CUSTOMER — May 2015

The Rise of Martech: How Software is Eating the Marketing World

High-tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen in 2011 famously wrote that software is eating the world. Just recently marketing has become part of the smorgasbord. The always-on consumer, artificial intelligence, automation, big data, cloud communications, digitization, mobility, and good old-fashioned competition are transforming marketing as we know it. People and companies that had once used a combination of art and experience to formulate their messages and reach......Read More >>>

CUSTOMER Magazine Announces the 2015 CRM Excellence Award Winners
The CRM market remains an important and crowded one. And, like so many areas of customer service, marketing, and sales - and our world in general - it's increasingly moving to the cloud.

MyDigitalClients Launches SaaS-Based Marketing and Team Sales Solution
Organizations that want but cannot afford CRM, marketing automation, and/or social media marketing solutions may now be able to find what they're looking for in MDC DOT. The software-as-a-service from Texas-based MyDigitalClients delivers all the above-mentioned functions through an affordable and easy to use online portal.

Foreign Language Services
Here's a short list of some of the companies that offer translation services to help businesses engage with customers.

Leverage the Power of Top Performers to Drive Performance Improvement
CUSTOMER Magazine recently spoke with Mark Miller, contact center practice leader for J.D. Power, a leading market research company. We asked Mark to talk with us about some keys to utilizing customer-based research to drive performance improvement.

Omni-channel Callback Solutions: A Today Way to Connect with Customers
Your customers are everywhere, and they are busy people with a low tolerance for waiting and a desire for immediate gratification and personalized service. An omni-channel callback solution can help you meet, or even exceed, their expectations, while increasing customer loyalty and driving new revenues.

Telecom Testing & Monitoring: TelcoAlert Ensures Businesses Can Answer the Call
Every business seems to have a tale to tell about how its phone service or IVR system failed, and no one at the organization was aware of the problem for hours. Such outages might seem like a blip in the grand scheme of things, but the fact is that even a 30-minute failure can add up to big losses for a business.

Verint Exec Explains How Actionable Intelligence Can Optimize Engagement
Verint delivers solutions that help businesses get the most out of their customer service employees and optimize customer engagement. Just as Verint's solutions focus on people, so too does the company itself. As Elan Moriah explains, Verint's core values include integrity, transparency, humility, innovation, and passion. And Moriah and the company's "stellar" team, he says, are passionate about making good things happen for Verint customers.

Personality Profile: How Contact Centers Are Using Voice Analysis to Improve CX
Question: What do Bill Clinton, state-of-the-art call centers, and NASA all have in common? Answer: They all understand the importance of language and personality.

Product Development: Social Can Yield a Goldmine of Value to Build, Tweak Product
The always-on consumer has created new challenges for businesses, which can now be put on the hot seat with the whole world watching in an instant. The good news, however, is the tendency for online denizens to be very vocal in what they like and don't like about products creates a wealth of information that companies can use to their advantage.

The Great Enterprise Debate: When to Use a Mobile App vs. Mobile Messaging for Customer Engagement
There is an ongoing debate regarding which mobile channel is best for customer engagement: a mobile app or mobile messaging? Mobile apps are getting lots of press, but IDC predicts that 45 percent of mobile enterprise app initiatives will be delayed or go over budget in 2015. Meanwhile, the enterprise mobile messaging industry is booming due to the widespread use of application-to-person messaging, which is predicted to be worth $70 billion by 2020.

Needle Advocates Help Online Shoppers Find What They're Looking For
People are social animals. The success of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter attest to that fact. Unless you're the kind of person who likes to hang out at the mall with your girlfriends or sisters, however, shopping for most people tends to be a rather solitary experience for the most part.

Video Moves Into Marketing, Customer Care
Bringing video to the masses has long been the Holy Grail for the communications industry. The affordability, availability, and ease of use of tools and services like Apple's Facetime, Skype, and YouTube have allowed that to happen.