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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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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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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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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Saturday - April 12, 2008
We often talk about the importance of recording calls in the call center to ensure that agents are properly following scripts, to measure customer satisfaction and to assist in proper coaching and training of call center agents. Additionally, most call centers use call recording solutions to determine agents' and groups' performance for the purpose of merit raises or promotions.
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Thursday - April 3, 2008
In recent years, First Call Resolution has emerged as a critical element for contact centers looking to become more customer centric. The FCR metric focuses on how well a contact center handles customer requests the first time, and most organizations agree that it is the only true metric that delivers a clear measurement of their effectiveness and customer satisfaction level.
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Monday - March 31, 2008
SynerG, formed in 2005 to develop interactive business mashups, has released its first product -- a contact center application -- from beta. SynerG Contact Center targets a familiar pain point -- one that all agent desktop apps have tried in various ways to address: the difficulty of accessing and integrating data from a company's back end.
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Friday - March 28, 2008
Companies now have many options when it comes to packaged applications for CRM, and these applications are helping companies reduce development time, in some cases by as much as 65 percent, which in turn helps save money. These resources are now freed up to explore greater CRM customization that ultimately helps companies focus on aligning their CRM systems with their core business objectives.
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Wednesday - March 19, 2008
Microsoft Convergence is a very large show. Last week in Orlando, Fla., there were in excess of 9,500 people, most from outside of the United States, and by that measure alone it was a successful event. Convergence is one of Microsoft's chances to meet face to face with its partners and customers for the usual mix of training, new product announcements and the like.
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Tuesday - March 11, 2008
There are those partnerships where the companies swap logos and do joint press releases and that's about it, and then there are partnerships where true integration happens. This latter type of partnership is starting to emerge between Salesforce.com and Google, and that's a very good thing for the CRM industry. It's clear that Google and Salesforce.com are moving quickly in the direction of integration at the XML level.
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Monday - March 10, 2008
As anybody who manages a contact center knows, the seemingly impossible task that needs to be accomplished every day is, "make more with less." While budgets and headcounts get cut, expectations of better sales, better service, greater customer retention and satisfaction rise.
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