In honor of Valentine’s Day, last week, CMSWire posted an article that likened customer relationships with personal relationships. The piece, How to Make Your Customers Love You This Valentine’s Day, took three best-practice tips for happy, healthy, successful relationships and applied them to customer relationships in the contact center. We encourage you to give it a read, it’s interesting how well they apply. Read More
Industry Perspectives: Contact Centers or Customer Engagement Centers?
This week’s Industry Perspectives comes from a recent article by Patrick Budmar for Australia-based ARN. In his article, Businesses to turn to multi-channel customer engagement: Gartner, Patrick highlights Gartner’s recent prediction that companies will continue to transition into multi-channel customer engagement centers. Read More
Industry Perspectives: Big Data – Mainstream for Most
This week, BroadSoft is continuing our new Industry Perspectives series with a recent piece by Louis Columbus, a contributor for Forbes. In the article, 2014: The Year Big Data Adoption Goes Mainstream In The Enterprise, Louis highlights IDG’s recently conducted study on big data and enterprise predictions for 2014. The most notable of results are that on average, enterprises will spend $8 million on big data-related initiatives this year. The study also mentioned that 70 percent of enterprise organizations have either deployed or are planning to deploy big data-related projects and programs. Read More
Industry Perspectives: Does Big Data Need to ‘Shrink to Grow?’
This week, we’re introducing a new blog series, “Industry Perspectives,” to share insights from today’s top reporters, influencers and thought leaders. Our first post comes from Quentin Hardy and highlights a recent article he wrote for the New York Times. In “Big Data Shrinks to Grow,” Quentin writes about a big data paradigm shift that Read More
Five Tips for Contact Centers in 2014
This past holiday season, UPS and FedEx experienced what can only be summed up as a customer nightmare when an influx of orders created shipping delays and prevented on-time delivery of hundreds of thousands of packages. Both companies immediately kicked into damage control mode, and issued public apologies to customers about not being able to meet the high expectation of delivering gifts in time for Christmas morning. Read More
Customer Rage and the Big Data Dilemma
In 1989, the song “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” by U.K. pop band Simply Red hit the number one spot on the Hot 100 list. Almost 25 years later—in the era of big data—the lyrics “If you don’t know me by now, you will never, never, never know me,” probably ring true for most people purchasing goods and services this holiday season, as I will explain. Read More
From the floor at Dreamforce: Must analytic solutions be purpose-built or can they solve multiple problems?
Prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent the week in San Francisco attending Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual conference. It was a great opportunity to gain insights from the industry’s leading vendors, share best practices among CRM experts and learn about up-and-coming tools and trends in the contact center space. Read More
The Customer-Centric Contact Center
Last week I attended Frost & Sullivan’s Contact Center West conference in Tucson, Arizona. The conference was a great opportunity to share insights, ideas and best practices among the industry’s top vendors and experts. Read More
The Next Competitive Battleground
“The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” This was Jerry Gregoria’s fatidic statement just before resigning as Dell’s CIO in 1999. His words have become even more revealing in recent years, especially with advancements in technologies, including the proliferation of digital touch points. PCs, smartphones, tablets, not to mention social media, have profoundly impacted the way companies interact with their most important commodity. Because of this, customers across all demographics now share a common trait: they are empowered. And if companies want to stay competitive, the onus is on them to make the overall customer experience a top priority. Read More
