Call Centers

Call centers that rely on VoIP without proper security measures could find themselves facing degraded quality of service, slowdowns, or no service at all. In addition, insecure lines could lead to information theft, leaving a call center liable.

Professional courtesy, that's what I call it. It's the punch line to the question, "Why don't sharks eat lawyers?" It's also my reason for not criticizing other analysts in public. Besides, there's too much to write about to bother picking a public fight. If someone wants to promote a flat-earth t...

Quite a few companies are offering solutions that provide automated customer service in one way or another. There is a lot to be said about this trend, and much of it is good. The days of long waits on hold or frustrating attempts to navigate a series of phone menus are winding down, and in many ca...

Call center operator InfoCision Management Corp. is adding teleservices representatives. Over the coming months several hundred people will join the company's call centers in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This growth seems to fly in the face of expectations following the implementation of th...

RightNow Technologies and UCN will team up to deliver an on-demand contact center solution, the companies announced today. The partnership will combine RightNow's on-demand CRM applications for customer service and UCN's hosted communications infrastructure for call centers in a system that will all...

With recent regulatory developments in the industry and routine call center functions moving to offshore teleservices vendors, there is no time like the present for the Call Center Research Laboratory established at the University of Southern Mississippi a few weeks ago. The CCRL, led by USM profess...

Last week Salesforce.com introduced a new call and contact center service called Supportforce.com. It's a slick package that includes the hardware and software any company needs to initiate or enhance call center activities right down to voice over IP. Salesforce now joins the ranks of companies suc...

Almost one-third of the world's financial institutions have outsourced work overseas, and the practice has spawned consumer and political backlash. But according to many analysts, the benefits outweigh the negative publicity incurred by financial services giants such as American Express and Discover...

A fire at a telecommunications hub in Chennai, India, crippled call centers across the country yesterday, and voice and data service interruptions continued this morning. Cell phone customers of Tamil Nadu were also impacted by the fire at a Bharti Tele-Ventures Limited telecommunications facility i...

German software giant SAP has opened a support center in China to serve its customers in China, Japan and Korea, the company said in a statement. The center will be based in Dalian, an industrial city in northeastern China. According to the company, 130 native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean a...

With Hurricanes Charley and Frances inflicting an estimated $40 billion worth of damage to the state of Florida in just three weeks, insurance companies have been forced onto high alert. "Natural disasters are our business," Jeanne Salvatore, spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, told...

After years of job losses due to the decline in the manufacturing and lumber industries, the Pacific Northwest may be seeing a bright spot for growth as call centers target the region. Oregon seems to have more pull when it comes to new centers being put in. Recently, Royal Caribbean chose the state...

A fully interactive, Web-based three-day conference and expo set for November is designed to connect contact center professionals with developers of IP technology and industry experts in what the promoters say is the first-ever virtual event of its kind for call centers. The IP ONLINE Conference and...

It's that time again; the earnings calls for CRM, ERP, hardware and services vendors are being scheduled, rehearsed and delivered to shareholders, industry and financial analysts. What's common across the more than two dozen calls I've listened to that span CRM, ERP and SCM software, hardware and se...

Maine isn't normally considered a hotbed for emerging-technology entrepreneurialism. Yet that's where IntelliCare, a healthcare call center outsourcing company, started in 1997. By 1999, the company had put its Yankee pragmatism to work to create a distributed networking model for telephonic nursing...