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. “When you’re looking at these folks, it’s important to consider” these things.
McFadden highlighted some of the advantages of cloud contact centers, such as limited in-house IT needs, allowing your company more of a focus on its core competencies, quicker deployments for seasonal needs and of course, the significantly lower initial investment.
Read more here.
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“The most effective sales techniques go beyond the selling process itself.” That’s according to an interesting post on the Soffront blog, noting that it’s “the small, but critical details that take the sales experience from good to great in the customer’s eyes.”
Soffront runs down nine areas you can use to shine in customers’ eyes:
Prospecting skills. Exceptional salespeople genuinely love selling and understand that prospecting is a key component of the selling process.
Product knowledge. Think this is just common sense? You’d be shocked how much many otherwise good salespeople rely on pre-sales engineers or scripts or fact sheets. Think outside the box, and take it upon yourself to learn the product.
Honesty and integrity. Consumers value transparency, so honesty and integrity rank highly in the list of desired sales traits. Customers can usually tell when a salesperson is being dishonest or shady.
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You want to know what Salesforce.com’s doing about social media as it relates to CRM, and you’ve heard they have this thing called Chatter, what’s up with that? Industry observer Maria Verlengia has a long portrait of CRM as social media company, the whole long study is well worth a read when you have the time.
In brief, she says that the thinking at Salesforce.com is summed up well by Fergus Griffin, vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com, who notes that, in Verlengia’s words, “Social CRM can improve customer service by turning problems and issues into success stories, and allow customer service to become more integrated with the sales and marketing process.”
Scott Holden, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce.com, told her that with social media, "It's more transparent. We're creating a transparent world." The new customer experience is "all public."
So companies have to treat customers differently, and among other shifts, the use of mobile devices is also having a big impact -- “they can share bad experiences more quickly,” Griffin warned.
Read more here.
]]>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. On-premise software isn’t great for people working remotely or from home. In order to allow these remote workers to access the applications, you have to manage dial-in systems, security, VPNs and the other technical requirements of connecting outside of the Internet.
Read more here.
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If you’re interested in providing good customer service, you know the importance of knowledge of a caller and caller attributes. If you don’t, well, you may have just discovered the reason your customer service isn’t as successful as you might wish it were.
You’re welcome.
Knowing who your caller is, either by name or by attribute, leads to action based on that intelligence. This is the foundation of personalized call handling, according to a treatment of the subject posted on VoltDelta’s site.
The benefits of this, of course, are that more rapid call handling combined with a superior contact experience is likely to result, as the agent is rendered much more capable of resolving a call when they don’t have to ask callers all those questions we all dislike so much -- “Can you give me your account number again, even though you’ve entered it in the IVR twice already....”
VoltDelta’s LSSiDATA business unit, in fact, is focused on just this problem. Their focus is aggregating and updating caller data on a daily basis.
Read more here.
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. Information Week has a good list. Let’s run down a few:
Basecamp. By 37signals. It’s a bare bones Web site, but the client list isn’t, with the likes of National Geographic, Patagonia, Warner Bros. and Fox Sports using its project collaboration tool. Basecamp has about five million other users, supports multiple languages and was also designed for mobile devices such as iPhones and Android smartphones. Available with a free 30-day trial option, 37signals sells Basecamp under three plans: Plus for $49; premium for $99, and max for $149.
OfficeMedium. Based on Drupal CMS open source software, it’s aimed at giving small businesses a tool to collaborate and manage projects “without spending unnecessary resources buying and managing proprietary software,” since it’s well-known how much small businesses hate doing that sort of thing. The product has contact management, events, tasks, calendars; file sharing and client integration for about six bucks per month per user, and a $1 per gigabyte fee.
Read more here.
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Broadview Networks, a network-based business communications and cloud services provider, has won a Stevie Award in the “Innovation in Customer Service” category for its eCare Enterprise. Broadview’s eCare Enterprise is the company’s proprietary customer self-service web portal and mobile application.
The award was presented at the fifth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, an event which we might note we didn’t attend, although our dinner jacket and black tie were pressed and ready to go.
The Stevies are an annual recognition for excellence in business presented by the American Business Awards. Trophies were presented to honorees during a gala banquet at the Eden Roc Renaissance Hotel in Miami Beach, and we hear it was nice.
Last month TMC’s Rajani Baburajan wrote that Broadview Networks, a provider of business VoIP service, announced the launch of its OfficeSuite Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and Recording for small and medium business customers.
At the Stevies this year, “there were 25 categories for customer service professionals, including Contact Center of the Year, Innovation in Customer Service, and Customer Service Department of the Year, as well as 40 categories for sales professionals, ranging from Global Sales Leader of the Year to Sales Training Program of the Year to Sales Department of the Yea,” Broadview officials said.
