CUSTOMER — October 2014

Skin in the Game: How GENBAND Ties Its Success to Telco Selling Outcomes

The telecom infrastructure landscape, like just about every other industry you can think of, is facing massive disruption. The pace of change across virtually all the markets has never been faster in fact. Hotels are now competing with AirBnB, Uber is a new taxi alternative, and singles bars most recently have to compete with Tinder....Read More >>>

FEATURES

Strategic Solution Series

Bank on It: Neustar Helps Companies Reduce Risk with Verification Solution
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act was created and signed into law in the 1990s, and FCC rules implementing the Act were updated last year. The laudable goal is to prevent people from getting calls and other communications that they have to pay for, but don't want to receive. While these rules are positive developments for most consumers, they have caused a fair amount of confusion - and some steep fines - for many businesses.

The New Help Desk: TeamSupport Enables Businesses to Better Understand Their Customers
TeamSupport is a fully hosted cloud-based help desk solution that solves a fundamental problem that most support systems don't: helping businesses better understand their customers. Robert C. Johnson, president and CEO of TeamSupport LLC, explains it does that by delivering a suite of tools that provide insights into how customers interact with your company. CUSTOMER magazine recently interviewed Johnson to learn more.

Ask the Experts

PureCloud...Changing Everything
Twenty years ago, Interactive Intelligence changed the way businesses communicate with its all-in-one multichannel software platform. Ultimately, our platform changed the communications industry, the customer experience, everything. Now we're changing everything again with Interactive Intelligence PureCloud, a suite of cloud-based services for enterprise-grade communications, collaboration, and customer engagement.

Roundup

Lead Management
This issue's Roundup focuses on lead management solutions. Here's a rundown of some of the offerings in the lead management space, as submitted by the vendors in this arena.

TARGET

Tips for How to Implement Retail Omnichannel Strategies
In the past, retailing has concentrated the majority of its marketing efforts on finding customers. In the digital era, however, the focus has shifted to simply keeping up with them.

What Alibaba Can Teach Us about Omnichannel
The buzz since April has been about the China-based web retail giant's IPO, which started low on paper at $1 billion and has since ballooned to more than $20 billion. If the company surpasses that figure, it will eclipse Facebook, the largest technology IPO, and edge the current IPO record, the $19.2 billion The Agricultural Bank of China raised in 2010.

ENGAGE

The Role of Automation, the Cloud, and the Human Touch in Translation
Automation has been and continues to be an important tool in customer service and in communications as a whole, but when it comes to esoteric matters such as language translation, employing a combination of human and technological resources tends to deliver best results.

Deliver

How to Find the Ideal Contact Center Site
To some, Guatemala may appear to be the perfect location for a customer contact center. From languages spoken to educational and university infrastructure to government embrace of the emerging call and contact center industry, the Central American country has significant benefits that can be highly attractive to center providers and their customers.

The Call for a Superior Customer Experience
We all know this: Customer retention has never been more important. Customers have choices and creating a positive experience with every connection you have with them leads to the long-term loyalty every business is seeking. Today, the essence of the customer experience hinges on how well companies can connect and communicate with individuals according to their needs. Companies that are successful at retaining customers and earning positive word-of-mouth understand the importance of keeping them engaged across all channels of choice - voice, print and digital. And the first stop in this connection is often a company's contact center.

Accolades

CUSTOMER Announces Speech Technology Excellence Award Winners
TMC's Speech Technology Excellence Awards recognize companies that have developed innovative speech technology solutions that improve the bottom line for their customers. These include, but are not limited to, speech and analytics engines, IVR and self-service solutions, headphones, and voice-activated applications and services.