There are many challenges that a contact center may face. But, one of the challenges is to improve the level of agent productivity while maintaining a high standard of service. Every customer requires attention, but sometimes the agents are not in a position to respond to every single customer and this leads to a lower level of service. A contact center can improve both agent productivity and the quality of service by choosing the right software. Carl Noblitt (VP Account Management, AireSpring), in his article writes about some ways by which a contact center can improve productivity. To know more, follow: http://www.callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/873/Default.aspx

Social media and smart phones help dissatisfied consumers to raise their voice. Most companies understand the extent to which a company’s image can be damaged, but many companies do not know that technology also exists to help and improve their customer service standards. To know more how Contact center management software can help companies to take corrective action, follow: http://www.callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/869/Default.aspx

AdvaTel, an Australian software company, developed BestTime, a product which improves productivity and also enhances customer experience. With the help of BestTime, potential callers can choose to receive a reminder via SMS or web page notification when the call waiting time is lower and it also helps in better management of a call center. Read more at: http://www.contactcenterworld.com/view/contact-center-news/totally-new-concept-in-call-center-management.aspx

Interactive Voice Response is important for any call center. But, what is an Interactive Voice response or IVR? It is a technology that makes customer interactions efficient and streamlined. Some IVR’s are complex in design. Some companies don’t use IVR, and others have such a poor design. Richard Manulkin (Connect First), writes in this article some tips on how an IVR design can help in improving customer service.Read more at: http://www.callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/861/Default.aspx

Contact centers are making the transition towards cloud technology from premises-based solutions. In a premise-based solution, companies make a huge investment, whereas in a cloud based solution, there is quick deployment, and less investment. It is more flexible. The operational cost is also less in cloud based solution. Updates of the contact center software can be delivered quickly through the cloud. Unlike premises-based solutions, a cloud hosted contact center is not a fixed solution. Call centers are developing beyond phone support to also handle customer interactions. Customer services are now given via chat, email, SMS, and social media. For contact centers call reliability and security are major concerns while moving to a cloud based solutions. But, due to flexibility, reliability, and future-proofing, companies are looking forward to move to cloud based solutions. To read more about the benefits of cloud based solutions, follow Carl Noblitt (VP Account Management, AireSpring)’s article link: http://www.callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/850/Default.aspx

In cloud based contact center market, various types of solution, service, application, vertical, and region are playing an important role. Applications like call routing, queuing, data integration and recording, chat quality monitoring, real time decision making and work force optimization are being provided. The vendors in this market provide customer related data with call recordings to monitor agent performance and provide customers with better experience. To know more about cloud based contact center solution market, follow: http://www.sys-con.com/node/3194060

Fraudsters are exploiting weaknesses in call center and help desk user authentication processes. Common caller authentication methods are creating inconvenience for legitimate users. Current authentication methods fail in three ways. They are: 1. knowledge-based authentication (KBA) - KBA's are used to authenticate users.2. PINs. 3. Caller ID. The other two ways include PINs and Caller ID to authenticate users- all of which are accessible by criminal. The best security is always layered security. This principle holds true when securing telephony channel. Voice biometrics can catch fraudster voices and put them on a blacklist for future voice comparisons and verifications of callers. Phone printing combined with voice biometrics provides the strongest method for detecting fraudsters. To know more, read Avivah Litan's (vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner) article at: http://www.itworldcanada.com/blog/preventing-fraud-in-the-call-center-use-voice-biometrics-phone-printing/97217#ixzz3D51sGlc6

According to Brian Cantor (Managing Editor and community Director of IQPC's Customer Management IQ), businesses develop and put into operation strategies without truly trying to understand who their customers are and what they want, thus producing suboptimal customer experiences. The question is does a customer actually want to engage in long, personalized calls to identify and resolve a business issue?  A customer may not be supportive in all cases.  But a business that ignores the desires of their customers cannot be called customer-centric. Being alert of this problem, the author discussed this situation and was exposed to some of the factors that "normal people" value when it comes to customer service.  They are as follows: availability of full service 24/7 and quick resolution-because time is money and effort is money.  Read more at: http://www.callcenter-iq.com/customer-experience/articles/what-normal-people-think-about-customer-service/