Read more here.
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Some major U.S. business software firms are expecting to get a boost in sales and profits from a predicted broad increase in technology spending, including business software -- which will cut across nearly all geographies and verticals, according to Dow Jones’s John Kell.
Some business software vendors are seeing it already, according to an analysis Kell published recently. He names Oracle and “smaller players” in the business software market, including Tibco and Progress Software, who have posted higher sales and margins in their latest quarters.
But there are other business software vendors who should get a nice slice of the broad-based tech spend, as Kell describes. International Business Machines. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected a profit of $2.30 a share on revenue of $24.01 billion, up from income of $1.97 a share and revenue of $22.86 billion last year.
Kell notes that “IBM has benefited from heavy investments in emerging countries, as well as growth areas, such as business analytics and cloud computing.” Just last month the company said its long-term roadmap “helped it report record results,” Kell said.
Read more here.
]]>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. It uses Angel's Caller First strategy to help companies deliver customer service.
A couple months ago, TMCnet reported that Metaverse Mod Squad selected the company's Angel 4 Customer Experience Platform solution to enhance its customer support offering with inbound telephone support capabilities.
Metaverse Mod Squad provides professional services to online communities and game services. Angel 4 allows end users of Metaverse Mod Squad clients' games and properties to access automated systems to route and resolve their problems.
Read more here.
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Here’s a question you probably spend less time thinking about than you should: “At the moment of live interaction, whether handling inbound or outbound calls, does your call center agent know who they are talking to?”
Stop and think about that one for a minute. Why does it matter? Imagine what products they might be interested in, what cross sells or upsells they may be open to and what might be their potential lifetime value to the organization.
Such issues were the focus of a recent highly useful Webinar, titled “Who’s on the Line: Identify and Value Prospects and Customers.” The Webinar discussed how to identify and qualify the customer or prospect on other side of the phone can transform your call center; helping drive conversion, improve operational efficiencies, and increasing revenue.
Presenting was Dorean Kass, director of consumer facing markets, TARGUSinfo, a key industry voice and advocate for the use of on-demand intelligence about consumers and businesses.
Kass said the key question today, the one to answer first, is “If you knew more information about your callers, in real time and during that moment of interaction, what might you do differently?”
The presentation covered how to understand who’s calling and instantly identify high-value prospects, improve operational effectiveness by moving high-value prospects to the top of the call queue and route them to most appropriate agent, boost order values by instantly pinpointing the most compelling cross-sell and upsell offers and automatically re-engage non-converting callers while their interest is still high.
Read more here.
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Child Rights and You is a non-profit organization working with 200-plus grassroots organizations in India, “addressing the root causes that keep children hungry, illiterate, exploited and abused,” according to CRY officials.
The organization needed a suitable telecommunication conferencing partner in India, and thus selected conference call solutions provider Eagle Conferencing, driven in part by “Eagle’s offer for free services to avoid their capital and operating costs, network reliability, and an enormous infrastructure capacity of 19 billion minutes of annual global conferencing bridge,” according to CRY officials.
CR officials prioritize “constant and instantaneous communications,” as they invest significant human and financial resources to manage many programs across India. “Group communication among employees is largely restricted to e-mail and online chat as these are cost-effective channels,” CRY officials note, adding that while telephone and face-to-face meetings are also used, “traditionally these are not preferred options as the costs are phenomenally higher.”
So Eagle Conferencing’s team analyzed CRY’s needs from business productivity point of view, and offered its flagship audio conferencing services free of charge to CRY, as well as conferencing support tools to expand their conferencing usage.
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. “Could it be,” as he says, “that much of the problem with cloud computing adoption has to do with the fact that it's still too difficult and inaccessible to the average developer?”
There you go. Didn’t think of that one, did you? He mentions an Information Week article where Charles Babcock talks about an event at CloudConnect 2011 where Jinesh Varia, technical evangelist for Amazon EC2, “had problems guiding the audience through a hands-on session on how to deploy code on the cloud.”
And it wasn’t just a bollixed demo, heaven knows that’s happened to us all enough times: “When asked, no more than 10 percent of the crowd had previously deployed on EC2 successfully.” And as Babcock says in the article, “That untouched-by-cloud portion of the IT profession may be larger than many believe, given the trendiness of the term ‘cloud’ combined with the looseness of its definition.”
Read more here.
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Looking for cloud collaboration software apps? You’re in luck -- we’ve got quick rundowns for some of your top options condensed from the longer reviews available at Information Week.
