Both Human Resources and the Contact Center play a key role in optimizing the “talent acquisition” process. HR has broad responsibility and perspective to support enterprise-wide needs, and its pursuit of technology generally aligns with that charter. But the Contact Center often struggles to get value from HR’s enterprise-wide tools and services, or seeks its… Read More »
Every contact center looks for ways to be more effective and efficient in handling customer contacts. Process improvement is a high impact opportunity. Yet we see few centers focus attention on the agent desktop, a common hindrance to smooth processes and a ripe target to enable dramatic changes. Given the potential payback, agent desktop optimization… Read More »
The “Cloud” contact center technology market is maturing and the vendors are all in. A solid, experienced set of cloud-only players set the competitive stage, led by companies like 8×8, Five9, inContact (recently acquired by NICE), LiveOps, and Transera. These companies have enough market presence to make Gartner Magic Quadrants or other analyst evaluations. There… Read More »
Every small center aspires to deliver good (or great!) service to customers and offer a good (or great!) place for employees to work. The realities of small centers and big technology can make these rather simple goals feel rather daunting. Although sophisticated contact center technology has been available a long time, robust solutions at an… Read More »
The entry point to the contact center – identification and verification (aka authentication), along with routing – is a make or break moment for the customer experience. All too often it is unpleasant at best, and downright irritating at worst. Prompts are arguably the most hated and frustrating part of any contact, with routing to… Read More »
Mainstream technologies get a lot of press. As the backbone of contact center operations, they’re on everyone’s radar and they need to function at peak efficiency. But I’d like to put a spotlight on a few niche technologies and tell you why I find them intriguing Desktop and process analytics (DPA) captures and analyzes all… Read More »
Over the years, we’ve watched key players in contact center technology evolve their solution positioning from enterprise communication with contact center (CC) applications, to unified communications (UC), to converging CC and UC. They want the market to take notice as their core technology advances, their product portfolios offer more complete and innovative solutions, and/or they’ve… Read More »
As companies make decisions about sourcing for new contact center technology, a crucial question to answer is whether to pursue “best-of-breed” (BoB) solutions or solutions that are part of a “suite.” The BoB strategy was common when vendors had a more narrow focus. For example, there were “CTI vendors” or “IVR vendors” and “WFM vendors”… Read More »
Too often, the pursuit of technology is driven by speed and constrained by resources. Experience shows this to be a bad combination.Technology success demands careful implementation planning as well as effective technology monitoring and support. Implementation and Testing Getting implementation right takes time, well-structured plans, and commitment from the contact center, IT, vendors and/or their partners…. Read More »
The number and types of vendors offering contact center solutions has grown dramatically. Cloud, hosted, and managed service providers provide broad functionality, often with innovative licensing arrangements. Seasoned premise solution players make long-proven capabilities available in the cloud. And they are all pursuing centers across a wide spectrum of sizes and vertical markets. The proliferation… Read More »