David Sims
CRM
Cloud-Based Contact Centers, Standing Out in Cloud CRM, Social CRM, Call Center Webinar Offered
May 22, 2011A webinar that just took place titled “Achieving More with All-In-One Cloud-Based Contact Centers” was presented by TMC, and is still available free online. Register now to access the presentation.
As you’re no doubt aware, hosted contact center platforms have advanced considerably over the last several years. They represent a higher-profit option for some customers who want to go to market quickly with a low up-front cost.
Presenting at this webinar was Corey McFadden, managing partner of Infradapt, a managed services and platform provider. He has over fifteen years of industry experience, and a background including experience in field-consulting, project management, IP telephony, and software development.
“Not every network is created equal,” McFadden said, “and not every service provider has the skills” you might need, noting that considerations for choosing the best provider include such considerations as where the facility is, physical security, staffing and technical standards.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Six Call Center Strategies, Cloud Computing Strengths, Improving Call Center Knowledge
May 20, 2011Officials of Trillium Software say the company has decided to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM software into its data quality offerings for both on-premise and cloud environments using Windows Azure.
The Dynamics CRM’s Software Development Kit is intended to let users access data cleansing and matching capabilities in the Trillium Software System, Trillium officials explain, adding that it will give users real-time and batch enterprise data quality services -- “data will be evaluated and cleansed at the point of entry.”
"Microsoft Dynamics CRM is designed to offer a flexible and extensible framework to enable organisations like Trillium Software to integrate," said Mark Albrecht, director of Microsoft Dynamics ISV Strategy.
Read more here.
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A recent Webinar, titled “Six Simple Strategies for Improving Schedule Adherence in your Call Center,” was offered in conjunction with Monet Software on Wednesday, May 11, at 2:00 in the afternoon on the East Coast, and 11 in the morning out on the West Coast.
According to Webinar organizers, of all the tough jobs related to managing a call center, one many people don’t think of is “the intricate calculations of proper forecasting,” as well as “the numerous iterations of coming up with the best schedule mix.”
In fact, Webinar organizers say, the hardest part may come “after the schedules are in place -- simply ensuring there is the right number of staff with the right skills in their seats at the right times of the day.”
It’s really a fairly difficult issue, simply covering the basics. Forget advanced tips and tricks for slicing and dicing data, how do you get staff to show up for work on time and stick to their planned break times?
Penny Reynolds, a Founding Partner of The Call Center School where she heads up curriculum development, will present practices on adherence, including such issues as how to quantify the cost and service implications of missing staff, identify ways to communicate and educate staff on the “power of one” in call center staffing, describe options for setting adherence performance goals and selling to the staff and identify the reasons why staff don't adhere to the schedule plan, among others.
Read more here.
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Industry observer Chris Bucholtz recently put together a good list of ten ways cloud computing can help make your business stronger.
And for good measure, he tosses in a pretty good definition of the cloud as it is designed for actual users: “It’s a global, virtualized on-demand computing infrastructure and the software designed to take advantage of it. In many ways it’s like a computing utility; you pay on a monthly basis and for what you use."
Reduction of Up-Front Costs for You and Your Vendors. Unlike on-premise software, the price of deploying CRM, ERP and other applications in the cloud is far less, due to fewer hardware costs and the ability to buy the number of seats you need from month to month.
Universal Access for Remote Employees.
CRM and Biz Software Prospects, Cloud Call Centers and Weather, Cloud Collaboration Tools, Broadview's Stevie Award
May 14, 2011“With a cloud-based call center, your team can bring home a medal no matter what the competition or the weather sends your way,” wrote industry observer Meghdutt Brahmachari on the Contactual blog a while ago.
That’d be good news to the brave folks in Alabama and across the South these days, who are getting some of the worst that weather can send their way.
Maybe your conditions aren’t that extreme -- let’s hope they’re not -- but as he writes, if you manage a call center “you may have experienced changes in weather, seasonality, and the vagaries of the free market.”
In other words, stay in the cloud so you don’t have to worry about what’s in the clouds! (Pause for laughter) Thank you, crickets, for chirping out there, we’re here every Thursday, tip your waitress.
As Brahmachari says, “if you use call center software that resides in the cloud -- a virtual call center,” you’ll have the ability to adapt quickly. This is because virtual call centers give businesses the agility to adjust to changes, of which Brahmachari outlines three:
Read more here.
