Customers

I had my annual meeting with my friends at Walker Information the other day when they were in Boston talking about their latest report. I have written about Walker before, and it gives me pleasure to do so again -- and to point out that I have no business relationship with them; I just like what th...

Avaya has updated its flagship contact center software application, Interaction Center, with new features that make it easier for developers to build agent portals to their own specifications and needs. This latest iteration of the application, version 7.1, is taking aim at a pain point that many ve...

Companies that seek to automate the customer service process to cut costs often alienate customers instead, as Part 1 of this two-part series reveals. Some companies, though, are finding ways to incorporate informed, personal interactions into their customer service programs, and are treating every...

"Your call is important to us. Please hold." "We've automated our phone system for your convenience." "Our agents are busy helping other customers." As consumers, we are all too familiar with these rote statements that are somehow supposed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy while we cool our hee...

American consumers would rather have to deal with a rude or condescending customer service agent on the phone than one who speaks with a foreign accent, according to a survey released earlier this year. The survey seemed to indicate that the arguments against outsourcing of certain operations -- fro...

Contact centers will dramatically increase the adoption of Voice over Internet Protocol technology over the next few years, the Yankee Group projects. This long-awaited development will be driven in some part by related growth in the number of home agents. The VoIP adoption rate in North American co...

Sprint has entered the hosted contact center space, a submarket that is rapidly expanding, with the introduction of an IP-based offering that is powered by Avaya technology. It is Sprint's first toll-free VoIP product, Barry Tishgart, director of product marketing, told CRM Buyer. "We have always su...

Online surveys are becoming more popular and easier to use, and while their ability to find out exactly what customers want promises a goldmine for CRM, their real potential is not always tapped. "There's a lot more work that needs to be done by the organization than simply ask the questions and loo...

One of the most advanced communication hubs in the world crashed unexpectedly in Seattle on Sunday afternoon, July 30, 2006, due to a string of malfunctions in the facility's electrical power system. The facility, called Fisher Plaza, is billed as one of the most secure data centers and telecommuni...

The service revolution in CRM -- and, in fact, throughout customer-facing strategies -- is well underway in many companies. The reason the remainder of the industry doesn't see it yet is because many CRM vendors' responses to the revolution are so slow that they make lagging economic indicators loo...

Loyalty Lab, an on-demand CRM application for consumer brands, has introduced Loyalty 2.0, an upgraded product to help retailers and grocery stores incorporate e-commerce channels into their first-generation loyalty programs, and to better segment their customers. It is part of the summer 2006 relea...

Wincor Nixdorf, a German-based provider of IT applications for the banking and retail industries, has introduced its eServices platform in the United States for the first time. Bits and pieces of the application, which connects Wincor Nixdorf service management with customers via an electronic netw...

Increasingly, healthcare and financial services firms are investigating contact center applications that offer biometric security features -- specifically voice authentication -- as a way to meet new regulatory demands, according to one company active in this area. "The speaker verification market h...

For many companies, there is an uncomfortable truth that even with CRM systems in place, one big gaping hole comes up again and again in customer experience: it's the nagging issue of saving customers time. Does your CRM system really respect your customer's time, rather than your sales person's tim...

FrontRange has upgraded its HEAT Service and Support, a help desk and external customer support tool, for the first time since the beginning of last year, excluding the handful of patch versions the company has issued since then. This version, release 8.4, focuses on improvements to the user interfa...