Last October TMC’s Paula Bernier noted that Soffront’s CRM, in addition to being designed to help with sales forecasting, is also engineered to be less cumbersome than most CRM systems.

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A recent article posted by Enterprise Apps Today deals with a topic many companies are wrestling with these days, specifically how consumers want a consistent user experience across all channels from companies, and how that’s a real challenge for companies.

Basically what that means is that if a customer’s calls the contact center and deals with a rep there, the next e-mail they get from the company needs to reflect the fact that whoever sent the email from the company not only is aware of the phone conversation, but has acted on it.

What kills the ability to know a customer this completely is the departmental silo approach to data, as the EAT piece shows.

A customer has a problem with Acme Anvils, they go to the Facebook page, interact with someone, and assume that all of Acme Anvils is now aware of and dealing with the issue, when in fact, in far too many cases, what happens is the issue dies on the Facebook page, the Acme Anvils FB admin doesn’t kick the conversation around to the contact center or anybody else who needs to know about it.

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Why does business travel still exist when we have phones and e-mail? Because we all really, really enjoy airports and the wonderful customer service airlines give? Because everybody should experience the joys of Radisson hotels at some point in their lives? Because we just can’t stay away from all the charm that is Baltimore?

Oh that’s right -- face to face is always better. Well, except where the IT team’s involved. In that case speakerphones are your preferred option.

So if we’re talking about deals seven figures or above, or you can jump on a plane and the bean counters don’t complain too much, and the meetings in somewhere like Istanbul, and then okay, go for it. But you’d be surprised how much you can productively get done using video conferencing technology.

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Stewart Friedman has over 22 years experience in sales and marketing, so when he talks about  the e-mail service provider industry, in which he’s owned and operated his own business and held several top-level positions, well, you probably want to listen.

And we’re in luck: He’s offering three golden tips on mobile e-mail marketing.

Watch your design. If you want responses from mobile e-mail, Friedman says, well; design your email for mobile viewing.  All those heavy graphics look great on desktop or laptops, but mobile users detest them. Go big on the quick-loading text messages. Yeah, some graphics are okay; they’re fun in moderation and can be an integral part of the message.  

But bear in mind all the hours of your life you’ve spent waiting for irrelevant graphics to load, and think to yourself “Am I delighting my customer when I inflict that on her?”

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This reporter suspects there’s quite the market for name-brand voices in the auto-attendant market -- Mel Gibson as William Wallace urging you to select one, two or three; Humphrey Bogart on a travel site would be particularly notable.

So how do the companies actually decide what voice to use? And why do they always seem to be female?

ABC News recently took a look at how Siri picked its voice. Siri isn’t an auto attendant, but the same considerations are used across all areas of voice recognition systems. And what ABC decided was that people like female voices.

And if you’ve noticed, Americans particularly fall for British-sounding women.

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Want to grow your email marketing list? Let’s rephrase that: Want to make more money?

The self-proclaimed “Marketing Sherpa” blogger, Adam T. Sutton, recently offered three ways to do just that. 

“Yeah, sounds great,” you say, “but just expanding my email marketing list, I mean, other than the fact that it’s bigger?”

There are other advantages, as Sutton says, pointing out that new subscribers are a bit friskier than your old ones, they’re still exploring what you have. It’s not how big your email list is, really, it’s how new it is. And there’s no point in dropping older customers off the list, is there? Size matters, in the respect that it means you’re adding new customers. A huge, static list isn’t the idea here.

What you want is a list that’s big because it’s constantly growing, not because it got big at some point last year.

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You might be tired of hearing about password managers, but these are truly invaluable tools.  And recently there was another high-profile password hack where this time the target was a database full of FTP passwords at Web hosting firm DreamHost. More like NightmareHost now, thanks to inadequate password management.

Password management is something that simply must be more important to many of you than it apparently is. At DreamHost, the hackers got the FTP credentials of all shared hosting accounts by accessing a legacy table “storing passwords in plain text,” according to industry observer Ericka Chickowski.

