By Rich Tehrani

President and Editor-in-Chief

 

(This article appears in the September issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.) 

 

 

Like many of you, I recently returned from some R&R this past summer and as I head into the fall, I think it would be instructive to take a look at the important news from the past few weeks so we can accurately gauge where things are headed for the rest of the year. After all, it is very possible that while you were vacationing on that cruise ship, news of a killer contact center solution has emerged, which could make your job easier and in doing so save and/or make money for your corporation.

 

One trend which hasn’t let up these past years is applications going hosted. Although in the past month, there have been a number of high-profile on- demand outages, thankfully, few if any of these occurred from hosted on-demand providers in the call center or CRM spaces.

 

So rather than focus on damage control, SaaS (News - Alert) providers who enable better customer interactions have been able to focus on making better products. Case in point is Oracle who has now enabled better integration between the company’s on-demand and hosted applications. This comes courtesy of lots of elbow grease and Oracle (News - Alert) Fusion Middleware.

 

Another trend we have seen this past summer is that of increased focus on mobility and smartphones such as the 3G iPhone, which I went through quite an ordeal to get myself. But Apple is not alone in producing devices that make us drool — the much-anticipated Blackberry Bold is also being rolled out across various wireless networks worldwide.

 

In such an environment it makes sense for a company like SugarCRM (News - Alert) to come out with version 5.1 of their popular customer relationship management solution, which supports the iPhone and Blackberry via an HTML interface. As mobile browsers get better — and certainly Safari is one of the better ones, it makes sense to have applications which are at least aware of the fact they are running on mobile networks so they can adjust accordingly. Sure, you can browse any site with an iPhone but still, custom designed sites or even a custom application designed for Apple’s newest phone make the experience that much better.

 

While new call center jobs are created constantly in the U.S., global companies and especially those based in the U.S. have been steadily hiring Philippine call center agents. In fact, there are roughly 130,000 call center seats in the country and the latest growth rates are pegged at 25 percent over 12 months. More importantly, it seems the call centers in this Southeast Asian country are actively looking to become profit centers by excelling at cross-selling and upselling. As this trend continues and if contact centers here can do it well, perhaps the Philippines will replace India and other countries as a leading call center destination.

 

Of course even if your contact center is a profit center you will want to know how profitable it is and how much more potential there is to improve its output. One company looking to make this process easier is iNova Solutions whose Performance Tracker 2.0 can be used to produce a visual dashboard of contact performance based on internal databases, ACDs workforce management systems and other data which feed into the system such as Microsoft SharePoint.

 

One company who is no stranger to the contact center is Aspect and in a recent interview with Henry Danser, a vice president of the company, I got a solid glimpse into what the world’s leading contact center company thinks about the future of contact centers as well as the integration of the call center and UC. In addition the interview provides insight on the two other critical areas you need to focus on in your contact center — performance optimization and unified solutions.

 

This summer has also seen CRM systems get smarter. As a result of SalesForce.com’s open APIs and technology from DataSea, users of the popular hosted CRM solution can now use natural language queries to extract specific data from massive stores of information. Think of this as having a search engine available for all corporate information available to contact center agents allowing them to better serve your customers. In theory this should result in more accurate information being disseminated by front line workers and the speed to get at this information should be vastly improved as well. This could mean in some applications there could tremendous cost savings as in a contact center (as in many other areas of life), time is money.

 

So while many of us have vacationed these past months it is good to know that the companies making call center products and solutions have been quite busy — producing products and services, which should make your life easier this fall and beyond.

 

I hope one or more of these solutions makes your job easier this fall and hopefully increases your productivity and profits.

 

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On another note, I find it curious to see that over a decade after some predicted the Internet would kill the call center market, the world’s leading e-tailer, Amazon.com (News - Alert) recently announced it would hire 250 full and part time customer service positions. When will the Internet finally do away with the call center you ask? I suppose it will happen shortly after the paperless office that was predicted 20 years ago becomes a reality.