Call Centers

Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision. The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in t...

Memo to telecom service providers: "We never thanked you, but you did a great job offering us consolidated billing. It is hard to remember now, as for the last few years you have been so aggressive in promoting bundled services, but five years ago, this was a major pain point. Three bills for ISP, c...

Voice today is at center stage in the enterprise. Carrier Session Internet Protocol trunks, enterprise SIP trunks, converged IP networks, federating private branch exchanges, unified communications and communication-enabled applications are but a few of the many voice initiatives you'll find underwa...

What mistakes will cause emergency communication systems to undergo excessive stress or possibly fail in a disaster, and what steps should be taken to improve performance? One of the biggest challenges for emergency communication centers is the wide range of situations that require responses -- incl...

Credit card fraudsters beware: Victrio might be tracking you. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company recently released a new system aimed at identifying, analyzing and storing the voiceprints of identity thieves. "We're building a nationwide database of bad guys' voiceprints," Victrio's founder and...

Chief marketing officers are given the unenviable, almost contradictory, task of catching marketing lightning in a bottle on a consistent basis. The problem is that turbulent economic conditions, like the ones we've experience recently, have historically stymied marketing innovation and forced CMOs ...

Sure, Web-based chat applications on your site represent a leap in customer service and sales technology. But let's not forget that the brick-and-mortar standards still apply. If an end user is comfortable and finds your online rep trustworthy and predictive of his or her needs, the opportunities in...