Noa Bar-Yosef, senior security strategist at Imperva, told Chickowski that the hackers got “customer credentials to the FTP server,” which means they can “use these credentials in order to impersonate customers when accessing the FTP server,” which leads to all sorts of mischief, such as accessing customer documents and the downloading and uploading of unauthorized documents.

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One is that, simply, it can be a critical part of a positive customer experience, and that’s old news -- way back in 2010, TMC noted a survey conducted by Alcatel-Lucent found that “three-quarters of 4,200 respondents said they would continue to business with a company with which they had a great contact center experience.”

In fact, half of all respondents told Alcatel-Lucent they’d dropped a company based on a poor contact center experience.

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Snooozy lists some other advantages of an IVR, besides the fact that it never gets sick, asks for a day off or alienates customers if it shows up to work in a sour mood.

“The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person,” Snooozy notes, and yes, cost aside, this is the number one benefit of an IVR system for customer surveys: “Within two to five minutes after a service interaction is finished, an organization can have feedback from the clients that how their experience was with them and how they feel.”

And that quickly, an administrator can be data mining to see if there are any red flags in that conversation meriting a quick follow-up call to smooth over a problem or suggestive sell a product or service the customer sounds ready to buy.

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About a year ago TMC’s Linda Dobel wrote, “multi-site, multi-source contact centers have, at this point, come to appreciate the many benefits of transitioning to the cloud. Still, the biggest concern, and therefore the biggest hold back, is security.”

Things haven’t changed all that much between then and now. For hosted predictive dialers, that’s still a central issue; the common thinking is that, while cloud computing may be the big disruptor, if that disruption includes security concerns, count us out.

Paul Shread, editor-in-chief of the IT Business Edge Network, recently took issue with the concept that adopting cloud computing for a call center necessarily means a security tradeoff; that to get the benefits of cloud computing’s price, convenience and other goodies, you have to sacrifice your current comfort level of security.

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South Africa’s Hannes van der Merwe, Mitel product manager at Itec, recently said what most customer service professionals consider gospel truth -- customers really, really despise being abandoned to IVR and auto attendant “hell.”

"Many customers become frustrated when they get a long list of menu options to choose from when they call in to the contact center, and find themselves bounced around between an IVR and agents who can't help them," van der Merwe said. “The process of getting to the right agent should be as fast, simple and seamless as possible for the customer.”

Van der Merwe advocated ACD, or Automatic Call Distribution, as a way to offer salvation to customers yearning to find truth and meaning in their interactions with company support systems. The vast majority of customers ever have only two points of contact with a company, the product and the call center, and the vast majority of customers only ever use the call center when they have some issue with the product. Therefore, almost by definition, your call center is where your customer is either saved or eternally lost.

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It’s possible to get so fixated on the particulars of what we do in our business every day that we lose sight of the overall picture. For example, what business are you in? Hotels?  
Telecommunications? Transportation? Computer applications and deployment? Voice over Internet Protocol? Selling anvils to coyotes? Mafia hit man?

Wrong. You’re in the customer satisfaction business. Appliance deployment professionals NEI know this, and a recent blog post was written to remind their industry colleagues that no matter what line of work you think you’re in, you’re in the business of pleasing customers and providing goods and services that are valued by other people enough to pay for more than once.

In the highly informative post, NEI’s President & CEO Greg Shortell wraps it all up under the headline of “The Experience.” It’s not just the product; it’s not just the service that you’re selling. A great VoIP phone system sold by rude sales people, delivered by indifferent contractors and installed by surly, uncommunicative technicians is a bad overall customer experience.

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Your faithful TMC Australasian correspondent checking in here from the TMC offices in Mangawhai, New Zealand. Turning our attention from Megaupload, another fine day in New Zealand tech history, to today’s topic:

Call Trunk lets you record any phone conversation you want. Great. Is that legal?

