Call Centers

Driven by the housing market landslide and seizure of the global credit markets, economies the world over have slipped into retrenchment and recession. Many organizations are tightening capital and expense budgets, closing locations, shortening hours or reducing staff. Still others are tempted to re...

Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, said inContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players --...

The home-agent contact center model has undergone a metamorphosis in the last few years. A few short years ago, it was the refuge of small companies that couldn't afford to outsource operations to typical brick-and-mortar contact centers, said Alpine CEO Christopher Carrington. However, larger compa...

Chris Formant, president of Avaya Global Services, has been on the job since March 2008. It is no small irony that one year ago he was tasked with the assignment of strengthening the services group's financial and operating performance -- a significant undertaking, given that the services division t...

It's no secret that customers aren't buying much these days. The economic engines have locked and stalled, leaving businesses everywhere in freefall. While companies around the globe are jettisoning anything they can to slow the descent, none are ditching CRM. In fact, CRM may be the last remaining ...

Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision. The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in t...

Memo to telecom service providers: "We never thanked you, but you did a great job offering us consolidated billing. It is hard to remember now, as for the last few years you have been so aggressive in promoting bundled services, but five years ago, this was a major pain point. Three bills for ISP, c...

Voice today is at center stage in the enterprise. Carrier Session Internet Protocol trunks, enterprise SIP trunks, converged IP networks, federating private branch exchanges, unified communications and communication-enabled applications are but a few of the many voice initiatives you'll find underwa...

What mistakes will cause emergency communication systems to undergo excessive stress or possibly fail in a disaster, and what steps should be taken to improve performance? One of the biggest challenges for emergency communication centers is the wide range of situations that require responses -- incl...

Sure, Web-based chat applications on your site represent a leap in customer service and sales technology. But let's not forget that the brick-and-mortar standards still apply. If an end user is comfortable and finds your online rep trustworthy and predictive of his or her needs, the opportunities in...

With so many companies tightening their budgets in the midst of the tough, uncertain economic climate, there's a tendency to look at social networking as the new, free panacea. I've seen a few financial services and insurance companies start social networking strategies, promising to be open and rea...

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...

Last week, SugarCRM made version 5.1 generally available. With its beta release earlier this year, the open source CRM provider broke new ground, providing innovations in business intelligence and an intriguing mobile app for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Developers are particularly excited about t...

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...

At $2.4 billion, the global contact center marketplace has grown mature. However, trends in the industry are still driving much growth in the space, according to a newly released report by Gartner that looks at the market and its players. These trends include a move to IP-based systems, which in tur...