Microsoft SharePoint Online. You might have heard of the vendor here, they have a bit of a track record. The app can be deployed either on-site or in the cloud, is available bundled with Microsoft's business productivity suite, online standard suite, or as a standalone offering for about $5.25 per user, with a 30-day free trial. It’s part of Microsoft's Office 365, and includes a portal, collaboration and social computing, content management, and search.
The Jive Engage Platform. This app melds together collaboration, community, and social media monitoring software, providing customers with blogs, tags, videos, social bookmarks, collaborative documents, polls, profiles, and status updates. It also provides social media monitoring, mobile applications, community analytics, and integration with legacy systems, and works on desktops and mobile devices including the iPhone and BlackBerry.
Google Groups for Business. As easy to use as the rest of the Google universe, the app gives users access to email, documents, folders, calendar, and videos. But unlike the free standard edition of Google Apps, Groups for Business costs about $50 per user per year, and may include a set-up fee. But companies can disable ads in the Web interface; Google offers a free trial.
Read more here.
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Annual enterprise video conferencing and telepresence system revenue growth is clipping along at a healthy rate, according to a recent study from Infonetics Research.
It grew 18 percent in 2010 to $2.2 billion, and should more than double by 2015, hitting $5 billion.
Growth is great, but BrightCom CEO Bob McCandless wonders how the technology itself is actually progressing, remarking recently that today's video conferencing and telepresence industry “has not moved far beyond the original technology of the original video technologies” in the early 1990s.
“Apple CU-Seeme, AT&T's videophone and the CAL-Tech CERN project were among the first real video conferencing systems that introduced people to live video communication,” states Mr. McCandless. “As an emerging technology, they set the standards for the majority of what the industry uses today.”
One of the dangers of perpetuating technology, McCandless said, “is that we do not move forward. We continue to use standards like H.323 or MCU based systems long after the industry probably should have moved on to something else. Imagine the consequences if we were still on the path of only using the same gasoline engines that were first made for automobiles.
Read more here.
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. “It can either continue to produce quite unremarkable accelerated obsolescence-inspired designs that box in customers or they can give the enterprise what it wants: Industrial-strength innovation around scalability, efficiency and flexibility.”
The article adds that seven-year old data centers are “obsolete and that some users’ needs will grow beyond their data center’s capabilities in as little as two to three years.
Read more here.
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Telepresence vendor Teliris has partnered with FuzeBox, which sells visual and mobile collaboration applications, to integrate FuzeBox's online meeting tools in Teliris-Telepresence environments.
Jeff Cavins, CEO of FuzeBox, said "Together, these market-leading technologies will revolutionize the way people meet over distance."
Teliris officials say this will let users collaborate remotely and more effectively. The company has certified Fuze Meeting for use with Teliris' telepresence offerings -- in fact, they’re Teliris's only collaboration partner.
Fuze Meeting's collaboration suite will extend to the computer desktop, iPad, iPhone, Android tablet or Android phone. The two companies will jointly develop telepresence-specific collaboration tools incorporating the Teliris Research Labs roadmap with FuzeBox's web-based tools for “a lifelike meeting environment,” using SVC-based video.
About a month ago TMC’s Trupti Kamath wrote that Teliris announced that NYSE Euronext, the operator of financial markets and vendor of trading technologies, selected some Teliris products throughout the company's global operations to facilitate face-to-face visual collaboration.
Read more here.
]]>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. According to CNN, UberMedia, “which owns several popular applications that interface with Twitter, is outlining plans to build a social network that could compete with that popular microblogging platform, said three people who were briefed on the plans.”
Evidently they see their opportunity in Twitter’s message length restrictions and the fact that it’s apparently “confusing” to newbies. Friends, if you can’t figure out Twitter, social media may not be for you.
UberMedia certainly has the experience and the chops, they own UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd, apps that “connect to Twitter and offer features beyond Twitter's own software,” as CNN says.
“Twitter competitors such as FriendFeed or Google Buzz have failed to catch on with mainstream users -- although some, like Tumblr, are growing,” CNN reports. Studies also show that relatively few of Twitter’s 200 million accounts are actually used on any regular basis.
Technolog reported recently that “Our source's API data shows that there are 56 million accounts on Twitter following 8 or more accounts. There are only 38 million following 16, and just 12 million following 64.” Compare that with the fact that out of the 600 million Facebook accounts, about 300 million are on the site more or less every day.
Read more here.
]]>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. Supervisors can use it to support agents through messaging, monitoring, e-learning and coaching modules.
And given how key analytics are, all the Harmony Editions can be enhanced with speech analytics. Company officials say the Harmony Speech Analyzer, powered by Aurix, “enables call center supervisors and management to perform precision monitoring on keywords or phrases, using the smart Phonetic based search.”
