CUSTOMER — November 2014

Getting Personal: The Value of Contextual & Experiential Communications

Facebook on Sept. 29 announced it has rebuilt Atlas and is leveraging the technology to enable advertisers to reach people with personalized messages across devices, and use information about both online impressions and offline purchases to figure out what ads and offers are the best match for each individual. ...Read More >>>

FEATURES

Up Close

PGi Continues Expansion with Marketing Collaboration Acquisition
PGi seems to be positioned at the intersection of exactly where communications is, and where it seems to be going. The Atlanta-based public company is already a leader in the collaboration space, an area in which it continues to expand it's offerings, and is keenly interested in sales enablement, which has to do with getting the right information to the right place to reach the right buyers in an effort to drive higher conversion rates. - 11/10/2014

Ask The Experts

Omnichannel: The What, Why, and How
In the past year the contact center industry has embraced a new term, omnichannel, with some crowning this term as the successor to the now familiar term multichannel. What has changed to provoke this new term? Well, first, consumer habits have shifted. What began with handling e-mail and web chat, has now expanded to SMS, social media, mobile, and video. As consumer communications habits change, so does the way they expect to engage with businesses to resolve their problems. - 11/10/2014

Deliver

New Corporate Training Platforms Enable Improved Flexibility, Efficacy
We live in an incredible information age. We have smartphones more powerful than the computers NASA uses in the rovers and satellites sent into space. Virtually any type of content can be instantly accessed from the web, anywhere and anytime we choose. - 11/10/2014

How Mobile Users are Impacting Emergency Services for Call Centers
Thanks to technology advances and a changing senior demographic, the Personal Emergency Response Systems industry is undergoing a transformation. The change is affecting users, who have more technology options than ever before. The transition also has implications for the call centers that respond to PERS calls and the emergency care specialists who directly interact with customers. - 11/10/2014

Target

Call Recording: It Pays to Know the Rules, But Rules Vary By State
When it is ok to call and/or record conversations with people has recently become a heightened area of debate in communications and legal circles. - 11/10/2014

Roundup

Digital Signage
The value of digital signage is large and growing. In terms of market size, digital signage is worth between $4 billion and $5 billion globally, and $1.6 billion and $1.8 billion in the U.S. And analysts expect the digital signage space in North America and Western Europe - which currently ship in the low tens of millions of units per year - to double annually in each of the next three years. - 11/10/2014

Strategic Solutions Series

Contact Center Performance: Taking Your Organization to the Next Level
You've invested in the best leadership, technologies, and human capital sourcing and development partners available to formulate and perfect the secret sauce that makes your enterprise exceptional and successful. Now you can gain even more value from these investments by consistently communicating your message and measuring the performance across your organization via contact center performance management. - 11/10/2014

Understanding Your Customers to Differentiate & Grow Your Business
Customer experience is a hot topic these days. But ensuring a positive customer experience that fuses with the goals of your organization is about more than just pledging to be more customer focused. It requires employing processes and systems that enable your customer support staff to actually understand the needs of customers rather than just addressing their needs in a one-off fashion, and to be able to respond to those requirements in the most effective way possible. - 11/10/2014

Identifiers, Attributes & Network: Neustar Puts the Most Relevant & Current Data at Your Fingertips
The mass adoption of computers, smartphones and tablets means people have access to the information they want wherever they are. But what about the organizations that want to do business with these consumers? Are they taking advantage of the plentiful supply of data available to more successfully cater to and capture the business of these always-connected consumers? In many cases, the answer is no. The good news, however, is there's still ample opportunity for businesses to become more connected with customers and prospects by putting available information to work. - 11/10/2014

WebRTC Feature Story

Temasys is Working on Something Big
Temasys provides a complete WebRTC solution, including a full set of WebRTC-based developer APIs, mobile development frameworks, and other client-side tools. Supporting these frameworks it also provides telco-grade, enterprise-ready infrastructure for companies and developers to both create and manage products and services, which embed or support video, audio, chat and the exchange of data. - 11/05/2014

Vidyo Shares Views of WebRTC-Enabled Video
Vidyo has what it says is the most advanced, best-performing platform for ultra-low delay, ultra high-quality multi-point video, ranging from mobile screens to 4K. By choosing Vidyo, application developers can combine the benefits of WebRTC's open, free, browser-based endpoint architecture with those of a professional, rock-solid back-end that can easily scale to carrier-sized deployments. We recently interviewed Alex Eleftheriadis, Vidyo's chief scientist and co-founder, to learn more. - 11/05/2014