Writing for Gizmodo Australia industry observer Nick Broughall, who identifies himself as somebody who uses call recording on a professional basis from time to time, gives the basics of how Call Trunk works, which show why it’s such a useful little idea.

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How does one go about constructing an IVR system that can be used by people who don’t like IVR, whose needs aren’t met by IVR and who would rather talk to an actual person, preferably one with a reasonable command of the English language?

Simple: Design an IVR that knows when to gracefully bow out.

A precis on the IVR Deconstructed blog for a recent study by the University of Rochester and University of Illinois, titled “Robust Design and Control of Call Centers with Flexible IVR Systems,”  
mentions that the study argues that “businesses don’t have to choose between cost savings and service quality anymore -- they can design flexible IVR systems that satisfy all customers.”

And the way to do this, it concludes, is by designing an IVR system that knows when to hand a customer off to a non-IVR system.

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Oh no, not another New Year’s Resolution guilt trip...yes, sorry, we have to do it. However, don’t worry about spending three hours in the gym every day; instead focus on this vital virtualization idea which consists of lowering energy costs with automation.


As a recent blog post from Carousel Connect shows, virtualization can help you save up to $36 per PC per year. That’s the estimated cost of each employee when they leave their computers and monitors on when leaving the office to go home for the night. With the right desktop power management, you can eliminate much, if not all of that.

Okay, 36 bucks doesn’t sound like a lot, but multiply that by the number of computers in your entire operation and it adds up to real money.

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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. In other words, if you can lead on cost, customer service and product innovation in supply chain management, well, that’s a heck of an advantage you’d have over your competition.

At the recent CSCMP conference in Philadelphia, NEI officials saw the 2011 Trends and Issues in Logistics and Transportation Study and gleaned three trends they see as becoming increasingly important in “customer-focused” supply chain management:

Segmented Supply Chains. No, this isn’t a new, novel concept, but NEI officials say the study shows that firms surveyed had “an average of more than three unique supply chains.” In fact, half of the 700 firms surveyed told researchers that they had “moved from a focused competitive strategy” to seeking to lead in a number of categories. And it’s probably no coincidence, as NEI officials point out, that firms adopting this approach had the highest average number of supply chains. NEI officials conclude that there’s a good chance, given the results, that “the various supply chains enable a company to focus on different strategies in different segments.”

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Hosted VoIP company RealLinx offers services at a “low monthly price with our fully-managed SecurityLinx” product, promising that “your company will see ROI in the first month of deployment or we will gladly refund your money.”

The No. 1 feature of the product, at least as far as attractiveness goes, is that it promises to stop lost employee productivity to Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and other such sites.

It’s called “Work Internet Abuse,” company officials say, adding that it “is robbing your company of valuable time and money. An average of 25 to 30 percent of each employee's workday is spent surfing things that have nothing to do with work... When employees do not have the option to play, they work.”

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Great idea for a column from Call Center Helper: Ask six experts what the best return on investment is from implementing speech analytics in contact centers.

Reducing avoidable contact: As told by Craig Pumfrey, director of Marketing & Communications, NICE Systems EMEA, a service center project created search parameters to automatically “listen” for words and phrases in every inbound customer call that could be used during an avoidable contact, such as “parking fine” or “I called last week.” These interactions were then indexed and checked against the set parameters and wherever a match was found the call was flagged for the team to review the reason for the enquiry.

Deployment methods: According to Duncan White, managing director, horizon2, the potential of speech analytics is not being realized because the return on investment is generally not compelling enough. The main problem is that speech analytics is being promoted as a discrete technology within the contact center or customer operations environment rather than a strategic enabler at an organizational level.

Deployed in the right way, speech analytics should be used to re-engineer core processes such as quality management. Use speech analytics in a supporting role for organizational change.

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Recently VoltDelta officials gave a summation of some compelling reasons why businesses interested in expanding their call center options and functionality should be looking at voice recognition, specifically VoltDelta’s OnDemand voice recognition resources.

