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October 2011

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CRM in Chat Translation, Call Centers and UC, Key CRM Problems, WFO and Lean Six Sigma

October 31, 2011

GeoFluent Customizer is a product billed by its makers, Lionbridge, as being able to improve base language models by using your enterprise’s language assets for an enhanced customer chat translation experience.

Basically that means that while, yes, you can find free chat translation services out there, Lionbridge is betting you wouldn’t want to actually allow valuable customers to utilize them in fear of inaccuracies.  

How is Lionbridge GeoFluent different? It offers real-time on-demand custom translation in a cloud app -- automated machine translation technology, instantly translating content and communications into multiple languages.The GeoFluent platform accomplishes this, Lionbridge officials say, by integrating advanced cloud-based language tools with a real-time translation service, a statistical machine translation engine from IBM’s Watson Research Center.

The chat translation platform can also be customized using your content and configured for specific business processes for multilingual communication such as eSupport, forums, blogs, web pages, chat sessions and other such uses.

Read more here.







Call Center Staffing, Effective Call Center Scheduling, Salesforce.com and Social Enterprise, B2B Content Marketing

October 25, 2011

 

If you’re like many -- actually, probably most -- small to medium size call centers, you still use spreadsheets to forecast and manage call center schedules and workforce planning. You think hey, this is an okay way to do it, since we have fewer agents. We don’t need all that fancy- schmancy software, it’s not like we’re trying to ride herd on 10,000 agents here.

Cloud CRM Reading, Real Time Chat Translation, Parlance's nameConnector, Mobility and Business IT

October 19, 2011

Soffront’s blog is one of the more interesting ones available, frequently touching on areas not of direct profit to the company, which makes it more worthwhile than most kept blogs.

One of its latest entries of interest is five of the best books for marketers. In addition to these, this reporter heartily recommends the 1995 book Where The Suckers Moon: The Life And Death Of An Advertising Campaign, by a New York Times advertising columnist, Randall Rothenberg. It details, step by painful step, the marriage of an old and decrepit automaker, Subaru, and a (then-) young, hip ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy.

Wieden & Kennedy won one of the most hotly-contested contracts of the year, despite the fact that their creative director hated car companies.

Entrepreneurs in the Cloud, Easy Expense Management Software, Appealing M2M Offerings, Better IVR Menus

October 14, 2011

There is a rising number of entrepreneurs seeking cloud-based communications these days, partly because the cloud can support the kind of apps that make communication easier, include features that enable mobility and lower costs, with require no phone equipment for continuous upgrading.

Market research firm In-Stat recently estimated the total number of mobile VoIP users will reach 288 million by the end of 2013, generating annual revenues of $35.2 billion. That’s a heck of a market.

In fact, of these, “well over half will be associated with online mobile VoIP providers, under one-third will use mobile VoIP with 3G MVNOs or mobile operators, and 11 percent with WiMAX/LTE operators,” In-Stat analysts found in the report, “Mobile VoIP -- Transforming the Future of Wireless Voice.”

As Frank Dickson, In-Stat analyst remarked, “The near-term opportunity for mobile VoIP is closely linked with the growing success of dual-mode phones and other Wi-Fi connected devices... [but] mobile VoIP still poses a direct threat to operator voice revenue.”





CRM and Advertising, Improve Auto Attendants, Dallas Cowboy Headsets, Social CRM

October 11, 2011

Industry insider Darryl Bolduc asks the good question: Why is advertising becoming more like customer relationship management still such a foreign concept?


“We see it at Moxie, and we see it across client work,” says Bolduc,  vice president, client partner Client Partner for CRM and direct response at Moxie, a digital-based ad agency, noting that “e-mail marketers have known of this potential for years, they've taken the lead from CRM systems, lists and strategies that drive loyalty, retention and re-engagement.”

Maybe that’s why, as Bolduc observes, e-mail media is “seeing a resurgence as budgets rebound, while digital media is benefiting from traditional marketers familiar with these data intensive environments.”

As Bolduc explains, online displays are using more behavioral and transactional advertising strategies: “We've got an amazing story being built for some of our most technically and digitally aware clients -- a CRM discipline, specifically micro targeting and dynamic segmentation, is being applied through online display.”

He calls this “a big change in the way online display operates, adding to complexities that already make online display tedious, like sizes, tagging and inventory management.”

“Tedious” being the nice word for that, of course. This is a family publication.














Read more here.


ERP Systems as Inhibitors, Software Licensing Jeopardy, YTel Cloud Dialer, Call Center Furniture

October 5, 2011

Never let it be said TMC doesn’t scour the world to bring you fresh perspectives on business technology. From Modern Ghana we have an interview with Immo Bohm of Sage ERP X3 partner Afresh Consult, on being sure that your ERP system “hasn't gone from being an enabler to an inhibitor to continued success.”





Bohm boils it down to six core questions you’ll want to ask yourself:

“Do you do functionality, not complexity?” So many people think that complexity equals increased functionality, which equals an improved user experience. You probably use about the same percentage of Microsoft Word features that you do of your brain capacity, no?

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