Customer satisfaction is important in any organization but the main criteria is to achieve and maintain it. Customer satisfaction can be achieved when any organization gives importance to service. But, the key question is how to retain quality service? To know more about quality service, please follow John Tschohl (Founder and President, Service Quality Institute, Minneapolis)’s article link: http://www.callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/828/Default.aspx

According to Tracey E. Schelmetic (TMCnet Contributor), many small organizations with contact centers that could have improved their services to customers by using analytics were earlier forced out of competition. They were unable to bear the high capital costs of instigating such solutions unlike big companies with greater access to large amounts of data resources that have been able to use analytics solutions to run their businesses more efficiently. However today, cloud-based analytics solutions are helping even the smallest contact centers by turning all the communications with customers into useful data that can be used to provide better analytical solutions in the customer support operations thereby, leading to superior customer satisfaction ratings. Read more at: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/workforce-optimization/articles/383244-smaller-companies-reaping-large-rewards-from-contact-center.htm

“Money is King” in the field of call center and the result is well proved in a research. An important feature of human motivation is influenced by perks offered. The company Snowfly, which is the leading provider of Internet based employee incentive and loyalty program offers different rewards to its employees, some of which are reloadable debit or gift cards that can be swiped anywhere, merchandise and donations in form of charity. Out of all anywhere spend cards are overwhelmingly in demand as compared to others. In the results, more than 98% of the value of rewards was both types of cards against the cash equivalent as they are soon forgotten but cards have long term motivational value. Thus, the study shows direction of how incentives are valued and the end line is for all that matters is money. Read more at: http://www.callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/549/Default.aspx

Mostly all customer service providers offer there service through phone calls. It is time consuming and customers have to wait long before they can have a conversation personally. Optus is an Australian Provider in integrated communications and a subsidiary of SingTel, brings in effective action its [24]7's mobile chat capability in Optus mobile app. This application will allow customers to chat with Optus customer care from a mobile phone. It is a very smart choice and it will give personalized service to all consumers. The same user friendly service which they accessed from their laptops and PC's is now available on their phones. It is a brilliant experience for the customers and increases customer satisfaction as it saves a lot of time. The same service should be adapted by other service providers also so that they do not lose their market share. Read more at: www.contactcenterworld.com/view/contact-center-news/optus-makes-customer-service-brilliant-with-247s-chat-in-the-optus-mobile-app.aspx

Nuance communications is one of the world's biggest providers of voice and language solutions to many businesses and consumers. Its applications experienced by millions of people. To streamline customer authentication and fight fraud at the same time it has partnered with TRUSTID which is a provider in contact center authentication technology. Nuance Voice Biometrics uses a technique to detect unique characteristics of a person's voice and creates a voiceprint which is used for future reference. It replaces the intrusive questions often asked and saves time. Contact centers that uses TRUSTID and Nuance in combination can see greater reduction in time taken on a call, operation cost and strengthening of security. Read more at: http://www.contactcenterworld.com/view/contact-center-news/nuance-and-trustid-partner-to-help-contact-centers-streamline-customer.aspx

The first step towards managing the call volume peaks is identifying the patterns. Some of the several tips are as follows: The fewer variances available on the desktop like emails, printers, office suites the better standardized it is. It reduces variances which may cause problems with updates which ultimately lead to call spikes. The second most important thing is to be better placed in your environment i.e. to keep call center agents well informed about their tasks and coach specific agents on specific skills. Lastly, the most important aspect is to design an efficient action plan containing a trigger point which could easily signal when the plan should go into effect. Read more at: http://blog.inovasolutions.com/2014/surviving-call-center-peaks-and-valleys-part-2-managing-call-volume-peaks

Customer service is the key element which decides the fate of a business. If the customers find the employees rude or they don't know what they are talking about the organisation will start losing customers. Irrespective of the business type, customers make phone calls and may want to know the hours of operation or they may have a query about a recent purchase. The customer service department should always follow up with customers in order to show that they care about their customers and they make sure that the product features matches the demand of the customer.Helping them to the car when they have an arm load of products is a good way to show them you care. Helping them decide on which products to purchase and helping them to understand which products will complement each other is another way. To know more go to:http://www.coursepark.com/blog/2012/07/4-reasons-why-customer-service-is-important-for-your-business/