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“Cloud...” “collaboration...” two buzzwords you hear swirling around in the air. Which naturally raises an important question: What about cloud collaboration? And is there an app for that?
Glad you asked. Yes, in fact, there are quite a number of cloud collaboration apps.
Maximizer CRM Live, Angel IVR Recognized, Knowing Call Center Callers, Free Conference Calls for Charity
May 10, 2011Cloud-based customer relationship management software is an increasingly prominent market, but you didn’t need us to tell you that.
Officials of Maximizer Software recently announced Maximizer CRM Live, which is the on-demand version of its flagship offering with all the expected CRM software functionality, including sales and marketing automation, contact management, and customer support.
The system, the company said, “consolidates all contacts, action items, business communications, forecasts, reports, and results into one central hub.” Through opportunity dashboards, managers can assess their sales team’s performance, while e-mail alerts notify team members of changes to opportunities.”
If you were a fan of the old Maximizer CRM software and worry that the new cloud CRM system isn’t what you know, don’t worry. Company officials say it’s built on the same data model as the company’s on-premises offering. Plus you can migrate from one deployment option to another as need be, according to company officials, “with minimal technical requirements and without any data loss.”
Read more here.
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A tip of the hat to IVR services provider Angel, also a seller of cloud-based customer experience products, whose Angel 4 Customer Experience Platform has been selected as a finalist for the CODiE Awards.
The Angel 4 Customer Experience Platform was nominated in the "Best Cloud Infrastructure" category. The platform incorporates multi-channel/multi-modal forms of customer engagement and communications, which company officials say is intended to help improve levels of enterprise customer self-service and satisfaction.
Enterprise Call Recording, Cloud Computing Simplicity, Cloud Collaboration Apps, Telepresence Keeps Growing
May 6, 2011South Africa’s Electronic Communications and Transactions Act imposes “stringent record-keeping compliance requirements on organizations,” according to industry journal BizCommunity.com, requiring them to keep accurate records of all telephonic and other electronic interactions with consumers for at least three years.
Protecting the rights of consumers is part of the recent legislation, but as the journal says, “simply implementing a call recording system will not provide the optimum compliance with the increased legal requirements either.”
Last fall TMC had the news that Datatec acquired niche software security company Biodata IT SA, which was part of the group's strategy to grow its South African networking, convergence and security distribution business.
"The acquisition comes at a time when we are seeing growing demand among our customers for products that will enable them to meet, reach and exceed their security needs with particular reference to the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act," said Jacques Malherbe, the CEO of Westcon SA.
Matthew Balcomb, director of Majuda Software Southern Africa, an affiliate organization to Majuda Corporation International, which deals in call recording and quality management, said to fulfil the requirements as set out by the laws, “companies will need to do more than simply implement mere policies and procedures. A governance, risk and compliance strategy tightly integrated into the operations and the culture of an organization, is required."
Read more here.
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Of course one of cloud computing’s great selling points is its simplicity -- right? So why is Andre Yee blogging that “there's an issue with the adoption of cloud computing that no one is paying much attention to... until now. It's the issue of complexity.”
“Complexity?” Is this the same cloud lauded to the skies for how simple it makes IT for SMBs? Yes it is, but still, Yee has a point.
Salesforce CRM and Intuit, NetSuite and SFA, Data Centers and Customer Info, Telepresence and Teliris
May 3, 2011Good news, if you were waiting for the highly popular Intuit QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online small business accounting software to integrate smoothly with Salesforce’s small business CRM software editions -- Contact Manager, Group and Professional.
Industry blogger Laurie McCabe posted recently about the fact that not only have Intuit and Salesforce.com partnered to make this particular dream of yours come true, but that as part of the deal Intuit “will resell a pre-integrated version of the Salesforce CRM application via Intuit’s App Center (as well as Intuit channel partners).”
What this means, as McCabe explains, is that data will synchronize across QuickBooks and Salesforce for “a real-time, unified view of the data,” whichever app you happen to be working in at the time.
The Wall Street Journal said that according to Intuit Chief Executive Brad Smith, many small businesses still manage their customer data on paper or in basic spreadsheets: “We know there’s a better solution,” he said.
Read more here.