Good products in the field combine up-to-date speech science, experienced Voice User Interface (VUI) design and technology for engaging and effective voice self-service. VoltDelta, for example, can provide “multi-channel support such as SMS messaging to confirm a speech response, call recording, and whisper on agent transfer to avoid repeating steps,” company officials say.

They point to a few specific features potential buyers of such technology should be aware of:

CrystalWAVE. This is the Crystal Weighted Average Voice Evaluation technology, using multiple, simultaneous grammar evaluation techniques with context sensitivity to improve recognition accuracy while reducing speech tuning requirements.

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Five9, a popular vendor of hosted call center tools and products, recently presented a good overview of the company’s technology using a Q&A format to reflect some of the most common questions companies have when considering a switch to such technology:

What are the basic requirements of an at-home agent?

At-home agents using the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite only require a computer with high-speed Internet access and a USB headset.

How do you handle planned down time? Our need is for 24x7 availability.

Five9 is available 24x7, including support, with one exception. Five9 reserves a maintenance window from 9-10pm on Wednesday and Saturday nights. Though this window is not always used, if uptime is critical during this period, alternative call processing is required.

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The Philippine call center industry grew in 2011, whereas many other industries can’t say they did. Why did call center do well? Simple – people realized that if you need something you need it. And if it’s genuinely useful to business, they’ll spend the money for it.

In fact, the country’s all-important call center industry saw growth of over 20 percent in 2011, on the back of health care and finance-related services expansions, according to industry journal BusinessWorld Online.

Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) Executive Director Jojo J. Uligan told BusinessWorld that an “upbeat outlook” for 2011 and 2012 is being retained, “given opportunities in English-speaking markets beyond the United States and a move toward knowledge-intensive services.”

That’s usually the terminology for seeking to expand into more Business Process Outsourcing services instead of simple call center work.

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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. The gym is busier for the first couple weeks in January, then by about Valentine’s Day attendance is back to normal.

There might be a point to making New Year’s resolutions, though, if you manage a call center. As Boehm says, “one way you can be a better person is to review and change your metrics, thresholds and reports.” And that would make a fine New Year’s resolution. As would “Drink more red wine.” Hey we all like an easily-kept resolution now and then.

Reviewing and changing your metrics, thresholds and reports “will make you a better person,” Boehm says, “because your agents and supervisors will love you for it! Call centers are dynamic. Every year there is something new from the company that the call center must deal with. Everyone in the call center needs to adapt to these changes. Yet the agents and supervisors are still looking at the same metrics, responding to the same thresholds and seeing the same reports from last year.”

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It’s true that 3rd party remote call monitoring can be used to not only drive customer satisfaction but also dramatically increase business efficiency when used correctly. A recent study from BPA International, written by Craig Antonucci, director of Client Strategies, MBA and professor of Decision Sciences, points out some of the ways this is done.

First, determine critical activities. What activities make or break your call center? If you are a 911 dispatcher, being able to get the emergency group to the right home is the critical activity. Be sure to identify these critical activities and make them high focus, key measurements, and high penalty for failure at the agent level. If you fail to measure this, you might as well be the cook who doesn’t wash his hands.

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This reporter remembers when “just in time” was the hot, desirable practice for keeping on-hand inventories low. Turns out it’s good for call center training as well.

Harmony officials recently featured their Coach and Learn modules as ways businesses can “put knowledge in the hands of those who need it, when they need it the most.”

Sounds like something your business could do with? Read on.

These integrated contact center coaching and e-learning modules provide what KnoahSoft officials characterize as “a collaborative feedback loop between the agent and the supervisor to delivery training content and messages to agents just in time to improve their efficiency and enhance productivity.”

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Five9 officials recently touted their call center on demand products’ integration with some of the most popular CRM products available today, such as Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite.

Great. But what’s the basic business case there in the first place?