GENBAND's WebRTC Evangelist Talks Real-World Implementations
GENBAND is a global company that has a heritage of building some of the finest communications tools that have ever been invented. We are using this experience and our strong financial backing to create advanced, easily accessible communications tools for service providers, enterprises, and consumers. - 11/05/2014

WebRTC in the Criminal Justice System
JurisLink is demonstrating that and growing rapidly in solving a potential significant problem and opening a huge market. It is clear that the pervasive use of video in the criminal courts could save $2-5 billion per year. Assuming that 10 to 20 percent of that would be spent on the systems enabling the savings, the market is between $200 million and over $1 billion. It is easy to see why Slade is so excited about JurisLink's prospects. - 11/05/2014

How WebRTC Can Serve the Enterprise
The enterprise has numerous uses for WebRTC, including expanding the bring-your-own-device model, allowing for next generation customer interaction through web integration, extending videoconferencing and collaboration systems, and establishing direct communications between employees and the outside world. Because WebRTC creates an experience that comes from the host web server, the experience the enterprise provides can be unique and tailored to deliver advantage. - 11/05/2014

Wireless WebRTC: Everything You Were Afraid to Ask For and Why
WebRTC opens up the communications experience to web feature interactions. Companies can build an entire scripting tool for a web attendant that would be far more brilliant than the chat services currently offered. Developers can plug into a cloud speech recognition service. They can become more contextually aware than anything the carrier or the device manufacturer can connect to general social networks. In other words, whatever you can think you can do on the web you can expand with WebRTC. - 11/05/2014

Dialogic Views WebRTC as Key Catalyst for Developers
Dialogic has a large portfolio of telephony infrastructure and developer enabling products that range from softswitches, gateways, SBCs, telephony and fax boards and media servers. These products are sold to service providers, enterprises, contact centers and developers. The company, which has a long history in enabling communications media processing for new development communities, sees WebRTC as a core catalyst for bringing real-time communications to the enormous web development community. WebRTC, the company notes, also is helping traditional telephony developers move into the larger web development world. We recently spoke with Chad Hart, senior director of product marketing at - 11/05/2014

Plantronics Explains How Wearables Can Elevate the WebRTC Experience
For Plantronics, it is all about delivering devices and software that can easily integrate with WebRTC-enabled applications. We are diligently developing desktop and mobile WebRTC device integration solutions for our customers. Developers can download code at developer.plantronics.com. - 11/05/2014

Talking with TokBox about WebRTC
TokBox was founded in 2007 as a consumer video chat service. In November 2010 it launched OpenTok, a cloud platform for adding live video, voice and messaging to websites and mobile applications and in 2012 became the first company to launch support for WebRTC. The company's scalable, customizable platform gives users the creative freedom to develop any real-time communication interaction, from one-to-one video chats to large-scale broadcasts. We recently interviewed TokBox CEO Scott Lomond - 11/05/2014

Voice4Net: WebRTC Powers Unique, Purpose-Built Solutions
The suite also includes a contact center application based on Voice4Net's WebRTC Framework architecture, which allows companies to create drop-and-drag widgets to build an interface around their needs. It's simple and enjoyable to use, and most critically, it delivers a solution that is explicit to the customer's needs. Voice4Net: WebRTC Powers Unique, Purpose-Built Solutions - 11/05/2014

Exploring the WebRTC Ecosystem
The goal is to give the reader a deep look at each company within an analytical framework. This will save prospective engineers, executives, investors, and developers time while helping avoid confusion as they seek partners or strategic position in the communications domain. To participate in the WebRTC Ecosystem and the The WebRTC Ecosystem report, please visit the WebRTC World site. - 11/05/2014

WebRTC V to Focus on User Adoption
There's an entire track focusing on how WebRTC is being implemented in various business and government verticals. That includes sessions on WebRTC's use in cable and broadcasting, in e-commerce, in education, in finance, in health care, and in logistics. - 11/05/2014

A WebRTC Primer
It takes the components of a typical VoIP media engine into a browser or any other peer endpoint with a simple API that a web server can control. That means developers can build real-time communication into web pages, existing software applications, or wherever else they want - and do so more easily and affordably than they could've in the past. - 11/05/2014