Read more here.
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A recent webinar still available for listening, “Cohesive Customer Experience Management: Strategies and Plans for Success,” focused on how organizations can marshal their resources for a cohesive customer experience management (CEM) process, including successful strategies, a cross-organizational blueprint and key elements for a successful start.
Presenting was Sid Bannerjee a Greater Washington Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in IT services, The CEO and Co-Founder of Clarabridge, Bannerjee is a well-known expert in customer experience, business intelligence, and text mining.
Also presenting was Chris Zinner, an executive in Accenture’s Management Consulting Practice and leads Accenture’s efforts in developing thought leadership on how organizations apply Social Media in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) efforts.
And presenting was Paul Hagen, who returned to Forrester after eight years of running his own consulting business, which provided business, marketing, environmental sustainability, and technology planning services to executives at a broad range of organizations.
Read more here.
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A webinar scheduled for April 14, “Who’s on the Line : Identify and Value Prospects and Customers,” will deal with how identifying and qualifying the customer or prospect on the other side of the phone can transform your call center, helping drive conversion, improve operational efficiencies, and increase revenue.
Do those sound like things you could use in your call center? We thought so.
Here’s something to think about: “At the moment of live interaction, whether handling inbound or outbound calls, does your call center agent know who they are talking to? What products they might be interested in? What cross sells or upsells they may be open to? What is their potential lifetime value to the organization? How to re-engage a non-converting caller?”
If you can’t answer “yes” confidently to all those questions, then this might be one of the more valuable webinars you’ll attend.
It’ll deal with such issues as how to understand who’s calling and instantly identify high-value prospects, improve operational effectiveness by moving high-value prospects to the top of the call queue and the right agent, and how to boost order values by instantly pinpointing the most compelling cross-sell and upsell offers.
Presenting will be Ken Dawson from InfoCision Management Corporation, who will share case studies of companies using real-time identification and scoring through InfoCision’s capabilities.
Read more here.
]]>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. Try this, do that, here’s the newest things, we’re retooling everything based on this article I skimmed on the flight over from San Antonio, I expect complete buy-in and everybody on board.
Or even worse: “Hey everybody, this is I.M. Smart, a consultant who’s got a great idea...”
Does knowledge management have its share of less-than-stellar fads? Uh, yes. That’s according to T.D Wilson from Sheffield University, who sniffs at knowledge management as one big fad “pushed by certain consultancy companies,” according to the Chartered Management Institute. He confidently asserted that KM would fade, along with other fads.
One thing: He said that in 2002. And here we are today in 2011, talking about KM, the $72 billion-in-America-alone industry. Maybe a paper published last year by Harvard University “on the issue of turning corporate knowledge into better team performance,” as CMI says, might be of more interest.
Read more here.
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Broadview Networks, which sells network-based business communications, has released its OfficeSuite Automatic Call Distribution and Recording platform.
It’s targeted to the small and midsize businesses market, and it’s a hosted application integrated with OfficeSuite, the vendor’s hosted IP phone. So if you were looking to stay hosted, you might want to check it out.
The platform has all the call center functionality SMB customers would want -- advanced call routing, queuing, call recording, out-of-the-box reporting, dashboard functionality, customized hold treatments, routing options that factor-in call agents’ skills, location, experience or other parameters, all the expected features.
Still, education is necessary for some: “Many SMB customers don’t think in terms of traditional ACD functionality even though they use it in their everyday business,” said Jeff Blackey, senior vice president of marketing for Broadview Networks.
Read more here.
...
Here’s a story you’re going to post on your Facebook page, as we just did: Be careful of unwittingly friending a debt collector.
According to Portland, Ore.’s KATU News, social media gives debt collectors a whole new way to catch scofflaws. KATU spoke with Tim Mabry, who owns a debt collection agency.
Mabry loves Facebook. He told KATU that he gets told oh, I don’t have the money to repay them now, I really don’t, but “you go on their Facebook page and [they’re] standing out in front of the pickup with big tires and fancy wheels -- you have to be careful.”
According to a recent item on FoxBusiness, a St. Petersburg, Fla. judge recently ordered a debt collection agency to “stop contacting one debtor’s friends and family on Facebook” in an attempt to find a woman who owed $362 on an unpaid car loan.
Personal finance consultant Gerri Detweiler of Credit.com told FoxBusiness that using Facebook “is legal when trying to locate a debtor,” adding that they can’t just use any means they want. “They have to follow the law— it's not necessarily that they can’t use Facebook to find more information about a debtor. For consumers, if you owe debt, be well aware that anything you post online is fair game for a collector.”
