Sitel, a provider of call center outsourcing offers transaction processing solutions that can help any organization to succeed. Equipped with the item- and document-processing technologies, Sitel officials say in a white paper that the company can help you gain access to flexible and efficient tools, designed to assist clients “who value service excellence.”

And if you don’t value service excellence, you can always go for a cheaper product suite, however Sitel’s clients have found that it pays to get the quality stuff.

“Approximately 41 percent of our client base trusts us to process reply cards, warranty cards, checks and rebate requests,” Sitel officials note, adding that among those businesses is a billion-dollar ISP, one of the 10 largest commercial bank holding companies in the U.S., a $17 billion consumer products company, an international continuity marketer offering coffee, tea and gifts and one of Canada’s largest utility companies, as well as the financial services division of an automobile manufacturer.

These are companies that know quality. They know they got where they are by valuing customer service and excellence.  Read more HERE.

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Here’s the twofer you were looking for: You want to save on customer service costs and you want to improve customer service.

Don’t be under the mistaken impression that it’s an either-or choice, and that your choices are to either skimp on customer service to save money, or go large on customer service and take the hit on the bottom line. Done correctly, IVR gives you both.

Take a recent blog post from Angel.com. They’ve been in the business a long time, and they know what they’re talking about: “IVRs tend to be demonized, but a lot of the time, they can actually make life easier for both companies and customers.”

There’s a lot of truth to that -- face it, would you rather have to speak to a live person to get your bank balance, repeat your account number a couple times and answer other questions -- “Is there anything I can help you with today? A car loan, perhaps?” Or, simply call a number, punch in your account number and get your balance, and boom, no fuss no muss?

And it’s not only banks that do their customers a favor by offering IVR options. Angel.com gives other pertinent examples:

Airlines. How about letting us register our mobile phone under your loyalty program, so we can check in with a short call “rather than logging on to the airline’s website, which can be difficult when on-the-go?” they ask. Good question.

Read more here.

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ERP software leader Aplicor is the latest contestant to merit a review from CRM Idol.

Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant and their fellow CRM Idol judges, Esteban Kolsky, Jesus Hoyos and Brent Leary, “are viewing and reviewing contestants for the quality of their product, the vision of their company, the presentation that they are making and a variety of other factors.”

They’ll have you know that these reviews are reviewed “and modified if need be” by all the primary judges.

First up: Aplicor. The stage is yours.

According to the judges, Aplicor offers a cloud-based Business Management product pitched to small and medium businesses, which the Idol judges consider to be businesses with 500 or fewer employees. On stage today is the Aplicor CloudSuite7, containing both CRM and ERP tools.

The judges see the tool’s ability to be cloud independent as one of its unique selling points today -- “Aplicor’s customers can select where the application can run based on their cloud strategies,” whether they want Aplicor to host it on their own cloud, or they want to host in a traditional IT situation, or on external clouds like Windows Azure and Amazon.

The choice is yours, customer. You’re not locked into any one option.

Read more here.

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If you’ve had issues with supervisor assessments of employees as part of your performance management and coaching initiatives, a recent innovation from Envision might be of interest – an anonymous review of evaluations, with the results then being sent directly to all stakeholders with the reviewer still kept confidential.

This and other improvements are included as part of an overall upgrade of Envision offerings, including more support for Microsoft, according to senior Envision officials.

Richard Snow, VP & research director for Envision, recently penned a perspective on workforce optimization products.

The company offers a suite of products including recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, coaching, e-learning, performance management and speech analytics, according to Snow, who noted that among the company’s recent product improvements making them more attractive to performance management and coaching pros, are support for more Microsoft products and performance and scalability improvements, with the main improvements centering on quality monitoring and training of contact center agents. Read more here.