Contact Center Solutions

In today’s highly competitive consumer marketplaces, effective customer engagement becomes the key differentiator that can separate an organization from the pack and enable it to quickly win market share over domestic and international competitors. Having the capability to quickly respond to marketplace forces and impactful events to deliver performance improvement is critical to immediate and long-term success.

As companies face commoditization of their product and service offerings, they need...

The cloud contact center market is experiencing tremendous growth, while the on-premise sector struggles on. NewVoiceMedia, a leading provider of integrated cloud contact center services, experienced fourfold growth between Q1 2011 and 2012, and now serves more than 8000 agents in 30 countries including PhotoBox, QlikTech and SHL.

NewVoiceMedia’s CEO Jonathan Gale believes that the contact center market has lacked innovation from traditional on-premise vendors for many years. The company is...

Expert Planet - Why and How We Use Virtual Agents

Expert Planet designs, develops and measures targeted sales and marketing campaigns for some of the largest organizations on the planet. Using a unique community of topical experts—talented agents with sales skills and specialized knowledge relevant to client programs—this outsourced contact center service provider is able to quickly deploy, test, measure, and optimize client programs, without operating a physical contact center.In four years, the...

Using Workforce Productivity Solutions and Practices to Turn the Contact Center into a Profit Center

The traditional view of the contact center as a cost center that needs to be managed solely for efficiency is outmoded. For your company to remain competitive, your contact center has to go beyond cost savings and evolve into a revenue contributor.

The enormous potential of the contact center as a tool to build customer loyalty, win new customers, and increase revenue has now been recognized by...

Mobile WFM: Defining Success for Next Generation Contact Centers

Many contact centers now draw their staff from the millennial generation who largely use smartphones and tablets for their personal and social communication. For these progressive organizations, adopting a mobile WFM solution is often the defining element in successful operation. Leveraging  mobile Web-enabled devices to connect contact center managers, supervisors and agents can increase efficiency as well as staff and customer...

Roadmap for Selecting a Contact Center Infrastructure

Choosing a new contact center infrastructure is one of the most crucial decisions your business can make. But with so many premise- and cloud-based solutions available, the selection process can be daunting This white pape,r by respected industry analyst Donna Fluss, provides a detailed roadmap that will get you to the best option for your business, and outlines how your organization can:

• Narrow your choices swiftly and intelligently,...

Recently we have noticed a new call center layout trend from several of our customers: classroom style layouts for their agent workstations.  Since Interior Concepts is fortunate enough to work with contact centers from across the county, we have a unique opportunity to identify call center trends.  This layout has three benefits for contact centers.

The first benefit is visibility.  The classroom style layout allows supervisors to easily see all agents.  This setup also allows agents to face the...

The global consumer electronics market was estimated at $681 billion in 2010 by Business Insights and 83% of consumers say that their purchase decison is influenced by support services accoding to Research Now. And consumers now have questions that frequently go beyond the realm of standard service agreements, involving multiple interconnected devices and programs from separate sources. 

So it's no wonder that OEMs, ISP carriers, software vendors and major retailers are all seeking...

I'm the new kid on the block here at CRMXchange,but since I've been involved in customer-related issues since the prehistoric days when CTI was the golly-gee tecnhology and it was still acceptable to use the dreaded 'T" word to summarize the industry as a whole, I'm not all that new and hardly a kid.

I've seen the terminology migrate from customer service to customer care, to customer relations management--before it became the acronym we now all know and love. But the growing demand for immediate...

Workforce management (WFM) has been at the foundation of efficient contact center and customer care operations for decades. Today, over 30 years since the first WFM solution found its way to the call center, WFM is experiencing a surge in industry interest and demand. With market penetration rates of over 50 percent and the benefits of precise workforce scheduling well-understood in the market, this renewed interest is not due to any previous lack of information about WFM. Rather, it is likely...

The main topics of interest at the IQPC Call Center Week Las Vegas were ‘cloud’ and ‘multi-channel’.  Attendees were also concerned with the use of social media.

How customers connect to companies is evolving.  Customers want to connect on their own terms with the channel that suites them best.  Vendors are attempting to respond to the customer’s needs with a variety of new solutions.  Below is a recap of exciting technologies and solutions that were at the event.

360'CRM   is a full spectrum CRM...

The latest generation entering the workforce brings a new energy to the contact center, which also brings new challenges to the table for call center management.  But this generation also represents the new social customer, so understanding what makes them “tick” can provide invaluable insight into what motivates your customers.

Donna Fluss, a recognized thought leader and innovator in contact center and real-time analytics, will join Knowlagent CEO, Matt  McConnell,  for an interactive webinar on...

The "US Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide" is the major annual report studying the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of US contact center operations. Taking a random sample of the industry, a detailed structured questionnaire was asked to 210 contact center managers and directors between November 2011 and February 2012. Analysis of the results was carried out in February and March 2012. The result is the 5th edition of the largest and most comprehensive study of all aspects...

The contact center landscape is experiencing significant changes, both in the business model itself and its underlying technology. The ability to access telephony and applications over the Internet has increased the flexibility of the contact center workforce, introducing a new trend: the work-at home agent. Driven by a greater need for both flexibility and cost control, cloud contact center solutions (also known as hosted contact centers) are seeing double-digit growth rates.

Cloud contact...

With the growing interest and application of assessments as part of a data-driven talent acquisition process, understanding factors that may limit your organization’s use of assessments is important.  Your recruiting process is potentially one of those factors.  The recruiting and sourcing process potentially creates a bottleneck that reduces the effectiveness of your assessment tools and ultimately your talent acquisition process.

The validation process is an important step in the setting up...

With the growing interest and application of assessments as part of a data-driven talent acquisition process, understanding factors that may limit your organization’s use of assessments is important.  Your recruiting process is potentially one of those factors.  The recruiting and sourcing process potentially creates a bottleneck that reduces the effectiveness of your assessment tools and ultimately your talent acquisition process.

The validation process is an important step in the setting up...

Contact center executives like the certainty contact demand, resource availability, operational efficiency, and maybe most importantly, the certainty of agent performance and customer experience delivery.

However, certainty is the one thing that the manager of such a complex operation will never have.

The best equipped contact center executives tame the uncertainty of their environment with good management and with the help of mathematical models. These models provide the next best thing to...

It should come as no surprise that people are frequently dissatisfied and annoyed with the level of customer service they receive from the companies and organizations with which they do business. Surveys consistently find that many people are not getting the kind of service and help they feel they deserve. Complaints run the gamut from not being able to find answers on company Web sites, to not being able to speak with a knowledgeable company representative. Given the countless...

As the contact center landscape changes, so too must the reporting and analysis solutions that drive decision-making and performance management. Each contact center is a unique mixture of systems, applications, people and culture serving a specific customer or client segment, each will need a different roadmap to their destination.

There are four common reasons that contact centers are driven to undertake this journey in the first place:

1. Current reports don't meet requirements: Typically,...