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January 2012

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Customer Brand Loyalty, Customer Advantage With Supply Chains, Manage Employee Social Networking, Analyzing Customer Speech

January 26, 2012

Yealink UK’s managing director, Andrew Roberts, credits the generally poor European economy’s performance-price ratios with how difficult it is to get telecoms and IT managers to commit to new capital expenditure.

In fact, Robert says, these days projects which were essentially rubber-stamped with little debate a few years ago now merit evaluation and scrutiny. As he says, even issues such as longstanding brand loyalty are coming under the green eyeshade exam -- “We’re paying more for this service why, exactly?” is heard far more frequently now.

As Roberts said recently, they’re looking to see if a big brand name really does add value or if they’re perhaps instead simply paying for a costly marketing and operational overhead.



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In these economic times a good way to stand out from the herd of vendors and suppliers is to be “all things to all people,” as a recent blog post from appliance deployment provider NEI points out.

CRM Modules Explained, Call Centers and Voice Recognition, Hosted Contact Center Technology, Philippine Call Centers in 2011

January 23, 2012

Soffront runs one of the more useful company blogs dealing with the CRM space, it has information that is actually quite useful even if you don’t buy their products. Shocking concept, yes, but a welcome, refreshing difference from the usual dreary “this problem can only be solved by using our Acme CRM...” approach.

Company officials note that most companies who are finding success with their CRM are using what amounts to an integrated customer relationship management  approach to automate their business processes. And yes, Soffront can help you with that, but so can a lot of other companies.

A recent entry on the company blog does a good job highlighting the different basic modules you’ll want to understand. These are as basic as CRM tools get, if you’re doing CRM at all you should be familiar with them.



Call Center New Year Resolutions, Customer Satisfaction and Call Monitoring, Call Center JIT Training, CRM and On Demand Call Centers

January 20, 2012

 “With the new year comes new year's resolutions.”

For Dan Boehm, Vice President of Sales and Marketing forSpectrum Corporation, they do, anyway. Haven’t seen much in the way of a New Year’s resolution around this reporter’s house ever since our young son said “If there’s something you want to do, why do you have to wait for next year to start doing it?”

But it’s cultural, to resolve to stop smoking, lose weight or be a better person, as Boehm says.

Call Center Agents At Home, Call Center Outsourcing, Video Conferencing B2B Customers, Protecting Customer Passwords

January 16, 2012

Always nice to meet a kindred spirit -- “I absolutely love working from home. I get more done,” writes Heather Hurst on the inContact blog, adding that it’s “no surprise that call center agents like working from home too.”


Sure, every now and then it’s fun to go to an office and work on group projects, but yes, this reporter prefers working at home.  

Hurst tells of a friend of hers who was a work at home agent for seven years -- longer than the average call center agent lifespan, and that “had nothing to do with the work, it was based primarily on the location of her desk.”



Mobile Banking For Customers, snom VoIP Phones, Customer Speech Analytics, Data Center Networks

January 12, 2012

Smartphones are growing just as rapidly in Britain as anywhere else... well, maybe not as rapidly as South Korea, but pretty rapidly. They’re ahead of Germany but not quite up to France.

And there’s a market for mobile banking via smartphone, although Brits aren’t the most gung-ho when it comes to banking via mobile.

Call Center Predictive Dialer, Expense Report Software, Email Segmenting Customers, Eliminating Roaming Charges

January 10, 2012

If you enjoy paying for dialer maintenance, if you think that’s a great way to spend money, then you’re not going to be interested in this, and you can skip over to the sports page now.

Okay, for the rest of us, we’re aware, as LiveVox officials say, that contact centers are by and large milking the most out of aging systems. Bad economy and all, don’tcha know.  

No funding this year for new systems.

Customer Expectations Changing, Contact Center Monitoring, Call Center Homesourcing, Mobile Christmas Customers

January 5, 2012

Puneet Jetli, president and Co-CEO of the wonderfully-named company Happiest Minds, recently shared some thoughts around the subject of customer expectations and entrepreneurs.

Specifically, as he put it, “customer expectations are changing,” and entrepreneurs need to catch up. This isn’t a new message, but Jetli has some valuable insights to add to the ongoing discussion.

Disruptive technologies, as he says are always good opportunities for the industry. And whereas grizzled old-timers still sit around campfires at night talking about the Internet revolution in the late 1990s, Jetli sees a new wave around what he calls the "consumerization of IT.”



Keeping Customer Data Safe, Mobile Customers, Auto Attendants, Save Conferencing Money

January 3, 2012

Happy New Year, y’all, here’s hoping it’s a prosperous and blessed New Year for us all, and that the Mayans were wrong.

Security is a paramount concern in cloud storage today, so woe betide the platform provider even perceived as being the least bit cavalier about security.

Box.net is covering all the bases when it comes to the security of its platform as the cloud storage provider recently announced a new set of tools and access controls for the enterprise. Company officials also announced a product integration with Intel to deliver what they characterize as “additional protections for users and increased admin capabilities for IT managers.”

Not that Box.net was any slouch when it came to security before the recent announcements; you don’t get to provide storage for 77 percent of the Fortune 500, and get 100,000 businesses using your service if you slack off on security. The company’s just ensuring that it remains state of the art.





CRM and Mobile Banking in Britain, Transitioning Customers to IPv6, Be Nice to MDM Customers

January 3, 2012

Hm, it appears the Brits don’t much fancy mobile banking.

Not that they’re unaware of it. According to industry observer Gill Montia, KPMG’s latest Consumer & Convergence Report found that UK consumers and businesses are actually “ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting new technologies.”

These are not the technologically faint of heart, these British -- “both online shopping and the use of social media are more widespread in Britain than in other parts of the globe,” Montia says.

When they do indulge in mobile banking, however, they’re generally smartphones owners.





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