Lots of companies today are moving from premise-based technologies to cloud computing platforms, and Five9 provides on-demand call center software that is pre-integrated with CRM “specifically to provide a robust and predictable migration path for companies to take advantage of the benefits that cloud computing can provide,” Five9 officials say.

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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.”

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Call center outsourcing is like any other business – if it’s done where it can be done most efficiently everybody benefits – customers get the lowest prices, companies find cost savings and people can be freed up to do what their most efficient work is.

However, grandstanding American politicians with a less than robust grasp of or concern for economics are threatening to force American companies to establish call centers here in America, instead of allowing them to be outsourced to where the work can be done more efficiently.

They’re proposing to make companies that have call centers overseas ineligible for grants and guaranteed loans from the federal government.  It also proposes a $10,000 a day penalty on US call centers that fail to report its relocation to an offshore location within 60 days to the Labor Department.

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A new report by Global Industry Analysts says the video conferencing market is set to grow in the coming years and will become a $14 billion global industry by 2017.

That’s from Mother Nature Network -- everybody’s networking these days, it seems -- which notes that it’s also going to bring along “improved image quality, increasing adoption among small- and medium-sized businesses, and rising demand from developing markets, such as ones in the Asia-Pacific.”

We hear them on the increased image quality. For a long time we couldn’t understand why video conferencing wasn’t wildly popular, why everybody and their brother weren’t doing it, then we were in a video conference with, uh, less than wonderful image and sound quality. It was as painful an experience as we’ve had recently, and we include watching the entire Jack & Jill trailer in that.

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An excellent, thorough white paper recently produced by Splashdata, titled “Secure and Efficient Password Administration Problem Solved by SplashID: Managing Passwords and Other Confidential Records in the Secure Enterprise,” deals with, as you might suspect, the problem of password security, critical in the modern enterprise.

Nobody argues with the notion that employees need more secure usernames and passwords, yet this increasing volume of username/ password combinations leads to major issues for IT managers.“Without the right password and information management solution, it is difficult for enterprises to simultaneously maintain employee productivity and ensure password and information security,” the paper contends, and it’s hard to disagree with that.

The SplashID paper does a good job identifying some of the major problems insecure passwords cause, with lack of compliance coming in first. There  are well-known, accepted  standards  for  creating  and  maintaining  secure  passwords, the paper says, “including specifying length, type of characters, and frequency of password changes.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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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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. Keep the old ones together with spit and duct tape. Hey at least we’re not dropping our support and maintenance contracts like those guys eating the seed corn over there.

Before you do anything as drastic as dropping support and maintenance altogether, bear in mind that in so doing, you may be violating client SLAs or business continuity-disaster recovery mandates. But yes, we agree that paying a large premium for talking to tech support sounds increasingly ridiculous, what with the consumerization of IT.

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Expense report software is becoming a more crucial part of business operations, and there are many options out there. You might want to consider SutiExpense, powered by SutiSoft as you select which one will best fit the needs of your company.

Company officials say that by leveraging the company’s solution, expense reports can be created and submitted as frequently as needed. “Build your expense report throughout the month and submit anytime,” they say.

In essence, the way it works is that expense items are added from different categories of expense types. Once you have added your expense items, the expense report can be submitted for approval, so in this way, the expense follows the company's defined expense approval flow.

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Good advice from industry journal Practical ECommerce: “When ecommerce marketers make their New Year's resolutions, they should include improved email segmentation and personalization.”

They should also forget the “lose weight,” “make up with my ex” and “start exercising” ones while they’re at it. “Drink more good red wine” would be a fine example of a New Year’s resolution one is more likely to keep. And hey, we all want doable resolutions, don’t we?

Email segmentation, they explain, is simply the idea of organizing email-marketing lists so each group of recipients receives a relevant, even personalized, marketing message. Of course to do this, as they note, you need to first learn something about customer preferences, demographics, desires, and even devices.

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Hey, what’s the worst thing about business communications on the road? That’s right, roaming charges on our mobile devices.

