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

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

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. Nevertheless, Halifax and the Royal Bank of Scotland see opportunities there, as each have launched mobile banking apps to help customers manage their accounts on-the-go.

More than a third of the people in the UK use a smartphone, but as TMC noted a couple weeks ago, mobile banking is less popular in the UK than elsewhere, with only 27 percent of Brits surveyed reporting that yes, they had used some form of mobile banking in the past six months. For comparison purposes, globally 52 percent of people have.

Just before the New Year snom officials announced that its endpoints passed a battery of interoperability tests with ZyXEL Communications’ Ethernet switches, “adding a new partner and combining the efforts of both companies to offer end-to-end Ethernet IP solutions for SMBs.”

The way company officials explain it, ZyXEL’s Power-over-Ethernet-enabled Ethernet switches are well-regarded in the industry for their “stable and consistent” data transmission for such apps as voice and video.

snom officials were understandably pleased by the results. One remarked that when combined with snom’s product portfolio, including the snom 3xx series, the touchscreen snom 870 and the standards-based SIP phones qualified by Microsoft for use with Microsoft Lync 2010 -- the snom 300 UC edition and the snom 821 UC edition -- “the tandem of snom and ZyXEL provides an optimal, end-to-end VoIP for small and medium-sized businesses.”

Speech analytics leader UTOPY offers Interaction Analytics software, noting that when combined with the UTOPY Collections Optimization offering, it can measure, monitor and improve debt collections.

“Whether you're a collections agency looking to drive results for your clients or an in-house contact center looking to reduce outstanding receivables, UTOPY can help,” say company officials. They highlight four areas of consideration:

Measuring Collections Skills with Interaction Analytics: Not all contact center collection skills are created equal. Some agent collection rates will be higher than others, and organizations that have the ability to identify the reasons for these discrepancies and reduce them with targeted agent coaching will do better, naturally. UTOPY officials say they can help since contact centers are able to measure and monitor 100 percent of their interactions and analyze them down to the individual agent and interaction level.

Good news: When it comes to data center design and operations, there are five areas, including data center networks, where we can expect to see significant advances in 2012, according to John Savageau, president of Pacific-Tier Communications.

Data Center Consolidation: The U.S. government is expected to close at least 800 of its data centers by 2015 due to lack of use, Savageau says, noting that “the lesson is not lost on state and local governments, private industry, or even Internet content providers,” who can see that the economics of operating a data center or server closet “are compelling enough to make even the most fervent server-hugger reconsider their religion.”

Cloud Computing: If you really secretly suspect that cloud will, sooner or later, replace all manner of server furniture, you have a like-minded soul in Savageau, who predicts that the move to cloud computing “is as certain as the move to e-mail was in the 1980s.”



 



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