Read more here.
]]>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. This worked to the region’s advantage, since the Asia Pacific is regarded as a low-cost provider, one aspect of its status as “the offshoring destination of choice among service providers.”
Alternative models such as the hosted contact center service also experienced higher uptake with the pay-per-use model emerging an attractive cost-cutting measure.
Obviously the heavyweights are India and the Philippines, with Malaysia and China coming on fast. Competition is increasing among other Asian countries jockeying for a niche with the strategy of pursuing “knowledge-intensive business processes that require significant domain expertise, rather than simply relying on their success in the voice segment,” according to the report.
Read more here.
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A good white paper, “The Cost Efficiency of Cloud: How IP/MPLS Redefines the Economics of Contact Technology in the Call Center,” produced by LiveVox, does a good job discussing what it sees as “a significant trend in networking and telephony... set to radically alter the economics of call center technology in favor of the buyer and lead to broader adoption of cloud contact tools in 2011.”
Sound like good news? Sure does to us.
These days carriers are actively selling IP/MPLS as a way to transport voice and data. That’s a switch -- even a couple of years ago, many were lukewarm at best to VoIP. But if contact centers all use MPLS, it would make it easier to tie them together in the cloud, of course. Having to upgrade their IP-PBX used to be the standard excuse why this couldn’t be done, but that’s not really the case anymore.
As the paper explains clearly, contact centers and telecom carriers are moving to IP infrastructure and embracing Multi-Layer Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) to transport voice and data. And since MPLS gives call centers a much more cost-efficient way to contact customers, launching calls via MPLS is less expensive than through the Public Switch Telephone Network and just as secure and reliable.
Hey we understand how it used to be -- site-based switching, protocol conversion and application integration made the WAN requirement all kinds of hassle, there weren’t any real standards carriers and IP-PBX vendors all agreed on, and yeah, hybrid and custom VoIP network configurations are expensive, slow, complicated and did we say expensive? That too.
Read more here.
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Quick -- what contact center outsourcing market, valued at $184.5 million in 2009 and expanding in 2010, according to a recent Frost & Sullivan study, “has been recovering recently thanks to rising interest in broadband service?”
India? The Philippines? South Africa? Strike three. Try Russia.
That’s right. As the Frost & Sullivan study points out, “fewer budget constraints have allowed for greater spending on customer care outsourcing.”
Iwona Petruczynik, Research Analyst for Frost & Sullivan ICT group and author of the Contact Center Outsourcing Market in Russia analysis, says there is “an increasing trend toward the use and deployment of interactive voice response and automated service technologies. It has proven to be an effective way to reduce cost and enable outsourcing companies to provide more services with the same number of agents."
The study offers a caveat: It appears IVR adoption “has not been as rapid as industry predictions of just a few years ago” would have it. In fact, “consumers appear apprehensive about automation and prefer to interact with live agents.” IVR is more accepted among younger and more technologically savvy consumers.
Read more here.
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We -- and Monet Software -- are here to help:
Consider setup and implementation. The cloud gives fast set up, as the vendor creates the new account and you simply access the product through a web browser. On-premise installations take time and configuration hassle -- both hardware and software.
If you’re into that kind of thing, or if you have the sort of geeks in your office who get their kicks installing new software, who come in on weekends just to get up to their elbows in new product installations, well, you’re golden with on-premise. Of course you still have to worry about your own upgrades, whereas with cloud software you’re paying someone else to worry about all that.
Now consider the upfront investment. With the cloud there’s hardly any upfront investment for software or hardware, but there is a subscription fee, which typically includes support, maintenance and upgrades, your mileage may vary, so check the fine print and ask a lot of nosy questions.
Read more here.
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Unitus Community Credit Union has selected the Interactive Intelligence IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center for use throughout its organization, replacing an Avaya system.
Unitus officials say the move is part of an effort to “improve its member services by offering contact via email and Web chat, and by adding new functionality such as speech-enhanced interactive voice response and skills-based routing.”
Unitus’s project manager, Leah Keeler, said with the CIC system the credit union “will now be able to do things like match caller ID with the associated account information so members are automatically routed to the most appropriate agent.”
The credit union’s CIO, Brian Irvine, noted CIC’s Windows-based architecture allows them to “manage the system in-house.” The deployment is slated to eventually support the entire Unitus workforce located across its eight branch offices throughout Oregon and Washington.
Read more here.
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Hey, we all like success stories; and IVR solutions provider Angel definitely has one you can learn something from.
