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 »
Are you the type of person who can’t wait to see what’s in the next smart phone release? All the bells and whistles, bigger, faster, better. You may have similar feelings about new contact center technologies. Here are 5 cutting edge technologies that are poised to move beyond early adopters. TEXT: With this channel, customers… Read More »
As consultants, we often hear clients complain about their technology. But when probed for suggestions to improve their circumstances, they’ll say, “We don’t know what we don’t know!” This post and the associated full-length article explore practical ways that you can close the knowledge gap and take responsibility for getting more from your technology. FIRST:… Read More »