Definitions, Benefits & ROI

Strategic Path - New channels, new risks

When it comes to handling customers, not everybody has the same ideas. Marketing people may want to launch an exciting promotion to bring in new customers, but the likely flood of calls to the company contact centre requires close co-ordination with th...

ATA - Don’t panic! Plan for growth through the meltdown

Over the past three editions, I have explored several large issues that impact on our industry, on our agents and on the customers that contact centres serve. One of the themes considered in May was the impact of stress in the contact centre, especiall...

CCMA - Credit where it’s due

In recent years we have seen an international explosion of contact centres and outbound sales and marketing. In India, centres have as many as 25,000 seats, and there has also been increased interest and expansion into the Philippines and other parts o...

Strategic Path - Far-reaching communications in the far north

Building a major communications network is always challenging, but it’s doubly difficult when you’re trying to do it in the remote reaches of far north Queensland. Angus Kidman looks at how the Cape York Digital Network overcame its technic...

UniComm - Beyond the contact centre…

In 1995, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema wrote The Discipline of Market Leaders. In it, they describe three strategic pathways that enterprises can take in order to achieve market dominance. These pathways are operational excellence, product leadershi...

SIP Forum - SIPconnect and the rationale for widespread adoption of SIP trunking

Making the most of VoIP IP PBXs are starting to dominate the enterprise equipment market. But TDM trunking remains the norm, unnecessarily limiting the advantages business customers can realise from IP voice in both capabilities and cost. The answer...

Wainhouse - Understanding & deploying a conferencing VNOC

Making the most of video By Ira M. Weinstein, Senior Analyst and Partner at Wainhouse Research Visual communications and videoconferencing are entering the mainstream as companies seek more cost-effective, efficient ways to conduct business. As a...

Learntel - It's virtual meeting time!

Telepresence revisited By Carol Daunt Skyring It seems to have become ‘official’ since I wrote the last article on telepresence 10 months ago: telepresence equals videoconferencing! In a recent white paper, Telepresence on a Videoconf...

Ovum - New Knowledge Frontiers

How the internet is pushing out and opening up the frontiers of organisational knowledge Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Public Sector Research Director, Ovum Frontiers are interesting places: historically, the buffer zone between civilisation and wilderne...

Frost & Sullivan - Redefining the rules of customer service in the Web 2.0 era

An evolving landscape in which customers are being exposed to a variety of communication channels is pushing contact centres to reinvent themselves By Audrey WILLIAMS, Frost & Sullivan Web 2.0 represents a new phase of collaborating, sharing ...

CCMA - The dichotomy of first call resolution and skills specialisation

Helpful hints on how to build capacity and retain business through current proven and tested support methodologies By Ben Oxford, CCMA Marketing and Communications Director Questions are often asked about whether to specialise or to multiskill an...

ATA - A Hotbed of Skills, Productivity and Profitability

Contact Centre Survey confirms transformation to professional sector complete By Michael Meredith, CEO , Australian Teleservices Association Among the most interesting results to come from the recently- published Australian Contact Centre Survey ...

ContactCenterWorld - Meet the elite

The contact centre industry’s top performers share best practices by Raj Wadhwani, President Contact CenterWorld.com What were the Asia Pacific’s most successful contact centre professionals doing in Sydney in July? The answer is sha...

Strategic Path - Home is Where the Heart Is

Strategic Path talks to Lachlan Burns, General Manager, Consumer Sales, Primus Telecom SP: What have been your greatest technological challenges in the contact centre? LB: The main technological challenges that we encountered were with the combin...

UniComm - Leveraging VAR and SI Talent

For unified communications success The best approach for your business By Marty Parker, Principal, UniComm Consulting, Co-founder UCStrategies.com Unified communications (UC) is now a proven business tool. Since the Strategic Path articles in ...

SIP Forum - Standardising SIP

Strategic Path talks to Marc Robins, President of SIP Forum LLC SP: Can you describe briefly the role of the SI P Forum and your position within it? MR: The SIP Forum was founded eight years ago as a non-profit IP communications industry associat...

UniComm - Key issues and trends in Contact Centre: with Global Expert Don Van Doren

Latest IT Developments and their Adoption By Don Van Doren Principal at UniComm Consulting & President of Vanguard Communications The contact centre industry is settling, mostly gracefully, into middle age. Over the past decade, we’ve see...

ATA - Tipping the Balance: Stress and the Satisfaction Triumvirate with Michael Meredith, CEO of the ATA

Examining the Stress and Satisfaction Triumvirate By Michael Meredith, CEO, Australian Teleservices Association Watching the television a few weeks ago, I caught a segment on Sunrise about new technology developed in Japan designed to help contact ...

