Customer Service

"We're seeing a digital transformation take place, where companies are moving their contact centers to the cloud," noted Dan Burkland, president of Five9. "There are two key criteria for a contact center -- there's the CRM and the contact center infrastructure, and those two really go hand-in-hand.

This is a call for resistance that has nothing to do with politics. It's coming from someone who unwittingly walked into a virtual jail cell that was disguised as a DirecTV contract. I'll be behind bars for another 23 months, and I'm counting the days. Please don't take this as a rant or as an attem...

The new battleground in enterprise software is likely to be the software platform. This is not to say that analytics and security are not important, but they are being handled in different ways. Security is being handled in ways that address both hardware and software vulnerabilities, but these thin...

"The most important thing an SMB can do ... is be proactive and ready to help [customers] right at the moment they need it," said Linda Crawford, CEO of Helpshift. Companies must streamline support systems to resolve issues faster and more efficiently, she said. An up-to-date knowledge base enables ...

Cali Group has announced a pilot program using kiosks equipped with facial recognition software and artificial intelligence to ease the ordering process for regular customers at the Pasadena, California, location of its international CaliBurger restaurant chain. The kiosks use NEC's NeoFace facial r...

Genesys on Monday unveiled a new integration between its customer management solution, Genesys PureCloud, and Amazon Lex at the annual AWS re:Invent conference. The integration will help businesses build and maintain conversational IVR flows that route callers more efficiently, by using artificial i...

Customers prefer human interactions to interactive voice response systems or other automated customer service offerings, according to a new report from B2B ratings firm Clutch. Businesses need to move carefully when outsourcing customer service operations, the research also suggested, because there ...

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it was preparing a plugin to its popular Messenger platform that will allow a website's visitors to chat with a human or bot without leaving the location. Customer Chat is one of a number of changes in the version 2.2 update of Messenger platform revealed at the We...

Advances in technology -- including speech analytics, metrics, a wider array of scrabble data, and perhaps even big data -- are making gamification a must-have tool in CRM, call centers, collections, sales and other business areas. Technological advances have enabled the design of games that offer e...

The joint platform will target B2C and B2B firms in retail, telecommunications and resources. "Personalized experiences for customers across all aspects of their interaction with a company are a big challenge for many companies," said Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann.

Tushar Makhija is vice president of revenue at Helpshift. In this exclusive interview, Makhija underscores the importance of establishing effective ways to connect with customers.

Helpshift's new Web Chat application uses AI to help companies release scalable chatbots that can automate customer service through real-time interactions. The new AI-based tool, released last week, will boost Helpshift customers' ability to provide enterprise-grade support to their customers, the c...

Insite Software's new InsiteCommerce Mobile App is the first fully configurable white label mobile app built for leading manufacturers and distributors, the company said. The app supports everyone involved in the B2B e-commerce experience, Insite said -- from customers to channel partners, to field ...

Brick-and-mortar retailers have been finding it difficult to offer pricing that's competitive with e-commerce sites, which have the advantage of massive scope and scale, according to a new Frost & Sullivan report. E-commerce will account for nearly 18 percent of the total retail market by 2025, ...