The company has worked with some pretty big global pharmaceuticals. And they’ve learned the general corporate culture. “When it comes to many technologies, pharmaceuticals can be slow to change, often times for regulatory or other pressing reasons,” Angel officials said in a blog, adding that this “go it slow” attitude extends to their IVR: “It becomes a major technological and regulatory undertaking to overhaul the IVR systems of a pharmaceutical company.”
A year and a half ago, Angel was selected to assist with an IVR overhaul for “49 brands of one pharmaceutical,” according to company officials, who said that prior to contracting with Angel, this pharma had “significant complexities, such as IVRs connecting to other IVR’s, IVRs connecting to call centers, a jumble of different IVR vendors, drastically different voice talents and IVRs interacting with multiple data sources.”
So you can see the urgency. Needless to say, this wasn’t doing great things for the pharma’s customer satisfaction numbers. As would be expected in such a confused situation, this led to high caller frustration “since the IVRs weren’t talking to each other, nor were they pushing data to the call center representative, who had to ask the caller to repeat information previously provided sometime earlier in the IVR.”
Read more here.
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Industry journal On Hold Messaging Direct has a good blog post telling you how to write a good script for your on hold message.
FADE IN to a rainy street in a foreign capital at night. The HERO runs along the sidewalk, nervously looking over his shoulder. Suddenly from a parked 1965 Aston Martin, a shot... huh? Oh, sorry, wrong script.
First off, why is the script such a big deal? Isn’t “Hi, thanks for calling, sorry, all available operators are busy, your call will be answered as soon as we can get to it” good enough?
Hardly. As blogger Lee points out, “This may be the only opportunity you have to do business with them so you can’t afford to get their on hold experience wrong... the on hold messages and background music need to engage the caller, to defuse potential frustration.”
Distilling Lee’s good advice into the essentials then:
Tell the caller where they are and thank them for calling. “Thank you for calling Acme Anvils, Mr. Coyote will be with you as soon as possible.”
Read more here.
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But on a more depressing note, the same study also found that 30 percent of the contact centers surveyed do not have a reliable method of measuring customer satisfaction. That’s right -- one in three contact centers don’t bother to measure their customer satisfaction.
The poll of senior contact center decision makers by ProtoCall One, a contact center consultancy and systems integrator, shows that contact centers are slowly -- oh so slowly, as in glacially -- moving away from operational-based metrics to customer-centric metrics, but still don’t give a whole lot of priority to customer satisfaction data. Rapid call turnover is still king.
Call volume metrics aren’t going anywhere -- nearly all (95 percent) of the respondents use such call volume metrics as call abandon rate, average speed of answer and average call length to measure agent performance, as if those somehow translate into more or less satisfied customers. Workforce metrics are still used widely, the survey found schedule adherence is used by 64 percent of respondents.
Read more here.
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KnoahSoft has introduced their Harmony Suite, Contact Center Edition, billed by company officials as a modular, Web-based tool for IP-based contact centers, “built for VoIP from the ground up.”
It does all the basic things you’d expect a good product to do, supporting call recording, quality and performance management needs and initiatives, but company officials are marketing it as a way to help “build a collaborative work environment by giving all contact center constituencies – executives, managers, supervisors, QA specialists, coaches and agents – the information they need to do their jobs.”
For instance, it has tools to give a total view of the contact center, with the “Evaluate” and “Analyze” modules, giving customers “not only a workflow-enabled quality assurance evaluation environment, but tools to create customizable, role-based scorecards and dashboards to measure the performance of all agents, queues, teams, groups, sites and lines of business supported by the contact center,” as company officials put it.
The “Evaluate,” basically the quality management module, has multi-channel recording and archiving capabilities to let users evaluate voice and support transactions, such as chat and email. It has a conversation graph to flag problematic calls -- elevated lines in the graph may indicate elevated voices, among other indicators.
Read more here.
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How to make sense of the facial-recognition app Google’s working on? According to CNN, it could tie in to social networking pots Google has boiling after a few signal failures in that area –Orkut anyone? Buzz?
They’re still trying, though: “This month, Google redesigned its Profiles pages in a change that more closely resembles Facebook's site. On Wednesday the company announced a new social-search tool, called +1, that allows people to share helpful search links with their friends.”
And now this. As CNN says, “Google plans to introduce a mobile application that would allow users to snap pictures of people's faces in order to access their personal information.”
No drive-bys, though: “In order to be identified by the software, people would have to check a box agreeing to give Google permission to access their pictures and profile information, said Hartmut Neven, the Google engineering director for image-recognition development.”
Right. And as we all know, such impenetrable firewalls have never been breached. It would certainly be beyond the capabilities of any 19-year old to snap a picture of a pretty girl in a bar, hack into a database, find out her info and stalk her.