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Have you checked out NetSuite recently? Or let’s put it this way: How long would it take you to pull up your customer satisfaction or lead conversion numbers? Can you remember which spreadsheets or SFA app it’s on?
With NetSuite all that’s in real time dashboards, reporting and analytics. You can let your sales, marketing and service teams monitor whichever Key Performance Indicators you desire, and access the latest reports every day, if you think that would help your business. Employees can diagnose issues on the fly, drill down visibility to the sales opportunity, customer record, or sales quote detail, and otherwise make your life easier.
About a month ago TMC’s Jamie Epstein wrote that NetSuite increased its efforts to recruit channel partners to resell its on-demand ERP applications, raising the margins and resources it began offering providers last year under its "SP 100" program.
The new NetSuite SuiteStart Service, Epstein explained, includes waivers of first-year $5,000 program enrollment fees, a free license for partners to use NetSuite ERP and CRM applications to run their own business, and more marketing resources such as marketing plan templates and sales leads.
Read more here.
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There are basically two distinct product models in the data center industry, according to a recent Data Center Knowledge article – enterprise class and inexpensive commodity facilities. Today, there are different requirements for building data centers to last the 10 to 15 years that they are designed to live, and the designs need to “be specifically tailored to a business’ current and future needs or they need to have the inherent flexibility to adapt as their needs change,” the article states.
The two models that the data industry revolves around are the enterprise class, which tends to focus on reliability and extended life cycle, “usually at the expense of efficiency,” and inexpensive and quick-to-build commodity facilities, “primarily to meet immediate needs with little understanding or consideration for full life cycle usage.”
“Today, the wholesale data center industry is at a crossroads,” the article states.
Call Center Wallboards, DC-Baltimore Ethernet, KnoahSoft's Harmony Suite, Out-Twittering Twitter
May 1, 2011A recent article in the Baltimore Sun highlighted the growth from the perspective of Georgia-based metro Ethernet provider FiberLight, which late last year promised to unveil a network “that can connect commercial customers in downtown Baltimore and several southern suburbs to points in Washington and Northern Virginia."
It’s "a huge, growing market for us," said Judd Carothers, the company's executive vice president of network operations, engineering and construction.
At the time of the announcement last November, FiberLight officials also said they would spend $20 million to build the network, slated to run 104 miles “from downtown and western parts of Baltimore south through Columbia, Laurel and Greenbelt, where it ties into the company's existing Washington and Northern Virginia telecommunication networks.”
Last month, TMCnet reported that the company completed a new 3.5 mile, 432-count underground network through Miami's Financial District.
Read more here.
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Wallboards. Don’t think about them much, do you? Maybe that’s why you most likely don’t have the one your call center really needs.
Start with LED wallboards. According to a good overview from Call Center Wallboards, displaying key call center statistics and metrics on wallboards is a good way to improve agent and team leader performance.
Why is this so? Because wallboards show the groups what is happening right now in the call center in a reliable and efficient way, according to vendor Spectrum Corp., which sells wallboards with a life expectancy that exceeds 10 years.
Company officials run down some of the benefits of wallboards -- they come in multiple sizes to meet any call center space or use requirements and budget, tricolor LED’s are useful to support threshold and variance alerts, messages can be run on the boards, audible alerts get the attention of the agent and request them to view the wallboards and they can be IP-enabled to connect to the corporate network and avoid costly separate wiring.
Read more here.
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KnoahSoft, a vendor in the contact center industry, is offering a nice feature on their Harmony suite product -- real-time, web-based silent monitoring with screen capture that gives authorized users permission to listen to agent calls as they happen.
Calling it “Silent Monitoring with Screen Capture,” it’s a godsend for supervisors who want to pinpoint any agent trouble spots to take care of customer satisfaction in real time. The feature gives them the ability to stay “involved and in control” with agent interaction from anywhere in the world, which is pretty much what any supervisor would want.
The way KnoahSoft officers explain it, users can listen to live calls in progress via a dynamic web-based interface from anywhere in the world, bring up a real time view of agent information and call status and use it for live monitoring of calls, “with or without screen capture.”
As far as the screen capture feature goes, it’s engineered to let users enhance real time performance assessment capabilities by seeing what the agent sees and what tools they are using to provide services, company officials explain, adding that it also lets users conduct Q & A during live monitoring, deliver real-time feedback and “enhanc training and coaching programs.”
