CRM in Chat Translation, Call Centers and UC, Key CRM Problems, WFO and Lean Six Sigma

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CRM in Chat Translation, Call Centers and UC, Key CRM Problems, WFO and Lean Six Sigma

GeoFluent Customizer is a product billed by its makers, Lionbridge, as being able to improve base language models by using your enterprise’s language assets for an enhanced customer chat translation experience.

Basically that means that while, yes, you can find free chat translation services out there, Lionbridge is betting you wouldn’t want to actually allow valuable customers to utilize them in fear of inaccuracies.  

How is Lionbridge GeoFluent different? It offers real-time on-demand custom translation in a cloud app -- automated machine translation technology, instantly translating content and communications into multiple languages.The GeoFluent platform accomplishes this, Lionbridge officials say, by integrating advanced cloud-based language tools with a real-time translation service, a statistical machine translation engine from IBM’s Watson Research Center.

The chat translation platform can also be customized using your content and configured for specific business processes for multilingual communication such as eSupport, forums, blogs, web pages, chat sessions and other such uses.

Read more here.

It’s a legitimate question: Is unified communications short-circuiting call centers?

Industry observer Art Rosenberg takes a crack at the question, observing that recently, his wife complained about the fact that one of the home shopping shows she was watching “kept announcing that a product on sale was all sold out even before they showed it on the program. Buyers (customers) were seeing the announcements on line and placing their orders on line without getting into any phone line connection queues for IVR applications or live call center agents.”

Hold on, we’re going somewhere with this.

As Rosenberg says, now that more and more consumers are using smartphones and tablets to access web information and initiate business contacts, “they will become less dependent on traditional customer call center agents.”

When will they need the live agents? When they have a problem. A real problem. One that can’t be solved by even good IVR systems. A problem somebody has to think about. Expensive problems.

Read more here.

Industry observer Chris Bucholtz recently wrote that when it comes to CRM, “the discussion you have with a vendor is like taking an anatomy course; the discussion you have with an integrator is like speaking to the coroner.”

Bucholtz identifes what he finds to be, consistently, the key issues associated with CRM problems:

The Band-Aid Approach. Fixing a sales or marketing issue by implementing CRM is, for smaller businesses, a neat band-aid that allows them to continue with business as usual, minus the problem that was vexing them... If the business is not in the habit of continually examining its processes and at the same time thinking about how CRM can improve and evolve them, CRM ends up being a wasted, one-time investment.

Inadequate Training. Many businesses have mistaken "ease of use" for "no need for training," with limiting results. Others have provided limited training to a core cadre of employees, leaving half-trained users to train other untrained users... scrimping on training is a great way to take the money you've already spent and waste it.

Read more here.

As anybody who has experience with workforce optimization knows, WFO can be quite handy when looking to improve performance within a company, especially with such tasks as identifying and implementing approaches for such tasks as employee training, efficiency and retention.

Ideally, WFO helps you build a more engaged workforce, as well as save you money and streamline your operation.

That’s the ideal anyway. And according to officials of Guidon Performance Solutions, those goals dovetail nicely with the stated aims of Lean Six Sigma.

It stands to reason, then, that as Guidon officials point out, it’s not uncommon to find organizations using WFO also using Lean Six Sigma strategies, “in their efforts to put together an effective model.”

Taking a closer look, yes, it is a good fit; it makes sense. As Guidon officials say, enabling employees to contribute to the success of a company has multiple benefits: “a more engaged workforce is likely to have better morale and productivity, and workers who are given the option of making process improvement suggestions can feel more involved while giving higher-ups insight into problems and challenges that may otherwise have gone unaddressed.”

Read more here.





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