CUSTOMER — Jan/Feb 2014

Come Together, Right Now, Over Me: Companies Get Acquisitive About the Customer Experience

Unifying all the different pieces of the customer experience so businesses can better understand their customers; offer them assistance as needed and via the communication media they prefer; and reach out to customers and prospects with timely and targeted messages, is no easy task. But, increasingly, that's what many of the big players in the customer experience arena, and software in general, are trying to do...Read More >>>

Intelemedia Brings Together Call Centers to Leverage Star Players, Drive Performance
Every business wants to improve its performance, leverage its best employees to get the greatest extent possible, and avoid needless duplication of work. Intelemedia Communications helps its business customers achieve all of these business imperatives via its cloud-based call management platform.

Keeping Up with the New Normal
Companies rely on their customer contact centers to help them maintain relationships with consumers and promote high rates of satisfaction, and an increasing number of new technologies are enabling organizations to communicate with customers better, through an ever-growing variety of channels. Technologies such as live chat, click-to-call, collaborative browsing (co-browsing) software and many others are making it easy to place the consumer at the center of operations - allowing them to become more engaged in the resolution process and happier with the outcome.

Cloud Contact Center Roundup
Starting this year CUSTOMER magazine will publish monthly roundups of a select product category. These roundups will essentially be like mini-buyers' guides. They will include the names and URLs of companies that offer solutions in a particular category, and then provide a brief write-up of what each company provides in terms of solutions in that space.

WARNING: Benchmarking Can Be Hazardous to Your Operation's Health
CUSTOMER Magazine spoke recently to Mark Miller, the senior director of contact center solutions at J.D. Power, a leading marketing research company. We asked Mark to describe the benefits and pitfalls of benchmarking performance when building a world-class contact center.

TMC Announces CUSTOMER Product of the Year Awards
CUSTOMER and its parent company, TMC, are proud to announce the Product of the Year Awards. Congratulations to all these distinguished companies.

Think Outside the App: A Great Experience Begins With the Customer
Smartphones, tablets, mobile information consumption, and mobile transacting. It's why more businesses are trying to develop the kind of mobile apps they believe their customers want. Yet with an estimated two-thirds of mobile customers needing to interact with a contact center agent at some point in the mobile service experience, there's often an abrupt disconnect.