Call Centers

As technology collides with forces of globalization, contact centers and the executives who run them find themselves in the midst of five megatrends. These trends present unique opportunities for these executives to add strategic value to their business, reposition themselves within their organizati...

Amdocs has rolled out Smart Agent Desktop, a new product that gives contact center agents visibility into back-end applications and provides guidance on decision making processes related to calls. It is the combination of both factors in one product that makes this rollout unique in the industry, Ho...

OpenSpan, a Microsoft partner, rolled out an application integration platform that allows users of Microsoft's Customer Care Framework 2008 -- which was also introduced Wednesday -- to link together older applications and custom-built systems with the front-end agent desktop. Built on the Microsoft ...

Companies' integrated voice recognition applications are being stretched thin. Even when the best interface designs are in place, customers are abandoning calls before completion. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the "Contact Center Analytics" benchmark were either seeing poorer performa...

Calabrio has upgraded its workforce optimization products, which go to market through several channel partners, including as an OEM to Cisco's Unified Contact Center product line. The company upgraded Workforce Management to version 8.1 and Quality Management to version 2.4. The latter in particular...

Aspect Software has introduced a series of software modules under one suite aimed at optimization performance in the contact center. The modules are for workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management and coaching and e-learning. Called "Performanc...

The world of technology contact centers is going to get a little more engaging. IBM, forever scrambling to stay ahead of the game in customer interaction models, announced Thursday that a virtual IBM Business Center is open for business in Asia. What makes this different from any other contact cente...

Avaya has made a significant upgrade in three self-service offerings that it introduced at the beginning of last year. Introduced at SpeechTEK 2007 in New York City, the three products are Avaya Voice Portal 4.0, its flagship self-service software; Interactive Response 3.0, a self-service platform; ...

It's now a well-known fact that on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog, but when it comes to Internet telephony, the bigger concern is that no one might know where you are either. Dial 911 for emergency assistance, and you could be out of luck, as some well-publicized lawsuits have shown. Voice ...

Companies are increasingly faced with the challenge of how to leverage the large amounts of data available in the contact center. The data is accumulated through customer management systems -- CRM, SFA, ERP and order fulfillment -- and interactions with the customer. Even though providing consistent...