While the contact center business is not the most dynamic market, it is undergoing more changes than I have ever seen. One of the biggest changes is coming about because of cloud computing. This trend was led by salesforce.com, and the impact is now being felt in the contact center market as more vendors start to provide a “contact center in the cloud.” I recently wrote about inContact , one of the first vendors to provide a full contact center in the cloud. Recently inContact announced an...
Read More
Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Data Management,
Customer Experience,
Customer Feedback Management,
Social CRM,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
InContact,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Desktop Analytics,
Text Analytics,
Unified Communications,
Workforce Management,
Siemens Enterprise Communications
Providing good customer service has never been easy, but today it’s more challenging than ever, because of three factors. First is the growing overlap between marketing, sales and customer service. This is driven by customers’ increased expectations about the quality of customer service, the consistency of responses they receive during interactions and privacy legislation that limits companies’ collection and use of customer information and unsolicited contact. These circumstances put pressure...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Operational Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Voice of the Customer Interactive Intelligence
My research into customer analytics shows three important things: Text analytics are at the early adopter stage; companies still use spreadsheets as their main tool for analysis; and to move companies away from spreadsheets vendors must offer tools that are as easy to use as spreadsheets. That’s no easy task, given the huge volume and varied types of text data companies are generating and the complexity of analyzing unstructured text. However, the research also indicates that this challenge...
Read More
Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Social CRM,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Desktop Analytics,
Text Analytics
I have been writing quite a lot lately about the contact center in the cloud. Now it seems that more vendors are moving in this direction. One of them, inContact has evolved from a telecommunications carrier into a software vendor and now has a suite of products for a contact center in the cloud. It includes many of the necessary communications management capabilities (such as ACD, IVR, CTI and autodial) as well as key workforce optimization applications such as interaction recording, quality...
Read More
Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Customer Feedback Management,
Social CRM,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
InContact,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Workforce Performance,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
Desktop Analytics,
Text Analytics,
Unified Communications,
Workforce Management
Twenty years ago, when I began consulting in the contact center industry, building a call center was a hard, resource-consuming task. Just to begin handling calls required purchasing lots of proprietary equipment, such as PBXs and automatic call distributors (ACDs), as well as software for computer/telephony integration (CTI) and business applications such as case management and CRM – and then spending a lot of time and effort integrating them. Lots of tasks were managed using spreadsheets, and...
Read More
Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Sales Performance,
SAP,
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Data Management,
Customer Experience,
Customer Feedback Management,
Social CRM,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
InContact,
LiveOps,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Workforce Performance,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Desktop Analytics,
Interactive Intelligence,
Text Analytics,
Unified Communications,
Workforce Management,
Contactual
Interactive Intelligence (ININ) recently invited partners, consultants and analysts to Portugal to hear about the latest developments in its products. Not surprisingly given the extensive range of products it now supports, none of us had much time to enjoy Lisbon but were put through an intensive program of presentations and discussions.
Read More
Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Customer Feedback Management,
Social CRM,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
RightNow,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Workforce Performance,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Desktop Analytics,
Interactive Intelligence,
Text Analytics,
Unified Communications,
Workforce Management
IQPC Europe, a global organizer of business conferences, recently held its Executive Customer Contact Exchange, where contact center and customer service executives and senior managers gathered to find out about developments in the management of customer interactions and the customer experience. Attendees had a variety of reasons for coming; the largest group consisted of attendees who (29%) said they were interested in customer experience management (CEM), while others expressed interest in...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Customer Experience,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
Creating the technology architecture for a modern contact center is no easy task. To do so, companies typically have to integrate lots of technology: systems to manage their communication channels (voice, e-mail, postal mail, mobile, Web, IM, etc.), systems to route interactions to the best available resource to handle the interaction, be it human or automated (routing, IVR, CTI, etc.), applications to manage the workforce that is handling interactions (quality monitoring, workforce management,...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Contactual
According to IBM everything now has to be “smart,” and its latest announcement heralding smarter commerce addresses customer-related activities. I find it interesting, as I have been researching for some time about the need for a smarter agent desktop and smarter Web self-service. My perspective, derived from observations in my research, is that companies need to focus on effectiveness in providing positive customer experiences rather than today’s almost exclusive focus on efficiency in...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Customer Experience,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Call Center,
Commerce,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
