CUSTOMER — JULY 2013

The Father of Customer Satisfaction: ACSI Creator Claes Fornell Shares His Thoughts on the Customer Experience

Customer satisfaction has become a central focus for businesses today. But Claes Fornell became interested in customer satisfaction before it became a hot topic. Fornell is the creator of the American Customer Satisfaction Index... Read More >>>

Getting Smart on Analytics in the Contact Center: Measurement is the First Step in the Process
At iQor, we believe that by taking comprehensive measurements, interpreting them in a disciplined and scientific way, and then sharing the resulting analyses with relevant company stakeholders, contact center leaders can put Big Data to work, driving strategic customer initiatives at the highest levels of the organization.

Mobility in Contact Center Management: Freedom, Functionality and Even a Touch of Fun
When we think of mobility in telecommunications, most often our focus goes immediately to mobility in unified communications and the ongoing challenge of presence management. This includes road warriors, for example, relying on find me/follow me applications, sales executives seamlessly accessing office-based functions out in the field, and smartphones and other personal devices being integrated into the corporate phone system to work as external extensions.

How The Online Sales Tax Will Benefit E-Tailers
The current debate over collection of sales taxes for online purchases is a perfect example of fairness in competition. Current U.S. laws dictate that sales taxes are only collected in states where an online business has a physical presence. The proposed Marketplace Fairness Act legislation would require collection of sales tax for all Internet purchases - a scenario many e-tailers feel would be ruinous to their profitability.

Pronexus Launches New IVR Toolkit
Keri Fraser, Pronexus director of marketing, explains that enabling users to leverage their touchscreens to do drag-and-drop IVR development introduces a whole new level of ease of use. She adds that Pronexus is all about reducing barriers to entry for its solution.

Leveraging Forums for Customer Service
Before there was Twitter and Facebook, Internet bulletin boards and newsgroups were the places people exchanged news, ideas, and debate topics. They're still around and growing, with millions in existence and growing daily - they just have a different name. Today, we call them Internet forums, and they are booming discussion groups that provide a place for people who are passionate about a topic to interact, and companies who want to market products or engage with their customers to commune. Online forum users participate and monitor the forums they belong to on a daily, if not hourly basis, and they are active to the tune of hundreds of millions of unique monthly visitors and page views every month.

Multi-channel Analytics: Stitching it All Together
Each year, according to IBM's GM of Watson Solutions Manoj Saxena, U.S. organizations spend roughly $112 billion on call center labor and software, yet half of the 270 billion customer service calls go unresolved. Let's face it, reaching a live person is rare. That person on the other end actually knowing what they're talking about is even more unlikely.

Customer Service is the New Marketing; Marketing is the New Customer Service
It is no secret brands are built on superior customer service. To achieve maximum customer satisfaction, organizations must truly understand the concept of the customer journey and maintain consistent conversations across all communication channels and touch points.

The Force of Social Media Management
CRM giant Salesforce.com, which popularized the software-as-a-service concept, in early June announced plans to acquire ExactTarget in a transaction valued at approximately $2.5 billion. Saleforce.com says that by combining ExactTarget's digital marketing capabilities with its own sales, service and social marketing solutions, it will create "a world-class marketing platform across e-mail, social, mobile and the web."

Automated Technologies and the Human Touch
In one case, a brokerage's managing director took to the company-wide loudspeaker in response to the news, saying, "Careful, those things can be hacked," warning his team to think before acting. Once the tweet was discredited, many traders emphasized the value of their human advantages - noting the person-to-person warning kept their organization from making costly and brand-damaging decisions.

TMC, CUSTOMER Recognize Speech Tech Excellence Award Winners
The 2013 Speech Technology Excellence Awards recognize companies that have made significant contributions to improving speech applications for their clients. Speech technology has become more prevalent in both wireline and mobile applications.

The Evolving Role of Process Automation and the Customer Service Experience
Give contact centers credit. In their effort to improve customer service and increase the effectiveness of how service is provided, many centers have made significant investments in technology as well as people. One payoff has been contact center automation and the efficiency it produces for managing customer interactions. Yet, bottom line, the pressure remains to improve service processes overall and reduce costs at the same time.

Chicago Theater Fills Seats by Using Rich Media Messaging
The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is a non-profit organization located in the heart of Navy Pier close to downtown Chicago. The professional theater company is known worldwide for its critically appraised Shakespeare productions that are performed 48 weeks of the year in more than six hundred annual performances.

Newcomers Introduce Personal Video Platforms that Explain, Engage
In the 1988 movie Big, Tom Hanks' man-boy character gets a job at a toy company and comes up with the idea for a choose-your-own-adventure comic book. Now a company called Engajer is bringing a similar concept to corporate customers. Meanwhile, an outfit known as idomoo is offering businesses the ability to create large libraries of personalized videos and deliver them to customers based on their CRM profiles and history.