Friday - May 9, 2008
If you could clone your best agent hundreds or thousands of times over, you could ensure that each and every customer calling your contact center receives the same high-quality, friendly and informed response. In reality, natural language speech self-service is probably the closest and best alternative to delivering cost-effective and customer-friendly service -- especially when the product or services mix is complex. When properly designed and implemented, natural language speech recognition can reinforce your brand message and help lock in customer loyalty.
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Thursday - May 8, 2008
Traditionally, the contact center has been a cost center. However, with the contact center transforming into a profit center, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the center to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer satisfaction goals and driving profits.
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Thursday - May 1, 2008
While demand generation professionals consistently turn to a wide variety of direct marketing software and e-mail marketing tools in search of sales leads, current research by Aberdeen points to a significant spend associated with a more human element: outsourced B2B teleservices, provided by a large array of vendors offering different models of phone-based support by outside agencies.
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Thursday - May 1, 2008
Pharmaceutical companies manage large quantities of content about their product lines. However, unlike other industries, the challenge of managing this information is exacerbated by regulatory and compliance demands and the need to manage information from multiple "touch points" across a diverse customer base including patients, healthcare providers and others.
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Thursday - May 1, 2008
It's a phrase that we hear all too frequently: "We're moving off our mainframe." Yet virtually anyone who has ever had a mainframe continues to utilize it in some fashion. These robust and highly functional legacy systems contain years and years of data, and when you're talking about abandoning them altogether, you're also talking about a huge chunk of change. The truth is the mainframe is not disappearing.
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Tuesday - April 29, 2008
Fittingly, the Google-Salesforce.com tie-up is many things to many people. The message for the larger industry is that CRM has to make room for collaboration in its suite set, says Rebecca Wetteman, vice president of Nucleus Research. "It is no longer just about the workflow -- it is about getting the right people together to solve a problem or address an issue."
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Monday - April 28, 2008
A striped beach ball bounces over cubicles at ListenUp Contact Solutions while workers talk on telephone headsets, some walking, others leaning into computer screens. Suspended from the ceiling are two big traffic lights. Yellow's lit, meaning call volume is high enough that workers should ask before taking a break. Green means just go, red means don't even think about it.
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Saturday - April 26, 2008
After two years working nights at a U.S. company's computer call center in Bangalore, India, Vasmi knew it was time to quit when his 6-year-old son brought home a school portrait he'd drawn of his father, asleep in bed. "He was asked to draw a picture of his Mom and Dad, and he drew me sleeping. That's the only way he ever saw me," remembers the 31-year-old. "He never saw me doing anything else."
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Wednesday - April 23, 2008
It's official. With the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is now formally a player -- a big one -- in the online CRM space. The general availability release seems almost anticlimactic, given that so many of its features and functions are the same as those in Dynamics CRM 4.0.
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Tuesday - April 22, 2008
Popular American dance music is playing, phones are ringing and sounds of "thank you for holding" fill the call center at an office park in the outskirts of the bustling city of Santo Domingo. "Did you unplug everything from the radio?" the Dominican customer service agent asked her American client, with just the ever-slightest touch of an accent.
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Saturday - April 19, 2008
I recently got a chance to speak with Jim Smith, vice president and general manager of Avaya's customer service applications division, about Avaya's launch of the Communication Manager 5.0 solution, which the company has positioned as a more cost-efficient and reliable way to implement end-to-end SIP in the contact center.
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