There is a lot of talk today about customer experience management, but use of the term is vague, much as customer relationship management meant different things to different people. For some it is much the same as CRM, for others it is about using the voice of the customer to gain insights to make customer-related decisions. I have another view. Let’s consider phone calls, which according to my research into the use of technology in contact centers, is still the main way consumers interact with...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
The contact center market is buzzing with talk about cloud-based computing. It began with applications such as CRM from salesforce.com, then came IBM with services based on hardware in the cloud and recently vendors such as Contactual, inContact, and LiveOps have brought nearly complete contact centers into the cloud. As well, vendors such as Interactive Intelligence have announced communications in the cloud. Now I have always considered public communications to be in the cloud: How else does...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
CallTower,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
Running a contact center has never been easy, and today it is harder than ever. Customers have become more demanding of good service and less tolerant of errors and are inclined to communicate over multiple channels of communications. Companies not only have to get all the technology together to handle all these forms of interactions but must also ensure that their contact center agents are working as efficiently and effectively as possible. My latest research into the technologies companies...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
VPI,
Operational Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
With the new year has come a significant advance in contact center technologies, enabling enterprises to roll out new applications and interaction-handling processes in record time. What used to take six months to a year to develop and deploy – and that was considered fast! – can now be done in a week or two, creating more potential for innovation in contact centers than I have seen in the last 20 years.
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Cloud Computing,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
Recently I wrote that Genesys is transforming itself from a near-pure-play CTI/call routing vendor into an agent performance and customer experience management vendor. If you look at its parent company, Alcatel-Lucent, you can begin to understand why. Alcatel-Lucent has three basic businesses – voice networks, data networks and Genesys. Its 2010 results show that voice represents 48 percent of the business, data 21 percent and Genesys 31 percent; growth came from its data networks and Genesys...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Lucent,
Operational Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
NICE Systems has announced its financial results for 2010, and they make impressive reading in what many consider a difficult market, for contact center systems. I’m not prone to quoting financial figures, but with revenues up to US$695 million (from US$589 million) and non-GAAP profit and margin up to US$451.9 million and 65%, respectively (from US$371.1 million and 63.1%), it certainly seems NICE’s customers are in safe hands. The company also is generating lots of cash, so potential...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
NICE Systems,
Operational Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
My latest research into contact center analytics shows how important it has become for companies to improve the way they monitor and assess the performance of their centers. In fact 41% said they could significantly improve the performance of their centers by using analytics, and 47% think they could improve somewhat. Their main requirements are to have more real-time operational analysis and metrics – that is, better insights into what is going on in their centers at the moment people need to...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Jacada,
Operational Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
In the contact center market Genesys is synonymous with computer/telephony integration (CTI) and call routing. It was the first vendor to combine routing of calls to agents and using CTI to pop screens onto the agent’s desktop when the call was put through. Genesys has been adding products to its portfolio and now has expanded into what Ventana Research terms agent performance management (APM) and our benchmark research. Many vendors and other analyst firms use the term workforce optimization...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Genesys,
Operational Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
One of the problems in the contact center and IT worlds is that terms mean different things to different people. Take “contact center” for example. The meaning was clear when it was just the call center because people knew it was a place that centralized the handling of customer phone calls. It became the virtual call center when calls were distributed over multiple sites. Then it became the contact center because some companies started to ask agents (a term that is interchanged with customer...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Cloud Computing,
Uncategorized,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Verint
Among the important findings of our latest benchmark research on contact center analytics were these two: 88 percent of companies said they can use analytics to improve the performance of the contact center (41% said they could make significant improvement), and the main issue holding them back from doing that is an excessive reliance on spreadsheets (90% indicated they use spreadsheets on a regular or universal basis).
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Customer Relationship Management,
Enkata,
Operational Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer Service,
Call Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
Aurix is not a widely recognized vendor in the speech analytics market even though its technology powers products provided by companies such as CallCopy, KnoahSoft, NewVoiceMedia and OnviSource. In fact its strategy is to provide the engine that these and other partners use in market-facing speech analytics solutions. Its main product, Aurix speech search SDK, is a search engine that searches through call recordings to find specified words, terms and phrases. It uses advanced phonetic search...
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
Customer Relationship Management,
Customer Service,
Uncategorized,
Call Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
Voice Analytics