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TMCnet Call Center Software Week in Review

By Linda Dobel
TMCnet Contributor

After an abbreviated business week due to the Thanksgiving holiday, the call center software market was again on fire with news of new solutions. If you found yourself too busy playing catch-up to keep up with the call center software news TMCnet reported in this space this week, here is a recap the some major highlights.

Before we get started on what solutions were announced this week, however, it’s interesting to take a look at  a report  that TMCnet Contributor Mini Swamy posted on this TMCnet channel early this week that  notes it is a good thing to invest in CRM. That declaration is based on a study from Nucleus Research, a global provider of investigative, case-based technology research, which shows that investing in CRM produces a great return on investment.

Quoted in Swamy’s article was Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, who said, “With a return of $5.60 for every dollar spent, investing in CRM is a no-brainer. Further, that investment has significant staying power. As vendors add social, marketing, analytics, and mobile access capabilities to their offerings, organizations have an opportunity to gain even more returns from CRM.”

EarthLink will undoubtedly be glad to learn about that study as, we learned this week from a report by TMCnet Contributor Raju Shanbhaq that as part of its CRM infrastructure, EarthLink installed FuseSource’s Fuse ESB product. The objective is to provide a unified format for its customer care agents needed as a result of its recent business acquisitions, the article explained. EarthLink will reportedly use Fuse ESB to integrate a number of systems including operational systems for network inventory, billing and customer configurations among other functions within the acquired businesses.

A solution of interest that hit the market this week aims to quickly detect issues that my affect the end user experience. According to a report from TMCnet Contributor Anamika Singh, BMC Software (News - Alert)  has enhanced its Application Performance Management solution in an effort to help its users detect and isolate problems in a proactive manner that can lead to improved resolutions. According to the report, through real-time predictive analytics, the BMC application performance management solution can enable the prioritization and resolution of problems as much as 90 percent faster.

For businesses that find they need the benefits of a call center but don’t want to make an investment in the traditional set-up, TMCnet Contributor Carolyn J. Dawson reported this week that OKI (News - Alert) has launched the EXaaS Call Center Service, a cloud computing service intended for the Japanese market. The article says that OKI goes beyond standard, uniform call center menus to also respond to individual customer needs.

 The final note in this recap is a warning that TMCnet Contributor Raju Shanbhaq reported about Google Translate API v2.  He wrote that IceWarp (News - Alert) discovered a security lapse when it went to power its hosted business-grade multilingual business chat service called LiveWebAssist with Google Translate API v2. The article noted that IceWarp took steps to quickly eliminate the problem.

The president of IceWarp, Ladislav Goc, was quoted in the article as saying, “We were really surprised to find out that virtually anyone with basic hacking skills can steal a customer code. It is relatively easy, since Google (News - Alert) Translate is typically using JavaScript. The code is visible to everybody directly in the HTML code of the page.”

Despite the issue IceWarp encountered, Goc also said, “Google Translate is an outstanding product, and we are proud to be in the first batch of its paying customers.”