Cloud Roam, based in Coventry, England, understands where we’re coming from. The telecom company sells to international travelers so they hear it, too. Its CEO and founder, Sotiris Anagnostis, is establishing a cooperation network between dozens of countries and his enterprise with the goal of saving up to 85 percent of what company officials call “exorbitant roaming charges ordinarily imposed on mobile calls” while traveling abroad.

To accomplish this, Cloud Roam offers pre-paid SIM cards -- no, no calling cards -- and that great telecom money saver, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

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Recently officials of Spectrum Corporation featured their call/contact center monitoring software aids in Contact Center Activity Monitoring (CCAM), a subset of Unified Contact Center Reporting (UCCR).  

“CCAM,” company officials explained, “is the process of collecting data from the call center applications. The challenge for many contact centers is not the data that is generated but getting access to the data and being able to do something with it.”

Sure -- after all, generating data is useless unless you’re accessing all your data and you know what to do with it once you do. Of course that’s where the challenge comes in -- few companies have that completely mastered.

Spectrum officials explain how their process uses different methods to extract data from siloed systems and warehouses. There are many benefits to this, primary amongst them the fact that it allows users to monitor many call center applications and extract data from these siloed systems. Custom built applications and spreadsheets can be monitored and data extracted so unique data can be used, and investments made in custom built applications are not lost.

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According to a news article, in the Rochester, New York Democrat-Chronicle, the popular notion of call center jobs always going to places like India or The Philippines isn’t telling the whole story.

In 2012, the Democrat-Chronicle reports, “DialAmerica plans to move to larger space on Brighton-Henrietta Townline Road and add to its staff by as much as 40 percent.” Verizon Wireless' Henrietta call center employs about 1,200 people, up from 900 five years ago and 100 in 2000, the article points out, adding that “Pioneer Credit Recovery employs some 1,000 at its Wyoming County operations in Perry and Arcade, about double what it did a decade ago.”

Part of the repatriation is due to local government giving tax breaks to business process outsourcing companies to relocate to their areas. Part of it is due to companies deciding to give genuine American English-speaking customer assistance to customers tired of trying to decipher thick foreign accents. And part of it is simply the expansion of the call center industry.

The Democrat-Chronicle reports that “between 4 percent and 5 percent of the workforce in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut works in call centers,” citing industry research firm Contact Babel's 2011 U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide.

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Amdocs, a telecommunications provider, recently noted in a blog entry by Naomi Weiser recently noted that two shoppers recently bought $100,000-plus Ferrari and “a new home via eBay subsidiary PayPal’s mobile app on Cyber Monday.”

Don’t try this at home with Mommy and Daddy’s smartphone, kids.

Most of us use smartphones to purchase more, uh, modest items. Songs on iTunes, for example. But we’re heading towards big ticket territory, Weiser writes, noting recent findings from data research and analysis firm comScore show that in September two-thirds of all smartphone owners made more substantial purchases on their phones.

British retailers Argos, ASOS and Debenhams are trying to find ways to sell their products through mobile apps. American retailers like Toys R Us, JC Penney, Lowes, and Best Buy are testing such approaches as giving store reps mobile phones to help shoppers instantly compare prices and match them when necessary, Weiser says.

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Amdocs, a telecommunications provider, recently noted in a blog entry by Naomi Weiser recently noted that two shoppers recently bought $100,000-plus Ferrari and “a new home via eBay subsidiary PayPal’s mobile app on Cyber Monday.”

Don’t try this at home with Mommy and Daddy’s smartphone, kids.

Most of us use smartphones to purchase more, uh, modest items. Songs on iTunes, for example. But we’re heading towards big ticket territory, Weiser writes, noting recent findings from data research and analysis firm comScore show that in September two-thirds of all smartphone owners made more substantial purchases on their phones.