Nintex , the world leader in workflow software, announced its integration with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the two market-leaders among CRM platforms. Nintex is the first workflow company which enabled business users to connect critical ECM and CRM systems through the cloud, and allowed customers to quickly and easily automate processes between departments in a customer-driven environment. With the new integrations, users can accelerate a variety of processes which involves frequent interactions between customer-facing teams and internal business operations. Nintex’s integration with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM lets organizations:

• Drive business processes in SharePoint in response to events in CRM so work flows better between previously siloed systems

• Automate the process of creating, updating, retrieving, and querying records in Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics using simple drag-and-drop workflow actions

• Post status updates, links and polls to Salesforce Chatter or Microsoft Yammer, and progress workflows based on user responses in social channels

To know more, go to: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nintex-announces-integration-with-salesforcecom-and-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2014-07-14

Craig Borowski (Research Associate at Software Advice, that offers call center software comparisons) in his survey data outlines the reasons why should a company offer callback instead of making customers wait on phone impatiently. 63% of respondents prefer call back instead of waiting on phone. 43% of them expect a callback within half hour whereas 25% said it does not matter when the call was returned. Thus three measures to eradicate the problems are: Introducing an intelligent call back system such as Virtual Hold Technology (VHT). Allowing the use of applications like FastCustomer and help it to navigate the IVR. The best solution possibly would be to launch a new phone system altogether. If callback emerges as a growing technology it will eliminate the frustration among the customers of waiting long and increase customer satisfaction and call center productivity. Read more at : http://inovasolutions.com/blog/post/contact-center-callback-services-are-improving-customer-service.

The most recently developed modern call center has emerged with so much of technology usage from cloud to Customer Relationship Management and Integrated Voice Response with new phrases catching up on people’s minds. It can be compared to an Oxford dictionary which gets 1000 new words added almost every year. There is always a need of new word to describe an innovation, idea or technology. These new words lead to puzzling communication. Thus the need of the hour is a jargon busting guide. Some examples are COLO which stands for Colocation. It refers to the service where data can be stored by a host company in a third party data center. For access to the whole guide visit: http://www.newvoicemedia.com/blog/understanding-the-modern-call-centre-our-jargon-busting-guide/#colo

Today call centers are becoming increasingly famous all over the world. Call centers play a vital part in most modern organizations, as they fulfill the need of creating a strong bond between a company and its customers. It is basically a place where inbound calls to the company are taken for customer service and support, while outbound calls to customers and clients are made for telemarketing. Taking the help of a company specializing in call center support will provide many benefits including: 1) saving money 2) saving time 3) providing expertise 4) better reputation. An expert call center gives protection to company and help build reputation. These benefits are required for many online companies and the best way to find a great call center is to compare the cost, reputation, such that any language barrier does not sustain between the countries. Read more at: 

http://serversitters.com/what-is-a-call-center-and-how-can-it-help-your-business.html

IVVR ( Interactive Voice And Video Response) which was once thought as a revolutionary technology has lost its grasp and nobody is interested in it anymore. Cloud telephony as well as hosted IVR services seems to have substituted it. Most of the Value Added Service providers are moving towards cloud telephony to provide corporate IVR services. But, in India it has to face a lot of difficulties. Till date, 3G technology has still not covered a majority of India and so even video calls are difficult leave alone IVVR. Also WhatsApp has become more popular and people prefer using it. Moreover, smart phones generally have a good quality camera but not speaker which makes it inefficient for IVVR. Hope that with the launch and greater spread of newly launched 4G IVR can gain its position back in India. Read more at: http://www.ivrsworld.com/ivvr-2/ivvr-failed-to-make-any-impact-in-india/#more-2372 http://www.ivrsworld.com/ivvr-2/ivvr-failed-to-make-any-impact-in-india/#more-2372