Read more here.
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Those of us who found no real use for Twitter might have another fad to ignore soon.
Call Center Headsets, KnoahSoft's IP Contact Center, Customer Experience Management, Customer Value Webinar
April 26, 2011Ocular Technologies, which sells contact center offerings, has partnered with headset manufacturer Plantronics. Ocular officials say the move is a way to enhance its “competitiveness in the contact center arena by offering a complete unified communication services portfolio and becoming a one-stop shop for customers.”
Duncan Barnes, channel manager at South Africa's reseller of Plantronics products, Headset Solutions, says the company has “always seen Ocular Technologies as a strategic partner in the African contact center environment. With Ocular Technologies extending its specialist skills into the UC market, it allows us to jointly ensure that local customers get the best technology.”
Barnes said having Ocular in their value added reseller (VAR) program “supports Plantronics in its African strategy.”
Early this year Plantronics added new products and services to its unified communications portfolio, TMC’s Sujata Garud reported, adding that the company was “delivering a vision of smarter, more intuitive communications and pioneering the next generation of mobile communications devices and technologies to help people stay connected regardless of location or device.”
Read more here.
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KnoahSoft, as you may know, sells a pretty good product called Harmony 3.0. It helps businesses get formal and informal IP-based contact centers with what company officials describe as “a low-cost, modular web-based” product.
And it’s built for VoIP from the ground up, with all the bells and whistles you’d expect -- call recording, quality and performance management initiatives, it supports the review of calls, e-mails and chat sessions in a PCI-compliant, services-oriented, open reporting framework, advanced reporting and real-time dashboards, all that.
Basically the product’s designed to provides important data collected via recording, surveying and speech analytics to help improve agent performance and quality.
Power Supply a VAR Opportunity, Knowledge Management Fads, Call Distribution Platform, Facebook as Debt Collector
April 22, 2011Recently, Business Solutions Editor Gennifer Biggs had the chance to sit down with Minuteman's Bill Allen to discuss the VAR opportunity “tied to uninterrupted power supply (UPS) and extended run time if your customers have low-tolerance about network security, physical security, and disaster recovery.”
Minuteman UPS/Para Systems, a leader in power protection technologies, offers UPSs for computers, servers, peripherals, voice and data communication systems, security systems and other mission-critical equipment.
During the interview, Biggs asked Allen about growth opportunities in the power protection industry.
“For the reseller community, there have always been opportunities in the IT sector for extended run time,” Allen said. This is because there’s certainly the need to keep network systems up and running for longer than 10 or 15 minutes, which as Allen said “is the standard UPS backup time.”
Telecoms have traditionally been another sweet spot for the UPS extended run time value proposition. As Allen explained, “it’s very important to keep the phones up and running.”
Read more here.
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Here’s one thing we don’t have to tell you: Management love fads. Love, love, love ‘em.
Online Collaboration Tools, Call Center Off-shoring Study, Call Center Economics, New Call Center Outsourcing Destination
April 19, 2011Industry observer Laura S. Quinn has produced a useful, quick and easy reference tool for companies looking for collaboration software tools.
Writing in an industry journal targeted to nonprofits, her advice applies to any enterprise, especially her observation that “these options are all different from each other, but each has notable strengths and weaknesses when it comes to supporting collaboration. For example, simple tools may not provide all the features you’d like, but more complex ones will require setup time and training that may not make sense for your group.”
As she writes, there are tools for informal conversations and presentations -- and she gives options for conference calls, video conferencing and online conferencing, but it wouldn’t be difficult for you to locate some yourself.
For information sharing she mentions such fairly common and easy options as e-mail discussion lists, social networking sites -- although it’s a good idea to be careful how much you require your employees to be on Facebook while at work -- collaborative documents and a message board.
Read more here.
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According to a recent study by Frost & Sullivan, the Asia Pacific “continued to be a high-growth region for the contact center industry even during the global economic slowdown.”
Some effects of the slowdown started receding in 2010. As that happened, the study says, spending on customer service resumed among enterprises to meet the rising customer demand -- “the region recorded a 8.5 per cent growth in contact center agent seats, and by 2017, it is expected to have grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5 per cent.”
And as can be predicted, the economic downturn led to more of a concern for cost efficiency.