British retailers Argos, ASOS and Debenhams are trying to find ways to sell their products through mobile apps. American retailers like Toys R Us, JC Penney, Lowes, and Best Buy are testing such approaches as giving store reps mobile phones to help shoppers instantly compare prices and match them when necessary, Weiser says.

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A recent white paper from lyrix.com, titled “Why Every Enterprise Needs a VoIP High Quality Speech Enabled Auto Attendant,” does a good job demonstrating why, with growing bandwidth and the ubiquity of SIP, “it is finally feasible to deliver high quality speech applications from the cloud.”

There are good business reasons to automate some or all of your call answering -- but the spelling of names on a DTMF keypad can be tricky or impossible on some smartphones and is illegal (and dangerous) while driving.

What you need is a high quality speech-enabled auto attendant, which its supporters would even describe as “prohibitively expensive and technically challenging,” involving premised-based installation of a dedicated server and expensive speech recognition licenses.

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“In these difficult times, companies everywhere are looking for unique ways to cut their costs.”

So say officials at AireSpring, a provider of IP communications services. While the company is right, aren’t all companies always looking for ways to cut costs, be times flush or thin?

Sure, products such as those offered by AireSpring might seem a bit more attractive when cutting costs is a matter of survival to a company, but well-run companies will always be in the market and on the lookout for such products.

And of course it helps to find quick, easy and relatively painless ways of cutting transportation, sales, and operations costs. Well, guess what hits the trifecta there? That’s right – conferencing. Put fewer people in the air from here to there, and not only do you save money and time, the employee probably appreciates not having to fly to St. Louis yet again for something that can be taken care of via conferencing technology.

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It behooves one to listen to the alpha pack member, and in this case that would be a guy whose business card reads “Alpha Coyote” – Bill Kish, of Coyote Point Systems.

“As the supply of available IPv4 addresses becomes exhausted, enterprises are under pressure to rapidly deploy IPv6 technology,” Kish says, adding that Hurricane Electric's tunnel broker services “helped us develop the IPv6 capabilities in our products.”

Quick recap: As you’ve no doubt heard by now from various online doomsayers, the pool of unallocated Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses will be exhausted in 2011. New technologies have been developed to solve this problem, one being IPv6, in 1998.

The Inquirer recently put the issue in stark terms: “The Internet is doomed until European businesses and organizations begin to move towards IPv6,” they quote Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda as saying recently.

"More people online; more ways of getting online; more applications and devices online. All these developments put greater demands on our networks, and require ever higher performance from them," Kroes said, drawing the obvious conclusion: “The Internet cannot adjust to these developments, cannot continue to grow and function properly, without sufficient IP addresses."

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Haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet? No? That makes you... part of the 99 percent, let’s face it. And if you have a mobile device management pro on your list, you probably need to find something appropriate.

Good thing that Matt Lidestri, who manages security and Internet services for COCC in Avon, Connecticut, is here to help you with that special gift for that hard to shop for person.

As Lidestri says, credit unions need to monitor employees who use their personal smartphones for work. MobileIron has developed a combination of an app and server software to do just that, called MyPhone@Work, which helps a credit union enforce such policies as password strength and updating, as well as restrictions on app installations.

Lidestri understands the budget you’re working with -- but, as he says, “the credit union will pay a monthly fee for each device managed by the credit union’s servers.”

Isn’t it interesting that online ads seem to know what items you want? That’s because advertisers are trying place their messages on pages you view just when you’re about to buy a rival’s product, Lidestri says, and recommends the latest version of the Firefox browser as a gift to help put an end to this by allowing you to opt out of online behavior tracking.

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The first question, of course, is why bother with expense report management software at all? Isn’t it just an added layer you really don’t need?

In all actuality, this software is vital to businesses and at this current time, for many companies expense reporting is a standalone manual process that is not integrated into accounting or ERP platforms. This makes it extremely difficult for the rest of the organization to benefit from any possible intelligence to be gathered from it.

However, if you convert that manual data entry process into an automated process with expense management software, you can lower costs, increase compliance, accelerate reimbursement cycles and reduce the cost of every expense report transaction.