CCMA - Ben Oxford of the CCMA Rethinks Employee Relations

By Ben Oxford, Marketing and Communications, Customer Contact Management Association (CCMA) In the current global context, re-defining the word client is key to business success. The buzz phrases at the moment include “customer experience&rdqu...

Strategic Path - VOIP Refresh at Corporate Express

VOIP Express Strategic Path interviews Mark Jones, Infrastructure Manager at Corporate Express about his company’s recent IP Telephony upgrade that was implemented quickly and is providing a lasting productivity boost. Having been a succe...

Strategic Path - Remote Contact Centre Agents

Remote Stephen Withers investigates the hard and soft issues affecting building a remote workforce. During the last few years, suppliers of contact centre systems have been promoting the benefits of virtual contact centres that can accommodate ...

ATA - ATA's Michael Meredith: Satisfying Knowledge

Satisfying Knowledge Knowledge Crush – it’s a term being used to describe coping with constantly changing data and the sheer volume of information received and assimilated by contact centre agents on a daily basis. If you’re ca...

CCMA - It's all about the service

It’s all about the service Global trends in Contact Centre Communications are displaying evidential support that agent assisted communications (Voice) are swinging once again to be the predominant players as a global contact centre industry...

Strategic Path - Live or die by your customer service

Live or die by your customer service In the 21st century quality customer service will increasingly depend on the intelligent deployment of IP-based systems as everything - voice, email, chat, video - becomes just another application on the networ...

Strategic Path - Australia Leading the Way

Australia Leading the Way The Asia-Pacific contact centre is growing rapidly, with last year’s estimated 1.8 million contact centre agents (at more than 21,800 contact centres) likely to almost double to 3.5 million agents by 2012. Behind t...

CIO Institute - CIOs Harnessing the Hype

CIOs Harnessing the Hype CIOs can rise above the avalanche of misinformation in today's market by working out where their organisation stands on the path to IT maturity. Anyone who has encountered IT vendors' more hyped claims – such as, f...

Strategic Path - Unleashing IP In the Call Centre

Unleashing IP in the call centre By Kirsten Marsh, Strategic Path writer Intelligent IP applications Real-time performance monitoring and analysis Remote call centres The hosted option Today’s enterprises are inc...

NSC Group - Realising the desktop continuum

Today, organisations of every size face a host of challenges. Pressure to deliver richer IT services while adapting to market, technology and organisational change is challenging IT departments to create more agile infrastructures that can keep pace wi...

Nortel - Do UC what I see?

Philip Goldie, Director, Enterprise Product Marketing, Nortel, Asia answers our questions SP: A lot of terms are now being brought to market – and with them some confusion – does Nortel see a difference between unified communications a...

Aspect - Contact centre intelligence

All too frequently, companies implement call routing solutions, outbound diallers and siloed performance optimisation products, such as campaign management or quality monitoring, in their contact centres with no real coordinated strategy for making the...

Verint - Setting and Achieving World-Class Performance Standards

Setting and Achieving World-Class Performance Standards How Your Organisation Can Create Opportunities to Excel, Drive and Reinforce Customer Service By Rajeev Venkat, Director, Solutions Marketing, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions Customers ...

Nortel - The Hyperconnected - here they come! A white paper by IDC

A Global Look at the Exploding ‘Culture of Connectivity’ and Its Impact on the Enterprise Romina Aducci Pim Bilderbeek Holly Brown Seana Dowling Nora Freedman John Gantz Abner Germanow Takashi Manabe Alex Manfrediz Shalini Verma...

Nortel - How to evaluate Business Value for Unified Communications by Forrester Research

Unified Communications Support Multiple Business Process Improvements by Elizabeth Herrell with Brownlee Thomas, Ph. D. and Rachel Batiancila for IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Executive Summary Unified communications (UC) ...

ServicePoint - Video-as-a-Service: keeping it simple

Implementing videoconferencing can be a difficult task for many businesses, but by taking a serviceoriented approach, you can get all of the benefits without the cost and the complexity. ServicePoint’s Video-asa- Service (VaaS) offerings allow yo...

CISCO - Case Study #3: Single System, multiple benefits

Integrating its communications systems onto a single platform has enabled pay TV provider Austar to reduce its call centre costs while also improving service levels to customers. How did it achieve that feat and what lessons have been learned? Over ...

Aspect Software - What contact centres can teach the rest of the organisation about unified communications

…and where performance optimisation solutions come into the picture By Michael Stelzer, Aspect Software, Country Manager, ANZ The business world is on a quest to break down information silos, and for good reason: when more people have acc...

