Call Centers

On my way out of Fenway Park the other night, I found a credit card on the sidewalk -- an American Express platinum card to be specific. When I got to a well-lit place, I called one of the numbers on the back of the card and began my odyssey. I am not picking on Amex and I have been a member of Amex...

Last year, SAP spin-off company Tealeaf introduced software that allows call center agents and other customer service representatives to see what customers see through their Web browsers through an application called "cxReveal." Now, the company has announced an upgrade to that software that integra...

Earlier this year, we did a study of attrition in the call center. We wanted to know why even good or great call centers have such persistently high rates of attrition, especially when on-boarding new agents. On-boarding is the process that starts with hiring and continues through training and the i...

Call centers for PC companies placed dead last in customer satisfaction in a survey released Tuesday by an international consulting group. The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based CFI Group found PC call centers scored a 64, the lowest customer satisfaction score of all the industries surveyed. "Scores in the six...

Cost increases are squeezing margins for outsourcing companies providing software and call center services to U.S. customers from popular international destinations. No immediate price increases for U.S. customers are possible for suppliers that are locked into fixed-term contracts in U.S. dollars,...

Call center software developer CosmoCom normally has an appetite for enterprise-scale customers. Now, it is employing a new business model with a product introduced in South Korea aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. CosmoCom teamed with KT Networks -- a company within the Korea Telecom family f...

If the reports of Avaya's acquisition are accurate, Texas Pacific Group and Silver Lake Partners are near to closing the largest leveraged buyout of a computer networking company. Avaya, TPG and Silver Lake are declining to comment, but reports say the two private equity firms will pay about $8 bill...

211 is more than a mere convenience to callers seeking information about critical health and human services available in their communities; it can literally be a lifesaver. "The heightened threat of terrorism in the post-9/11 world and the increase in frequency of environmental emergencies has raise...

Salesforce.com continues to carve its user base -- and prospective user base -- into finer and finer niches, which it then targets with new products. The rollout of the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com exemplifies that strategy. Salesforce.com introduced a contact center application w...

The most common and least understood marketing barrier facing outsourcing service providers is the absence of a strong brand. Most brands associated with IT and IT-enabled services companies are chosen on the basis of criteria relevant to where outsourcing firms are based, rather than where they int...

Five9's Virtual Call Center products -- on-demand contact center applications -- are now fully compatible with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. Essentially, what this means is that the system, which requires only a Windows-based PC, Internet connection and headset, can now support Vista....

The stage is set for further growth in VoIP communications with technological advances, telecom market deregulation and a growing web of fiber optic and wireless networks. India is now recognized worldwide as a center for offshore call centers, but a range of companies in other emerging market count...

When Royal Caribbean tapped Steelcase Applied Research to help it outfit a new call center in Oregon, the cruise line didn't require any guidance on what chairs it wanted its reps to use. In fact, the company had given a great deal of thought to what might seem to outsiders to be the most basic of a...

Apptix on Monday announced Apptix Voice, its new hosted VoIP product aimed at small and medium-sized businesses looking for an integrated e-mail and phone solution. A provider of on-demand messaging and collaboration products, Apptix is offering the solution via a SaaS delivery model. It works with ...

As the saying goes: You can't change the weather -- but you can prepare for it. Recent, highly-publicized airline and product call center overflow problems have highlighted the serious and potentially humiliating problems that can occur when a call center is not sufficiently staffed to handle a cris...