Top Seven Call Center Software Requirements for the “Now Normal”

2020 was already showing signs of being a transformative year for the call center industry—with growing interest in “all things cloud” due to the benefits of an OpEx model, zero-touch roadmap upgrades, and the beginning rumblings of moving away from the traditional brick-and-mortar facility to save on capital expenses and attract talent from a wider […]

Equipping the Enterprise for the AI-Powered Human Agent Era

From 1990 to 2010, some 4,400 children in the United States 17 years of age and younger made trips to the emergency room annually for the treatment of injuries resulting from amusement park rides. What does this have to do with contact center agents, you ask? I think many would agree that working in the […]

How Intelligent Virtual Assistants Are Leading the Transition to the Intelligent Enterprise

Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) have proven themselves to automate the handling of customer and employee requests and tasks. They are quickly becoming a fixture in the organization’s customer service workforce, becoming the “MVP” of the customer care team. But IVAs aren’t content to rest on their laurels; increasingly, they are being directed to serve an […]

Analytics-Infused Training: How to Nurture Agent Growth and Customer Happiness

Contact centers are complex and unique businesses. Some are five agents strong while others employ thousands. And while each contact center has its own business strategy and objectives, one common goal spans the industry: keeping customers happy. In a service-based economy, positive customer interaction is more important than ever. According to a Blackhawk Network study, […]

Knowledge Management: Four Selection Criteria to Increase Customer Lifetime Value

Knowledge management (KM) has become an important part of a contact center’s tech stack. In fact, according to Contact Center Pipeline’s 2020 contact center trends survey, of the top 20 challenges, “lack of, or bad desktop tools” (KM being one) ranked second. In that same survey, of the top 20 priorities, “improving knowledge access” ranked […]

Embracing Remote Work

The ability to work from home continues to top the list of desired benefits for employees seeking better work-life balance. Over the past five to 10 years, technology has enabled the growth of remote work across sectors and professions, and research suggests that nearly one-third of the U.S. workforce will be working remotely by 2025 […]

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  • Customer Engagement

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    Keep the Ball Rolling!

    The expression keep the ball rolling is an American variation of an older British expression keep the ball up, which people used idiomatically early in [...]
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    Digital Customer Care

    “A fundamental element of providing an excellent customer experience is making it easy for customers to get their questions answered through whichever means they prefer.” [...]
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    All About Ease

    The 1950 movie “All About Eve” starring Bette Davis is a “backstage” story revolving around an aspiring stage actress named Eve Harrington. Tattered and forlorn, [...]
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    Enough of the ideas, where’s the execution?

    I’ve just had the pleasure of chairing a customer engagement conference. There were some great speakers. One of my favourites was Stewart Bromley from Atom [...]
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  • Technology

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    Three Rules to Win the 2021 Holiday Season

    As we enter the 2021 holiday season, customers are experiencing more stressors than ever, including the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, disruptive weather, and economic uncertainty. This [...]
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    Hanging on the Telephone

    In 1978, new wave band Blondie released its third album, entitled “Parallel Lines.” The release marked the band’s transition from an underground group to a [...]
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    Lifting Innovation With Cloud WFM

    Workforce management (WFM) has been a fixture in the contact center world for decades. But it took on newfound importance in 2020 at the onset [...]
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    Mastering the Hybrid Retail Experience

    With the holiday season underway consumers are deciding how they are going to shop. Some of them may plan to shop online and avoid physical [...]
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  • Also in Customer Middle East

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    Low-Code/No-Code AI-Enabled Chatbots

    When the world went rapidly digital, customer engagement solutions such as intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) became invaluable pandemic frontline first responders in the customer service realm. Today, IVA technology is revolutionizing how customer service is delivered and is changing the game for many organizations as they strive to come back stronger in the post-pandemic era […]

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    From WFO to WEM

    Admittedly, I have not worked in a lot of different industries, but it is hard to imagine there are many that have a greater penchant for acronyms than the contact center space. When I first got involved in this industry about 20 years ago, my early impression was that practitioners could conduct an entire conversation […]

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    Games People Play

    Time for another trip down memory lane or, for most of you, probably another history lesson. Let’s start this one in 1968. 1968 was the year American singer-songwriter Joe South released a song called “Games People Play,” which was actually a protest song whose lyrics spoke against hatred, intolerance and inhumanity among people during the […]

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    The Gig Economy Effect: Addressing New Expectations and Requirements for Contact Centers

    Managing the contact center for maximum effectiveness has taken on a whole new level of importance as today’s agents are signing up for a very different social contract than what has been in place over the past decade when they predominantly worked traditional 8- to 10-hour shifts. Today, it’s not unheard of for agents to […]

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    Video Fatigue? Not in Customer Contact

    Video has been refined for use in business for over 15 years and it is certainly a key part of any digital transformation strategy. But while the industry has talked about the use of video in the contact center for years, until recently it didn’t get very far. Almost “always a bridesmaid, never a bride,” […]

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    Unified Communications. Single-Sourced. Always On-Instant Communications.

