vice president at Gartner, saying the market for enterprise software “continues to recover well following the 2009 downturn, with signs of ongoing growth on the horizon... Economic recovery is evident across all regions, although concerns have arisen in some countries in Europe and Asia.”

 

In fact, things are looking pretty good for worldwide enterprise application software spending. Across the board, it’s forecast to total $114.4 billion in 2011, a 10.2 percent increase from 2010 spending of $103.8 billion, Gartner found.

 

Breaking down those figures, Gartner officials said ERP is the largest segment within the enterprise application software market -- “ERP revenue is expected to reach $23.3 billion, followed by office suites with $15.7 billion.”

 

Analysts are mixed on just how rosy an immediate future ERP has.TMC’s Linda Dobel wrote last month that despite some consultants’ earlier predictions, it looks like 2011 will not be the year enterprises rush to invest in ERP software upgrades:

 

Read more here.

According to statistics presented recently by Lionbridge, 73 percent of Internet users don’t speak English. Yes, English is still the lingua franca of the Internet, but depending on where you’re doing business, it definitely pays to offer live chat translation services in the language your customers would actually like to use.

“Customers are twice as likely to complete an online transaction if they are engaged in their own language,” Lionbridge officials say, adding that since most organizations derive between 40-60 percent of their revenue outside of the US, well, you can do the math. The point is, live chat translation in a foreign language should at least be a topic of discussion.

 

Lionbridge makes a product called GeoFluent, a real-time translation platform which instantly translates content into multiple languages. A company calledLivePerson, as the name would suggest, offers live chat and other services to create and capture value through real-time customer connections.

 

Put them together, and you get GeoFluent Chat for LivePerson. It’s designed to integrate with LivePerson chat services, having components on both the client and server. The way Lionbridge officials explain it, on the client, a JavaScript rendering UI communicates with the Lionbridge Translation Web Service API. The server-side component translates messages (using the core translation component) and communicates with the chat service.  

 

Read more here.

Last March, according to industry observer Florence Pichon, the American Census Bureau reported that the American Hispanic population had climbed to over 50 million. This is a 43 percent increase in the U.S. Spanish-speaking population in the last decade. Obviously as a result, Spanish language contact center products are growing in all sectors.

 

Pichon notes that a recent convention by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, hosting Monica Lozano as a keynote speaker, CEO of one of the largest Spanish-language newspaper companies in the U.S, ImpreMedia, saying the growth potential for the digital news sector was impressive, especially since 60 percent of all Latinos are now online.

 

As Pichon reported, Lozano said there is a need for Spanish-language publications, due to the “content divide between English and Spanish language publications.”

 

 English language publications tend to focus on immigration issues, like Mexican drug cartels and other topics, while Spanish language media devotes less coverage to U.S. politics but more to international affairs.

 

Read more here.





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