Customers

When Royal Caribbean tapped Steelcase Applied Research to help it outfit a new call center in Oregon, the cruise line didn't require any guidance on what chairs it wanted its reps to use. In fact, the company had given a great deal of thought to what might seem to outsiders to be the most basic of a...

As the saying goes: You can't change the weather -- but you can prepare for it. Recent, highly-publicized airline and product call center overflow problems have highlighted the serious and potentially humiliating problems that can occur when a call center is not sufficiently staffed to handle a cris...

The movement to Internet protocol-based phone systems and contact centers is in full swing. This is great news for smaller businesses, since standards-based IP networks offer far more flexibility and capabilities for much lower costs than their TDM predecessors. As a bonus, the protocol that runs th...

There's no other series of business processes that are going through more of a transformation today and impacting customer relationships more than order management. These series of processes have gone through multiple owners, first starting with IT who adopted them as a quick way to achieve ERP syst...

No call should strike more fear into the heart of an online business than a call from a customer saying, "Your site won't let me do what I want to do." Chilling words, because only a tiny percentage of online consumers will actually pick up the phone to alert businesses to a problem. By the time tha...

It's not an easy task to summarize the makeup of today's customer in a singularly defined formula. Not only do customers' individual needs vary on a case-by-case basis, but as an aggregate whole, customers' needs are maturing and have become much more complex and demanding than prior generations. Re...

For years, vendors have argued the merits of click-to-call versus click-to-chat, but most analysts now agree that both solutions are an effective means of reaching out to Web site visitors to engage them in conversation. There is little doubt that nearly any company with a Web presence can see posit...

Internet search leader Google unveiled its latest set of online business tools Thursday, aiming to snare a bigger piece of the enterprise market dominated by Microsoft. Google already has at least one player onboard: IP telephony firm Avaya. Avaya, a top provider of Internet phone switchboards for b...

Genesys has introduced a major upgrade to its contact center product line, the Genesys 7.5 Customer Interaction Management Platform, and also released VoiceGenie 7.1, which offers built-in support for video contact centers. The contact center application builds upon several earlier developments Gene...

You don't have a lot of technology resources inside your company. In fact, just getting your office printer to work all the time seems like a monumental challenge. Investing in technology, whether it's new software or hardware, means dealing with a lot of stuff that just may not work like you expect...

I got a lot of mail on the piece I wrote last week about retail data collection. The mail ran two to one in support, but it was still interesting to gauge the reactions of those who think the notion of collecting data like ZIP codes, drivers license numbers and the like is kosher. Let me say again ...

The newly released American Customer Satisfaction Index provides fresh data illustrating consumers' growing love affair with e-commerce. The e-commerce industry registered a score of 80 on ACSI's 100-point scale -- less than a percentage point away from its all-time high score of 80.8 in 2003, accor...

RightNow Technologies has added new capabilities to its voice application, which it first introduced in June 2005 when it acquired Convergent Voice, a voice automation vendor. In this major upgrade, the firm has enhanced the application's inbound functions and has begun developing outbound features,...

Sage Software has introduced SageCRM Version 6, with upgrades that enhance the usability and productivity of the application, as well as new administrative capabilities. Much of the development that went into this release targeted end-user adoption, said Chris Reich, the group's director of CRM prod...

Inventory has different values depending on time. The goal of a supply chain is to deliver the right product at the right place at the right time and the right cost. Miss any of those elements and the value of the inventory can be severely damaged. Let me demonstrate with a real example. My family m...