Posted in CRM on Aug 19th, 2009 No Comments »
Being a rider of mass transit in and out of New York City via New Jersey Transit (NJT), I understand the value of texting messaging within the context of customer service. NJT provides SMS alert advisors to riders who sign up when foul weather or mechanical difficulties conspire to cause delays. So when I came [...]
Posted in CRM on May 22nd, 2009 1 Comment »
It still amazes me how the call center, which is perhaps the pinnacle interaction between a customer and a business, still undervalues the actual interaction. After speaking with a call center customer this morning, a Canadian outsourcer called Tacamor, it’s amazing just how much of the technology is designed to run the call center, not [...]
Posted in CRM on May 14th, 2009 1 Comment »
Saw a tweet from Mila D’Antonio of 1:1 Media that said a recent report from Frost and Sullivan written by Keith Dawson says most contact centers are not planning to drop headcount this year. That’s good to hear. Yeah, sure, we’re in a recession and of course companies are finally getting it when it comes [...]
Posted in CRM on Apr 22nd, 2009 1 Comment »
In follow-up discussions with a former colleague of mine over at Datamonitor, I came across a company called CosmoCom, which among other services, provides call centers with video-enabled solutions. Needless to say there’s a ton of potential here. Call centers no longer limited to the voice medium could offer huge bonuses in terms of the [...]
Posted in CRM, social media, twitter, web 2.0 on Apr 13th, 2009 1 Comment »
I took note of this recent Gartner report garnered by a survey of 1500 CIOs, mostly because I was taken back by the priorities and timetables laid forth by CIOs regarding the call center of tomorrow. First and foremost, the fact that attracting and retaining customers has dropped from second to fifth place in the [...]
Posted in cloud computing on Mar 16th, 2009 No Comments »
I’ve been reading a lot about Nortel’s financial woes and have found the emerging breakup of the company as an example of larger trends playing out in the enterprise call center market. While I realize that the majority of the company’s revenue is generated by its core wireless-equipment business, Nortel is also looking to offload [...]
Posted in CRM, SugarCRM, web 2.0 on Mar 6th, 2009 No Comments »
Phone calls this week with customers and for sales references underscored a somewhat disturbing trend I’ve noticed within the CRM industry. Business simply aren’t using their CRM packages to the fullest. When the going gets tough, everybody is forced to dig a little deeper; CRM isn’t an exception. In the call center, Martin touched upon [...]
Posted in CRM, SugarCRM on Feb 27th, 2009 No Comments »
Most of us in the CRM world see the marriage between CRM software and call centers a happy one, I mean, where else do you really relate to customers (read: not prospects) but in the call center. And while call centers tend to be where customer interact with you at their most unhappy moments – [...]
Posted in CRM on Feb 11th, 2009 No Comments »
I read that United Airlines is planning on resourcing its India and Mexico-based call centers back into the United States, while at the same pushing cheaper and more efficient mediums when collecting feedback from customers. Offshoring call centers has always presented businesses with a double-edged sword, both in terms of the actual service provided versus [...]
Posted in cloud computing, CRM, SaaS, SugarCRM on Jan 29th, 2009 No Comments »
I just got off the phone with a partner of ours, Performance Advantage, which is doing some great work in the Canadian call center market, leveraging Sugar On-Demand to help smaller businesses gain access to enterprise-caliber functionality via some true cloud computing environments. Among other topics, we discussed where we see the future of the [...]
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