Another problem with manual expense report entry is that it generally goes along with manual approval, manual sending to accounting, manual this or that. Manual, as you know, of course, is always more expensive than automated.

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You may have noticed that there’s a lot more mobile communication capability in the healthcare field now. You would be correct.

Not surprising, seeing as how the field was the one that popularized the idea of being available 24/7 -- remember when theaters just asked doctors to please turn off their pagers?

A recent survey, noted in industry journal Mobile Health News, conducted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, confirms the ubiquity of mobile as well -- amazingly, according to the survey, five of the 164 mostly hospital-based respondents said that no group of professionals in their organizations used mobile devices to access information necessary for their everyday activities.

The surprise, of course, is that there are as many as five. And even more astoundingly, the survey found that of those five, “one was an organization with no plans to offer mobile access to IT systems.” Really makes one wonder exactly who they are and how to avoid them.

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Officials of Accedian Networks recently detailed some of the highlights of their service assurance demarcation products.

Powered by Accedian Network's High Performance Service Assurance platform, company officials say, “our EtherNID, MetroNID and MetroNODE 10GE family of demarcation and OAM aggregation devices enable end-to-end service provisioning and assurance with carrier-grade performance.”

One defining quality of the offerings is that they offer comprehensive remote test and performance monitoring functionality, service creation and traffic management capabilities for services backed by assured service level agreements.

New to the lineup is the Accedian's V-NID product suite, described by company officials as “an application-oriented performance assurance” product for end-user experience of specific applications. It works by simulating real application traffic flows across the cloud.

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The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner's Office, tasked with watching over British data protection, is getting serious. One ndustry observer recently noted that text message spam is now being scrutinized; particularly what officials refer to as “an increasing wave of insurance industry and accident compensation-related spam.”

According to a survey of 1,014 people by the ICO, Kirk noted, “681 said they had received a text that had caused them concern. More than 200 said they were troubled by text spam and wondered how their details were obtained.”

The office has conducted one raid, Kirk reported, adding that they plan more raids “targeting operations that collect sales leads by illegally sending unsolicited text messages.”

What makes this a SIM issue is that the messages in question are often sent from SIM servers or banks, “or a hardware devices in which dozens of SIM cards can be inserted and used with automated software to dial hundreds of phones” citing ICO sources.

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Ah, Christmas – that time of year when thoughts turn to visions of sugar plums, flying reindeer, mistletoe and virtual contact centers.

According to industry journal Hindu Business Line, job portal Naukri.com recently reported that hiring activities have “surged across all sectors in November due to a seasonal spike in recruitment.”

No doubt virtual contact centers are driving much of this growth. Long a prime location for call centers, India has benefited from the ability of a virtual contact center to quickly ramp up – and down – as needed for seasonal fluctuations.

Virtual contact centers are used year-round by companies looking to avoid such problems as on-site disasters or poor weather conditions, or just for efficiency. My Twinn, a high-end doll manufacturer, switched to using virtual contact centers years ago, and company officials reported that in the first year, 2000, “30 percent more inquiry calls were converted to orders, employee turnover decreased 88 percent and 90 percent fewer calls had to be escalated compared to 1999.”

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If you’re looking for a good way to publish SLA reports to customers, you might want to consider a unified performance management solution such as APG.

APG is a performance and service level monitoring product allowing “effective management of the overall business performance,” according to officials of Watch4Net, who explain that “by consolidating both business and technology metrics, APG allows contractual SLA measurement and reporting.”

Here’s how it works: Once a service level report is created, users are able to monitor business compliance in real-time. SLA reports show the information needed to anticipate SLA achievement and prioritize efforts.

As an example of the available indicators included, there’s Best Case, which returns the value that will be reached at the end of the month if the resource remains up, and the slightly less encouraging Worst Case, which shows the value that will be reached at the end of the month if, from this day forward, the resource is down.

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