Sometimes it’s the little announcements that catch your eye. Most of the time I just read the vendor announcements on some customer win and move on, but this one caught my eye for two reasons; the humorous bent of the announcement and more fodder for a trend I’ve been seeing.
Continue reading "NEC Zeroes in on Hospitality with the Opening of theWit Hotel in Chicago" »
I attended Mitel’s Industry Analyst event that was held in conjunction with Mitel’s Partner Conference this last week in Las Vegas. The event was really well attended; selling out the Red Rock Resort and Spa, and spilling over into another neighboring hotel. This wasn’t an event tied to a major release announcement, but just business as usual. However, it wasn’t without some pretty nice product announcements, and other business discussions. For example, posting on Monday, on the UC-Strategies site is an overview I wrote on Mitel’s Wesley Clover affiliate program that is well worth looking at. This wasn’t a product announcement, but a business presentation that highlighted something of significance for Mitel.
Continue reading "Mitel’s Partner Conference and TeleCollaboration Solution " »
I was becoming a big fan of Twitter; incorporating into my daily work life, tweeting about events and following a lot of other people’s tweets, and even recommending to clients that they use it, until two weeks ago when I tweeted about having taken Mandarin when I was younger, but feeling glad that I didn’t have to live in China. That was during the time that China blocked Twitter in response to Twitter users talking about the anniversary of Tian An Men Square. I know this is a coincidence, but that was it. After that tweet, Twitter no longer would accept any of my updates.
Continue reading "Twitter – The Black Hole of Customer Support" »
It wasn’t just Siemens that announced more outbound capabilities this week. Syntellect also announced the upcoming (September) release of Syntellect Outbound Communicator to provide customers with proactive outbound calling capabilities. Integrated into their Customer Interaction Management (CIM) platform, Outbound Communicator gives customers the ability to do dedicated outbound customer care, or blended inbound/outbound calling with agents.
Continue reading "Friday Musings - More Outbound Calling Announcements/Funny Tech Support Story" »
Siemens once again has executed on their product roadmap as promised; this time through the integration of outbound technologies from their SER Solutions acquisition, adding a couple of new products to their contact center portfolio. Since the joint venture occurred, Siemens has consistently delivered on extending their portfolio of products through solutions that mesh with what they deem as their ‘core product values’; first call resolution, high usability and ease of deployment. Recently this has included delivering a fully integrated voice portal offering at the end of last year, and enhancing their managed services portfolio with features such as multi-tenancy, earlier this year.
Today Voxeo took some of its burgeoning war chest to make another key acquisition that bolsters its unified communications offering. It’s also a critical component in Voxeo’s Unified Self-Service strategy, which I’ll talk more about below.
Continue reading "Voxeo Bolsters Unified Communications Offering with a Key Acquisition - IMified" »
Kudos to Verint for their latest release focused on speech analytics. This latest release of Impact 360 Speech Analytics makes the deployment and use of SA reachable by the small and mid market, from both a cost and ease of use standpoint. It was only a few years ago that we were just starting to educate companies as to what speech analytics is. Of course we still are, but we have multiple proof points that SA works, and can provide some outstanding value to companies in any vertical. I like to call it “mining for what is missing”, which is to have the system tell the user what they don’t know, because all the traditional analytics that we have on callers, including listening to recorded calls, have limitations. The biggest has been the human limitation of listening to calls as it’s impossible to monitor every recorded or live call, particularly when you are getting hundreds or thousands a day.