Call Centers

While demand generation professionals consistently turn to a wide variety of direct marketing software and e-mail marketing tools in search of sales leads, current research by Aberdeen points to a significant spend associated with a more human element: outsourced B2B teleservices, provided by a larg...

Pharmaceutical companies manage large quantities of content about their product lines. However, unlike other industries, the challenge of managing this information is exacerbated by regulatory and compliance demands and the need to manage information from multiple "touch points" across a diverse cus...

It's a phrase that we hear all too frequently: "We're moving off our mainframe." Yet virtually anyone who has ever had a mainframe continues to utilize it in some fashion. These robust and highly functional legacy systems contain years and years of data, and when you're talking about abandoning t...

The contact center has become the focal point of the customer interaction. Customers spend more time researching products, managing account and order information, resolving issues, and utilizing self-service than they do within the traditional brick-and-mortar storefront. This requires contact cente...

Whether your company calls them "technical support technicians," "help desk representatives" or "strategic support analysts," in-house help desk professionals are an integral part of any business. Increasing productivity and satisfaction ratings while reducing costs and resources are the hallmarks o...

Avaya has introduced Intelligence Presence, a new software application that gives users -- both in corporate environments and call centers -- the ability to view so-called presence information across multiple sources. For example, it would allow a contact center rep engaged with a caller to see if a...

Call center reps get a bad rap. They're expected to be constantly nice in the face of increasingly not-nice customer interactions, field the blunt of management's never-ending drive for increased performance, and solve every problem that randomly hits their line. It's no wonder the industry faces a ...

An increasing global customer base is driving companies to provide "follow-the-sun" customer support services. In order to enable this level of support, agents are now being located in any part of the world. The challenge is to merge technologies and provide seamless, accurate and real-time customer...

I got a statistic stuck in my head last week during a visit to a client in California. Sometimes you hear or see something so interesting for its oddity that it stays with you no matter what. For me, this was one of those times. There are actually two closely related bits of information, and both r...

Voice over Internet protocol has recently become more common in corporations large and small. By combining separate voice and data transmissions onto the same line, this new communications option enables companies to lower their telecommunications costs and, after taking advantage of the savings, co...