A blog post at Medarch.net offers some insight on how “analytics and contact center quality monitoring are changing the way companies do business and dramatically improving contact center operations.”
Of course managers want “quick and accurate insights into the effectiveness of their contact center operations” in order to make decisions, but as the post notes, “they don’t have the time or resources to listen to and review the vast amount of customer interactions handled by the agents every day.”
Plus, “these days there seems to be more sophisticated tools including multimedia recording, desktop analytics, instant chat, self service options in the IVR, cloud computing... Therein lays their dilemma -- so little time, so much to accomplish in the course of a day.”
This is why, as the post notes, “contact center quality monitoring systems offered today are not only to evaluate agents but also to evaluate a contact center reputation. Yes, reputation might sound obvious but too often contact centers seem to miss this critical view point.”
Read more here.
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From an industry journal titled “Chief Learning Officer,” comes a solid, in-depth piece by industry observer Daniel Margolis profiling Rogers Communications: “Tara Deakin and her team have driven down costs while boosting effectiveness and transforming the company’s employee development culture.”
For communications companies, Margolis notes, “service is job one. While they offer a range of products from telephone and TV packages to broadband access for individuals and companies, a telecom’s main workforce management thrust is training the people who provide these services.”
However, Margolis identifies one reason why companies sometimes fail at this: “Like other people-intensive businesses, a high rate of turnover comes with the territory.” He cites Jim Lovie, executive vice president of sales, service and distribution at Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest communications companies, saying this is, in fact, “the biggest challenge” his company faces in approaching learning.
Read more here.
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As a year “dominated by social media” has ended and another one, which will be no doubt even more dominated by social media than 2010, opens, Searchmetrics officials are predicting what the SEO landscape will look like in 2011.
"As social media continues to stake its claim as the dominating force of the Internet, the entire landscape of SEO will have to change to accommodate it," said Dr. Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics. "We offer comprehensive, precise data to our customers. To be able to offer this level of data means that we need to stay a step ahead of the industry and add a functionality to our product before the client even knows they want it."
SEO will have to grow and change for social media, the firm has concluded. Since SEO is now being affected by Twitter and Facebook, data is going to have to include concise social media metrics. Additionally, the application used to collect this data will have to evolve.
Read more here.
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Recently industry observer Paul Shread noted that Teradata and Salesforce.com did “a little last-minute Christmas shopping,” as the data warehousing and CRM vendors purchased a pair of cloud computing companies.
Teradata purchased Aprimo, a maker of Web-based integrated marketing software, for $535 million, according to Shread, who said “online CRM vendor Salesforce has acquired email contact management startup Etacts.” As Shread said, “Salesforce declined to reveal plans for the acquisition, which follows the company's acquisition of cloud Ruby developer company Heroku,” also in December.
Teradata will use Aprimo's cloud-based integrated marketing software to combine "powerful business analytics with integrated marketing solutions to enable corporations to improve and optimize marketing performance with data-driven insights,” Shread reported, saying Teradata officials described the Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) business as “emerging as a critical focus for businesses, representing one of the most strategic and largest areas of investment for most corporations."
TMC also had the news that “the acquisition is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2011. Aprimo products will continue to be marketed and sold under its own name once the acquisition closes. The takeover is expected to be slightly accretive to Teradata's non-GAAP earnings per share in the first year of closing.”
Read more here.
