Call Centers

Increasingly, healthcare and financial services firms are investigating contact center applications that offer biometric security features -- specifically voice authentication -- as a way to meet new regulatory demands, according to one company active in this area. "The speaker verification market h...

In buying a U.S. company, liabilities do not cease once a seller has completed a deal. The allocation of liabilities is usually determined in the acquisition agreement. Acquisition agreements are described in the previous article in this series. The role of indemnifications in mergers and acquisi...

Walk into a typical command center and what do you see? A wall or desktop filled with multiple screens reporting statistics from a number of disparate systems. Details from a leading-edge workforce management solution are prominently displayed on one screen, stats from the ACD are on another monitor...

There are a few challenges facing the North American customer care outsourcing industry that may dampen growth in the coming years, according to a new Frost & Sullivan report that projects earned revenues to reach US$20.1 billion in 2012 from $19.5 billion in 2005. These predictions are intentio...

While enterprise PBX product lines continue to register the highest level of growth in the telephony market, newly emerging trends will eventually realign use and deployment patterns, according to a survey conducted by market researcher Dell'Oro Group. These include a shift to hybrid systems and a n...

Oracle has acquired Telephony@Work, an on-demand provider of IP-based software infrastructure for hosted contact center services. Telephony@Work provided much of the functionality in Oracle's OnDemand Contact Center application via an OEM deal the company had with Siebel, which Oracle has since acqu...

RightNow Technologies has introduced two new voice applications that provide contact center agents with enough identifying information about the customer to eliminate the need to repeat information when a call is transferred to a new agent. The new functionality addresses a long-standing customer c...

In a major leap for a company that only recently introduced the Software as a Service model, SAP announced it is combining its on-demand CRM application with its on-premise CRM suite in a new product it calls SAP CRM 2006s. "We are moving our entire CRM product [line] to the hybrid model," Angela Ba...

Lest any doubt remains that U.S. customers do not appreciate hearing heavy accents when they're on the phone with contact center agents, a new survey reveals that this is, in fact, one of the top sources of frustration among those who call for assistance. Difficult-to-understand accents was the top ...

Genesys has released two products aimed at easing deployment of the Genesys Voice Platform by two of its user constituencies: managed service providers of Genesys applications and companies that have implemented both SAP and Genesys. The Genesys Customer Interaction Portal for Self-Service signals a...

Avaya has rolled out two products aimed at expanding its footprint in the mid-market segment, as well as a completely new venture for the on-demand space. The new applications include a single-server product called Avaya MultiVantage Express, which offers IP telephony, messaging, contact center and ...

Cisco Systems has released the next version of its Unified CRM Connector. Like previous versions, it links into the Microsoft CRM application to provide integrated contact center-CRM functionality. Version 3.0 of the Unified CRM Connector, however, is much more appealing to users than its predecesso...

Aspect Software has announced it is supporting the emerging open source Internet protocol for PBX -- the Asterisk Business Edition -- with a software package that includes the Asterisk Business Edition license; SIP phones; application servers and IP gateways; interoperability with Aspect contact cen...

The trend of Americans and Canadians buying call centers in India is driven by the low cost of these facilities and by the speed with which buyers can begin using them. The first article in this series focuses on the advantages of buying a facility with less than 100 seats in Bangalore, primarily ...

Paul English, a Massachusetts-based software engineer turned customer service "guru," has become famous nearly overnight for his "dial zero for a human" automated phone system revolt. Judging from the widespread phenomenon and national attention, this is a customer service movement long overdue. H...