Read more here.
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At the recently-concluded ITEXPO 2011 East in Miami, TMC’s Erik Linask had an opportunity to interview Spiceworks’ IT Marketing Manager, Nicole Tanzillo.
The company is based in Austin, and was founded with the idea of looking for a way to help IT pros do their jobs better, Tanzillo said, adding that the focus was “those guys, maybe there’s one or two of them in a small business, they’re isolated,” but they’re the ones who have to handle all the IT issues for the business – the printers, e-mail questions, the server, networking, everything.
Traditionally those guys don’t have a whole lot of support in their job, as Tanzillo said, and had to use different tools. So Spiceworks created a single application to help them “do everything IT.”
It covers many of the common IT functions, such as network management, inventory, help desk and ticketing, and probably most importantly, “a discussion forum, where this organic thing happened, users could get together and share best practices in a way they couldn’t before.”
That part of Spiceworks has “exploded,” Tanzillo said. “We now have 1.3 million users, interacting, sharing best practices, and it’s all for free. They pay zero dollars for the community discussions or any of the products.”
Read more here.
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Some of the issue facing the IT industry right now, as far as Eaton, in the power management products and services sector is concerned, are budget strains when implementing capital-intensive projects. “We are in a business where we provide power quality products, a capital buy,” he said, adding that from their perspective, they’re seeing a real push to high-value implementations.
Which probably isn’t so different from most other times –many of which Eaton has seen, the company was founded in 1911, happy centennial this year, guys – but as he says, getting the most for the money and driving energy efficiency are prime concerns now, as is lowering cost of ownership and complying with energy efficiency programs being pushed through organizations.
There is also a need for companies to have a unified power strategy, he said, instead of just focusing on the hardware. Eaton itself is seeing a lot of interest in their scalable architectures, being able to scale for growth. “Those products were developed in concert with the engineers working with the early adopters, the early manufacturers like the HPs and IBMs. It’s modular, and that’s very much a hot product, both here in the United States and in our international markets.”
Read more here.
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At the recently-concluded ITEXPO 2011 East in Miami, TMC’s Steve Vonder Haar had the chance to interview Netbriefings’ President and CEO, Gary Anderson, for another installment of the Business Video Executive Briefings series.
In Miami for the business video conference, Anderson said “in a nutshell, we’re a video messaging company.” That means they focus on sales and marketing messaging, video analytics, tracking, and using video to “get connected and streamline the pipeline.”
It’s useful technology for cutting down on the time and expense of travel for face to face meetings, too, as long as the technology, in Anderson’s words, allows people to “be very engaging online.” After all, there is a reason for the face to face meeting.
Speaking of their usage of their product Proclaim, Anderson said if you’re at the show and down in one of the booths and you get cards from important people, “you might send them a Proclaim message on Monday saying thank you, and adding some questions, that would be one use.”
Read more here.
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The headline says it all: “Confused about the legality behind call recording?” If you’re the least bit confused you should probably read on.
A recent post on the United Kingdom’s Elitetlele.com blog with just that headline is a good primer on the subject from a British perspective.
According to the industry pros at Elitetele.com, you aren’t playing Orwell’s Big Brother by recording calls, so set your mind at ease about that.
Still, as the blog post says, “many ask whether the customer’s consent is needed to record phone calls, but the truth of the matter is – call logging is a wonderful tool that truly allows you to not only offers subsequent legal immunity, but also helps deliver top-rate customer service.”
So there’s your twofer -- you get some legal backup, and the customer gets better service. What’s not to like? Remember, you’re not Big Brother, we’ve already dealt with that one. “Calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes,” and all that.
Read more here.
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A recent product release from OrecX -- “The Open Source Recording Company” -- is being marketed as a way to handle your call recording and HIPAA compliance needs.
First, a little background: “When it passed into law in 1996, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) created a profound impact on how healthcare providers in the United States conducted business,” company officials say, quite correctly, as the act both “protects workers’ insurance coverage options when they change or lose their job” and “creates and defines numerous new regulations and processes relating to patients’ healthcare information and” -- listen up now, here comes the important part -- “provides civil and criminal penalties for failing to adequately protect it.”
Do we have your attention now? Good.
OrecX officials provide a handy listing of the HIPAA requirements and how their offering fulfills that need for your company. So for example, where the law requires that “Procedures must identify employees or classes of employees who will have access to protected information.”
Access must be restricted only to those employees who need the information to complete their job functions,” OrecX offers “built-in access controls easily configured to restrict access to only those individuals who are authorized to access voice files. Access sharing can be restricted to specific employees or groups.”