    Unified Communications. Contact Center Solutions. Delivered in tandem from the cloud “as a Service”… will enable your company to use both capabilities across your organization as required, with the maximum amount of operational flexibility and security possible. Why? Because your organization needs to. And now, because you can. A recent Metrigy* research study found that […]

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    Is It Time to BYOC (Be or Bring Your Own Carrier)?

    The continued shift from on-premises to SaaS-based cloud offerings extends across businesses and industries of all sizes. Enterprises that use and operate contact centers, for example, are rapidly adopting cloud-based services as they rethink their technology strategies in response to economic trends and industry changes. The move to cloud-based contact center services is a strategic […]

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    CX Is About to Change (Again)

    Much has been written about the impact of the pandemic on just about everything, including what it means to be a customer. Check-ups and appointments went online. Brick-and-mortar retail turned to digital. Our entire experience with brands was contained within a few square inches of a screen. Now, with social distancing restrictions lifting, the question […]

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    Three Steps to Acing AI-Human Interactions

    In 2018, the Harvard Business Review wrote about how artificial intelligence (AI) and humans are “joining forces” across many industries. AI has gotten good at doing many jobs that we previously thought only humans could handle: “diagnosing disease, translating languages and providing customer service-and it’s improving fast,” they asserted. Indeed. Over these last two years, […]

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    Contact Center Challenges and Priorities for 2021: A Year Like No Other

    It’s our sixth year of asking two simple questions of contact center professionals: What are your biggest challenges today? What are your top priorities for the new year? If you are a fan of this series, you may remember 2020 was going to be “The Year of the Agent”! I innocently looked forward to “a […]

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    Speech Analytics and Modernizing Agent Performance Measurement with the Customer in Mind

    Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles on analytics trends and technologies by Scott Bakken, CEO of MainTrax, a speech analytics professional services company. Scott is a highly respected industry thought leader and a regular contributor to Contact Center Pipeline. In his role at MainTrax, Scott is continuously learning about leading-edge […]

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    Seven Ways Next-Gen Knowledge Management Is Helping Organizations Respond at the Pace of Change

    Since the onset of the COVID pandemic, customers have found themselves in completely different circumstances, and support organizations have had to field new requests and new questions—often unprecedented and even unimaginable. How support organizations react and respond is paramount to ensure delivery of a winning customer experience but also to keep employees engaged during chaotic […]

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    What to Do After Migrating Your Contact Center to the Cloud

    This year, we’ve seen much of the workforce shift to remote work as companies adapted to operating during a global pandemic. With this transition, businesses turned to digital technologies powered by the cloud to support their contact center operations. In addition, some organizations have taken it one step further by transitioning their contact center operations […]

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    Evolving Challenges Require Evolving Solutions

    Many articles written toward the tail end of 2019 pegged 2020 as a year of big change for the contact center industry. Predictions from a variety of industry experts included more adoption of digital interaction tools, greater automation of interaction evaluations and the growing importance of agent engagement and satisfaction. We couldn’t possibly have known […]

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    The New World for Contact Centers May Be Where We Were Already Headed

    So far, 2020 has been nothing short of challenging for businesses. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, we all scrambled to adjust to the new state of the world. Virtually overnight, hundreds of thousands of agents transitioned to working remotely and the approach, management and infrastructure of contact centers were completely restructured. In the […]

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    Buyer’s Guide to Contact Center Technology: Scope and Sourcing

    SCOPE: Unified Communications or Not? Often, buyers need to replace an aging PBX that also provides their contact center technology—perhaps from Avaya, Cisco or Mitel. Or, the company will keep the enterprise telephony platform but opt for a new contact center technology platform, often cloud-based. That all seems straightforward. Now, broaden the view from “phone […]

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    Buyer’s Guide to Cloud Solutions

    This article is a buyer’s guide to help you in the selection and procurement process for a cloud solution, as well as active vendor management. The point is not to develop a big RFP and have a drawn-out evaluation process. (You can read my views about that elsewhere—the gist of which is, don’t do it!) […]

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