Many contact centers continue to operate at suboptimal levels. Case in point: One financial services company has managed to turn "press zero to talk to a human" into not just a selling point but a major advertising campaign. While some great leaps in efficiency and quality have been made over the pa...
Do loyal customers translate into steady sales or profits? Intuitively, the answer should be yes -- and indeed, customer loyalty is a significant metric by which companies rate their performance. However, there a few problems with the concept of customer loyalty and a corporate strategy to develop i...
What is unified communications and why do you need it? UC is not unified messaging, and it isn't a unified desktop. But both of these technology solutions help to support a unified communications architecture. In fact, according to Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company, UC is the convergence of such techn...
Retailers' approach to interaction between e-commerce and the contact center is changing. The online and call center channels are starting to meld together, and perspectives on how retailers handle the two have to change. A typical shopping experience today may go something like this: The customer b...
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 sati...
The contact center has become the focal point of the customer interaction. Customers spend more time researching products, managing account and order information, resolving issues, and utilizing self-service than they do within the traditional brick-and-mortar storefront. This requires contact cente...
After reading the book Mindset: The Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol S. Dweck, I began to wonder if her concepts of fixed versus growth mindsets were either accentuated or diminished when it came to customer relationship strategies enabled with SaaS-based applications. The many benefits of the Saa...
An increasing global customer base is driving companies to provide "follow-the-sun" customer support services. In order to enable this level of support, agents are now being located in any part of the world. The challenge is to merge technologies and provide seamless, accurate and real-time customer...
Companies' integrated voice recognition applications are being stretched thinner and thinner. Even with the best interface designs in place, customers are still abandoning calls before completion. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the Aberdeen Contact Center Analytics benchmark report are...
As technology collides with forces of globalization, contact centers and the executives who run them find themselves in the midst of five megatrends. These trends present unique opportunities for these executives to add strategic value to their business, reposition themselves within their organizati...
OpenSpan, a Microsoft partner, rolled out an application integration platform that allows users of Microsoft's Customer Care Framework 2008 -- which was also introduced Wednesday -- to link together older applications and custom-built systems with the front-end agent desktop. Built on the Microsoft ...
Companies' integrated voice recognition applications are being stretched thin. Even when the best interface designs are in place, customers are abandoning calls before completion. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the "Contact Center Analytics" benchmark were either seeing poorer performa...
SAS added a new application to its lineup of customer service analytical offerings. SAS Real Time Decision Manager embeds analytically driven decision logic at every customer interaction. The Decision Manager tool was introduced during Gartner's CRM conference this week, along with an updated versio...
The contact center has become the focal point of customer interaction. The method by which the customer interacts with the contact center dwarfs all other modes of interaction. Whether it occurs via phone, chat, e-mail, self-service Web or self-service IVR, the customer is inundating the contact cen...
My last few columns have been focused on new technologies that are making their way into the broader CRM suite. Expanding the CRM suite has never been easier, as platform vendors like Salesforce.com provide all the capabilities necessary for innovative developers to add something to the ensemble. He...
Good - It's entertaining and makes sporting events more interesting.
Bad - It increases the risk of gambling addiction and financial loss.
Neutral - The benefits and drawbacks are equally significant.
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CX Center Stage at Oracle CloudWorld
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New Sweetwater CEO Amplifies Vision for Music Retail
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Is Generative AI the Next Big CX Thing Despite Its Risks?
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Customer Analytics Now a Pivotal Piece of the Retail Sales Puzzle
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Marketers’ Texting Schedule Can Make or Break Consumer Engagement
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Subscription Sales Spur Superior Selling
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Customer Commerce Offers SMBs an E-Commerce Path to Better CX
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The Price Retailers Pay for Flawed Product Information
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AI Is Already at a Tipping Point
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