By Beecher Tuttle

To succeed in the current economic climate, enterprises need to make customer service a top priority. This task is complicated by the myriad of new channels that today's customers use to contact companies, including social media, email, phone and corporate websites.

In addition, organizations today often maintain a dispersed workforce, making it even more difficult to track and assess communications between employees and customers. In this complicated environment, enterprises need to find ways to evaluate the performance of customer-facing employees, influence their engagement levels with clients and develop routing rules for accurate employee scheduling.

Maximizing employee potential can be aided by a workforce optimization (WFO) strategy that brings training, quality management, customer survey tools, job scheduling, job forecasting, quality assurance, career development and analytics all under one roof.

A WFO strategy, also known as an Employee Effectiveness Model, helps companies identify workforce needs before they become serious while also providing insight into employee gaps and profiles. WFO solutions can also recognize passively engaged employees, giving management the knowledge necessary to filter out lower-tier employees while motivating top-tier workers.

By Susan J. Campbell 

As a customer service provider (CSP), you are in a considerably advantageous position to capture, mine and analyze data about your network and your subscribers. You have multiple touch points that provide valuable information and as you gather insights regarding your customers’ preferences, experiences and predicted behaviors, you’ll be in a much better position to transform the customer experience.

An Alcatel-Lucent white paper, Customer Experience Transformation via Analytics, explores this concept in depth, focusing on the fierce competitive environment that exists for CSPs in a dynamic market. Service providers today have to work harder than ever to keep customers happy.

By Mae Kowalke

Many visions exist for what the next generation of business communications technology will look like. The potential for resources like 4G LTE networks get a lot of talk time these days. But what will it take to actually turn all these visions into reality?

Alcatel-Lucent’s stance is that there are four vital elements to driving the development and adoption of faster, better communications technologies:

By Mae Kowalke

Around the world, electricity distribution infrastructure is being transformed using "smart grid" technologies. Although this is happening more quickly in some areas than others, the purpose is the same: secure energy supplies and ensure they remain viable.

This goes beyond security, of course, to profits – as such things always do.

“The bottom-line benefit is more efficient use of energy,” noted Peter Johnson, Vice President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Smart Grid division, in a GridTalk e-zine article, “Protecting the smart grid with today’s solutions,” about smart grid security.

By Peter Bernstein, Senior Editor

This posting marks the fourth and final installment of my series about Bell Labs innovations. The first three highlighted: the context for Bell Labs as a prolific and globally recognized leader in the global research community; its role as critical driver of Alcatel-Lucent’s market leadership; the Labs’ rich history of invention across a broad range of disciplines; and, how it literally is “Innovating Innovation” with a culture based on continuous learning and adaptability. I will reveal my prejudice. I saved the best for last.

By Susan J. Campbell

Data privacy and cyber security are two of the hottest topics in the telecommunications space as consumers and business users become more mobile, accessing anything from social media platforms to bank accounts and proprietary networks on their mobile devices, all the while demanding that increased privacy and data protections are put in place.

The same is true for utility companies seeking to capture information on energy use. A recent Alcatel-Lucent article, Ensuring Smart Grid Social Acceptance by Securing Data Privacy, explores the challenges that arise in the quest for a more economic and “green” approach to energy consumption.

Smarter utilities are implementing machine-to-machine communications that allow smart meters to send information back to the utility on the amount of energy being used.