Verint Systems - Tuning In to the Voice of the Customer

Leveraging your most reliable focus group By Diego Lomanto, Senior Analytics Solutions Marketing Manager, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions Is your organisation brave enough to flip conventional thinking on its head and develop marketing, sal...

NSC Group - Event Driven Architectures in the Responsive Enterprise

Section 1: Introduction To be competitive in today’s real-time world requires greater business agility than ever before. Organizations and their people are working faster, and have to respond ever more quickly and effectively to real-time busi...

Aspect - An Evaluative Report of the Knowledge Worker's Role in the Contact Center, 2008

Unified Communications strategies are largely focused on improving employee productivity. The concept can be extended to encompass contact centers and customer-facing support functions across the enterprise to enhance communications between organizatio...

Verint - Analytics-driven Workforce Optimization: An Essential Approach to Enterprise Customer Service

A Verint Systems White Paper by Bill Durr, Principal Global Solutions Consultant Preface Increasingly, organizations are using analytics to better understand what customers think about their products, services, policies, and service representati...

NSC Group - Maximizing Unified Communications for Your Business

Guidelines for Success in Deployment and Solution Optimization Section 1: Executive Summary Although Unified Communications (UC) is a term that’s frequently heard these days, finding clear – or even consistent – definitions can...

Aspect - Unified Communications...Keeping the Customer in the Equation

Unified Communications – Talk of the Town Everyone is talking about unified communications. But, how they are defining it and why they are considering implementing it varies from enterprise to enterprise. Many unified communications strategies...

Verint - Customer Service Analytics New Strategy for Customer-centric Enterprises

Customer Service Analytics: A New Strategy for Customer-centric Enterprises Preface This paper profiles customer service analytics, an essential part of an enterprise strategy for delivering customer service in today’s volatile global marke...

Cisco - Contact Centres to Customer Interaction: Cisco's Scott Rowan

Market forces are quickly re-shaping the strategic path of customer care by Scott Rowan, Customer Interaction Solutions Team Leader at Cisco. For the first time, the quality of customer experiences is the number one issue in the minds of CEOs (NYSE...

Aspect - UC Calling: Michael Stelzer recommends U.C. for the Contact Centre

Why you need unified communications in your call centre. By Michael Stelzer, Aspect Software, Country Manager, Australia & New Zealand On March 10 2008, Aspect Software issued a press release announcing that it is re-positioning the company&rsq...

IPScape - The New Generation of Disaster Recovery Solutions for Call Centres by Simon Burke

Simon Burke, CEO of IPscape, explains how next generation hosted software solutions give call centres the ability to quickly and easily implement low-cost, highly-effective disaster recovery plans SP: The nightmare days of call centres being unable ...

Verint Systems - Workforce Optimisation: The Strategy Defined

Workforce Optimisation: The Strategy Defined What is workforce optimisation? You can search through many documents about workforce optimisation without ever encountering a succinct definition. This is typical for a term that rightly describes a ...

IPScape - Contact Centres get enterprise level flexibility via pay-as-you-go

Contact Centres get enterprise level flexibility via pay-as-you-go SP: In your experience, why are Australian SMEs not leveraging the latest Contact Centre technology in their business? SB: SMEs, whether they are in Australia, India, UK or Ma...

Verint Systems - Optimising workforce optimisation

Optimising workforce optimisation Strategic Path (SP): Do you think the Australian market for large enterprise workforce optimisation systems, such as those offered by Verint, has reached maturity? Where might any remaining growth come from in t...

Verint Systems - Voice of the customer - Putting consumers at the forefront

Voice of the customer: Putting consumers at the forefront By Oscar Alban, Principal Global Market Consultant, Witness Systems Customer opinions and the internet Perception versus reality: It may be worse than you think Putting v...

Alcatel-Lucent - Why should I invest in an IP contact centre

Why should I invest in an IP contact centre? By Alcatel Maximising the efficiency of customer relations Unchaining the call centre agent Multi-media opportunities With the after-effects of the changes implemented for the new...

Jabra - Transitioning from PBX to VoIP - gain without the pain

Transitioning from PBX to VoIP – gain without the pain As business realises the benefits of VoIP for corporate telephony one company is making life easy by manufacturing wireless headsets to take both conventional and IP phone calls. A...

Telstra - Evolving the contact centre into a strategic asset

Evolving the contact centre into a strategic asset Exclusive interview with Agnes Sheehan, Director of Telstra’s Contact Centre & Collaboration Solutions Group SP: How long has Telstra been involved in the call centre space? AS: Telst...