Call Center Software Featured Article

TMCnet Call Center Software Week in Review

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

It's the end of the week, and time for another wrap-up of the last five days' happenings in the world of call center software.

The call center is constantly responsible for balancing cost with service, wrote TMCnet's Susan Campbell this week. Catering to customer demand is no longer enough; the call center today must be able to drive loyalty, identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities and deliver on multichannel performance expectations. To meet these lofty goals, a robust workforce management solution should be in place.

Consider the day when your spreadsheet approach to scheduling missed an overlap of two employee groups. You have one hour with too many people on the floor, not enough ringing phones and suddenly your shrinkage just increased exponentially. You’ve already overspent for staff you didn’t need and morale suffered as every agent realized the mistake too late. The opposite can have even more dire effects when the overlap means you have too few people on the phones and service quality suffers.

Call centers are a symphony of collaboration and organization requiring the careful management of a number of unique faculties to be fully realized. But the most complex system you’ll need to manage is not one that you’ll house in your server room or purchase from a provider, it’s the human element. Ensuring that your agents are not only happy, but meeting their requirements is just as essential as maintaining your ACD or metrics programs, and because people don’t come with instructions or a tech hotline, it’s also much more challenging.

If there was any doubt on the increased importance of contact centers, the recent earnings growth of contact center software company 8X8 should put that debate to bed. Despite self-service channels and mobile applications, customers still want personalized and direct interaction with a company and the contact center serves to fulfill that role.

Part of the revenue increase can be put on the acquisition of Contactual (News - Alert), which helped 8X8 attract larger customers, such as Jamba and General Electric, according to this Fierce Enterprise Communications report. After the acquisition, the company began seeing increases in revenue, which is up to $23.3 million in the third quarter (31 percent increase from this time last year).

Customer Relationship Metrics, a provider of managed call center analytics and advisory service, announced the findings of a study on the importance of big data in today’s IT scenarios and the challenges associated with implementing big data analytics strategies in enterprises. The study was conducted using Nielsen McKinsey’s NM Incite technology, which collects user-generated content from over 180 million sites worldwide, including blogs, message boards, usenet groups, Twitter (News - Alert), Facebook, and video and image sites.

Finally, AltiGen Communications, a provider of integrated Microsoft-based Unified Communications solutions, this week revealed that Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation has recently deployed AltiGen's (News - Alert) MaxACD call center operations software for Microsoft Lync. Milwaukee Electric Tool, which manufactures and markets heavy-duty power tools and hand tools, picked AltiGen's MaxACD call center operations software for Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync as part of its continuous IT/communications infrastructure upgrades that kicked off in 2010.

That's all for this week in the world of call center software. See you again next week!

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO registration, click here.

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