Read more here.
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You recognize the scenario, of course. Given that you'd really like to front-end your Web application, as Gibbs says, so ‘speak to a representative’ isn’t such an immediate option. “Where do you start?”
Oh, and there’s a catch: This is the real world, so bear in mind “the expense of undertaking a serious development project because of the cost and time involved,” Gibbs says. So now where do you start?
As Gibbs says, “Why not bolt an online telephony service onto your Web application?”
Read more here.
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Britain has just witnessed the launch of what its developers are saying is the country’s first hosted business software “designed specifically for small to medium sized enterprises.”
That’s Cocentric, developed by Cheshire based Triangle Software, which says the release has “sparked a wave of interest from entrepreneurs around the U.K. and further afield... Business owners from towns and cities across the country, one from South Africa and several from the USA are now trialing Cocentric.”
Trial versions of Cocentric are “regularly downloaded” from the company’s site, by “businesses across the country,” company officials noted.
We’re not sure what exactly would differentiate a specifically British method of hosting business software, the beauty of the business model is that it’s almost instantly applicable anywhere, maybe it has auto-reminders for David Beckham’s birthday, but if it’s introducing the U.K. market to the benefits of the technology, then well done, lads, down to the pub for a pint.
Read more here.
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That’s from Floodlight, which says yeah, polls “in their most basic form are the sample polls. Because they’re about facts and not opinions, these kinds of polls are pretty basic.”
You know these kinds of polls, odds are good you’ve been contacted for one -- “Hi, we’re doing a survey, are you a registered voter? If the election were held tomorrow, would you vote for Candidate A or Candidate B?”
Such polls’ accuracy and usefulness depends largely on “the scientific method behind the selection of the people polled,” what kind of a representation the pollster included, for its value. Polling 500 college students on whether the government should hand out free beer will get you a different result than polling 500 retirement home residents.
Read more here.
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It’s always good to be in the Top 100 of anything. That’s where KMWorld put RightAnswers. The industry journal serving the Knowledge Management space recognized RightAnswers as one of “100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management” recently.
“I like the space we are in,” said the RightAnswers blogger in response to the honor. “It is squarely focused on providing organizations that specialize in supporting fellow employees, students, and customers with a knowledge platform solving the issues of today and just as important, addressing the challenges of tomorrow.”
TMC’s Juliana Kenny wrote that Hugh McKellar, editor-in-chief at KMWorld, said “RightAnswers’ inclusion on KMWorld’s 2011 list is based on the breadth and impact of its innovations to meet specific customer needs while adding true value to its entire chain of constituencies. The firms on this list are true solution providers that are dedicated to understanding what their customers need.”
Read more here.
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Transera Communications has formed a partnership with NICE Systems, which sells products to help analyze business transactions. The intent of the partnership, according to Transera officials, is to “allow for the integration of Transera's Scorecard Routing with NICE's Real-time Process Optimization and cross-channel Interaction Analytics.”
Prem Uppaluru, CEO of Transera, said “contact centers need real-time insight to have the maximum impact. We will be able to infuse contact centers with even more relevant insights that help drive revenue from their customer interactions."
The deal specifies that Transera will resell NICE contact centers as SaaS offerings.
In other words, they want to produce something to let contact centers identify customers by their intent and value, and then connect them to agents with matching skills, using real-time customer classification and agent performance information.
The overall strategy, then, is to combine NICE's Real-time Process Optimization and Interaction Analytics with Transera's Scorecard Routing, with the result that a customer's profile will be evaluated with information taken from public and private databases and previous interactions, upon which a “suitable” agent will be chosen for that customer.
Read more here.
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Two CRM (customer relationship management) software providers who work with the charity sector are partnering with other companies for the purpose of improving and expanding their services to users, according to officials of both firms, Blackbaud and IRIS NFP Solutions.
Blackbaud officials say the company has linked up with O-Matic Software to offer a plug-in which “expands the importing capabilities of its fundraising platform The Raiser’s Edge.”
In addition to having one of the zingier names, Raiser’s Edge is a widely-used package for UK charities, commanding 16 percent of the market, according to the Civil Society’s Charity CRM Survey 2010. Raiser’s Edge officials say it will be the first product to market the Import-O-Matic tool to its users.
What that plug-in does is streamlines data processing, company officials explain, “by increasing the efficiency of data entry and eliminating manual steps.” It already has 150 U.K. users. O-Matic officials explain that the company has developed “a range of plug-ins” designed to improve the functionality of Blackbaud products, and the Import-O-Matic tool “is fully compatible with both The Raiser’s Edge and the Raiser’s Edge.”
Read more here.
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