CRM Players’ Accolades and Upgrades

TeleTech, a provider of business processing outsourcing solutions, has been placed in the “Leaders” quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant: Customer Management Contact Center BPO, Worldwide, 2011.

TeleTech’s integrated product road map combines a data-driven strategy, technology and associated resources to help customers drive revenue growth, increase profitability and improve customer loyalty and lifetime value.

Gartner’s 2011 report notes four customer management industry trends in the contact center space:

• the socioeconomic and demographic evolution of large customer management contact center BPO buying hubs or markets, such as North America and Western Europe, and the emergence of new markets;
• the increase in the numbers of mobile devices and richer content/interaction that is driving demand for CM contact center BPO, in both mature and emerging markets;
• growth in non-voice (multichannel), automated and cloud-enabled CM contact center BPO services — including self-service, analytics and multichannel services — being driven by technological changes, innovation, and a focus on service efficiency and effectiveness; and
• continued service provider consolidation as excess capacity is absorbed and service providers drive revenue growth and market share through mergers and acquisitions.

Yesmail Releases the ‘Look Book’ for Email Success

Yesmail, an Infogroup company that powers intelligent customer interactions, has announced the release of its “Look Book” in celebration of its recent awards for mobile-scalable email design. The guide showcases the creative design team’s work on presenting emails clearly in both traditional and mobile environments. The two Yesmail Interactive awards:

• The 2011 OMMA (Online Media, Marketing, and Advertising) Award for Best Email: CRM Campaign for the team’s work on HP’s Customer Revival Campaign; and
• The 2012 MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award for a Welcome Series campaign on behalf of Feld Entertainment: a Silver Prize winner in the “Best Triggered Email or Auto-Responder Series” category.

Holly Voice Platform Enhancements Adds Support for Call Control

Contact center solution provider West Interactive has released a major upgrade to its carrier grade Interactive Voice Response software. The Holly Voice Platform 6.0 is available through traditional software licensing, as part of a managed on-premises service or via West Interactive’s hosting services. Holly 6.0 adds support for an emerging standard for programming call control (CCXML) which can manage how phone calls are placed, answered and transferred.

“Holly has been a carrier grade platform for voice XML IVR,” Rob Castle, vice president of product management, told CRM Buyer. “By adding support for CCXML Version 1.0, users get much greater flexibility in terms of how conversations can be managed.”

Until now, platforms that have supported call control have used different standards for defining it, he added. “Unlike proprietary systems, you can now take an application written on one platform and move it to another. The industry likes to have standards — they’re a sign of a maturing of an industry technology.”

Holly 6.0 also includes enhancements to assist developers with building more powerful applications, including detection of telecommunications devices for the deaf, which takes appropriate action in response to callers who might not be able to hear automated voice prompts.

VBrick Delivers Standards-Based Solution for Video Conferencing

VBrick Systems unveiled its new Video Conference Streaming Gateway Module for its H.264 Distributed Media Engine at the ISE show in Amsterdam. VBrick claims it is the first to deliver a multivendor, standards-based solution to enable thousands of smartphones, tablets, PCs/Macs and TVs to display a video conference.

The new module provides a much more cost-effective way for organizations to integrate their current technology investments with VBrick on-demand streaming solutions to enable executive broadcasts, training events and marketing launches, according to the company.

The Video Conference Streaming Gateway Module has been successfully tested with a number of popular SIP-compliant video conferencing products from vendors including Polycom, Tandberg, LifeSize, Avaya and Radvision.

“This approach opens the door to all sorts of video streaming opportunities,” Mary Maguire, director of marketing for VBrick Systems, told CRM Buyer. “Usually it’s hard to get outside the firewall for large-scale video streaming. As a standards-based solution, the Streaming Gateway Module allows you to traverse all endpoints — including mobile devices — over any network, without having to engage in different coding.”

The Module becomes a participant in the video conference, she explained, ingesting the conference audio and video, transforming it, and delivering it as a stream to the other elements of VBrick’s infrastructure. The stream can then be centrally managed and delivered to thousands of users across multiple sites.

VBrick has also just released a white paper, “How Enterprises Can Ride the Video Mobility Wave.”