2017 has been a year of major changes in the contact center market: several significant acquisitions, vendors expanding their capabilities to support more channels of engagement, a continued trend to move products to the cloud and, as a result, more vendors expanding their global presence. One such vendor is NewVoiceMedia. When I last wrote about the company I pointed out that when it was founded in 2000 it was one of the first vendors to move telephony management to the cloud and offer contact center in the cloud services. At the time I wrote my perspective, it had just raised considerable funding to help it further develop the product and expand its presence around the globe.
NewVoiceMedia Invests for Contact Center in the Cloud Success
Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Customer Service, Contact Center, Omnichannel, Customer Journey Maps, Workforce Optimization
NICE Brings Employee Engagement to Enhance Customer Experience
2017 has been a year of major changes in the contact center market. There have been more acquisitions than in any year I can remember. There have also been more partnerships announced, which have at least in part been enabled by the advance of cloud-based systems. The move to the cloud has continued apace, along with the addition of new capabilities that allow employees to access systems from mobile devices. Vendors have of course announced many updates to existing systems, as well as exciting new developments around technologies such as video, collaboration, artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive analysis and bots. Moreover, several new vendors have popped out of the woodwork with innovative new products.
Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Service, Contact Center, Omnichannel, Workforce Optimization
Verint Desktop Provides Omnichannel Customer Experience
A lot is being written and said about the omnichannel customer experience and the role contact center agents play in providing such experiences. From the customer’s perspective, I think it boils down to four things: that the interaction is easy, personal to them, within the context of the relationship and previous interactions, and consistent no matter with whom or what technology they interact. From the agent or user’s perspective, it should be easy to find the information needed to resolve the interaction to the customer’s satisfaction, and he or she must be empowered to resolve any issues that arise.
Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Service, Contact Center, Omnichannel, Robotic Process Automation, Workforce Optimization
Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows the telephone is far from dead as a channel of customer engagement. Although the research shows other channels are likely to grow more quickly over the next two years, nearly half (46%) of organizations said they expect to see significant or some growth in the volume of calls they need to handle. So, as well as supporting additional digital channels of engagement, organizations must ensure the way they handle calls meets customer expectations. Primarily this means that there are no delays, voice quality is good and customers get consistent responses no matter who they engage with.
Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Service, Contact Center, Omnichannel, Workforce Optimization, Revenue
NICE Integrates Cloud Platform for Customer Engagement
Our benchmark research over the last couple of years confirms what we all instinctively know: Consumers engage with each other and organizations using an increasing number of engagement channels. Indeed, our latest research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud shows the average number of channels organizations now support has grown to almost eight. The same research confirms that organizations now realize the way to compete is to match or exceed customer expectations regarding how these interactions are handled. Summing these expectations up, customer engagement must be easy, personalized, in-context and above all consistent across all channels.
Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Customer Service, Contact Center, Omnichannel, Robotic Process Automation, Customer Journey Maps, Workforce Optimization
Aspect Software Makes Progress with New Customer Engagement Center
Not many years ago, building and running a contact center was a complex task. Organizations typically had to license all the systems they required (most of them proprietary and on-premises), customize them to meet their requirements and integrate them into a workable architecture. But beyond all the systems issues, the key to running the center was forecasting the right number of skilled agents that would be needed to handle expected interaction patterns and then routing calls to the most skilled agent for that specific interaction.
Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Customer Service, Contact Center, Omnichannel, Robotic Process Automation, Customer Journey Maps, Billing and Recurring Revenue, Workforce Optimization, Digital transformation
RingCentral Integrates Contact Center and Unified Communications
Customer engagement is undergoing its biggest transformation in decades. Consumers now use a significantly greater number and variety of channels to engage with organizations – everything from phone, email and the corporate website to social media, text messaging, chat, mobile apps and video. This is forcing organizations to change in order not to miss out on business opportunities.
Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Customer Service, Contact Center, Omnichannel, Robotic Process Automation, Customer Journey Maps, Billing and Recurring Revenue, Workforce Optimization
Technology Improves Customer Experience: Does Yours?
Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement finds that three-quarters (77%) of organizations participating in the research said it is very important to improve the way they engage with customers. The two main drivers behind this are improving the customer experience (cited by 74%) and improving performance of the customer service organization (70%). This is important because most companies said their customers have good experiences, but only one-third said that experience is excellent.
Topics: Mobile, Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Customer Service, Internet of Things, Contact Center, Digital Technology, Omnichannel, Customer Journey Maps, Billing and Recurring Revenue