Back in February I blogged about my mediocre customer service story with CapitolOne, and their egregiously bad use of speech recognition, coupled with lack of CTI into their contact center. However, things aren’t all bad in contact center land as I just had a quite opposite and stellar experience when I called Replacements Ltd.

It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

I just caught up with Syntellect to see what has gone on since I last blogged about Voiyager, Syntellect’s incredible application testing technology. I’d seen a few press releases on recent successes, including one in April on a win of one of the largest dental insurance carriers (name withheld to further disappoint this analyst in her 12 days of UC wish for more referenceable accounts). Besides not revealing the customer name, the press release left out some of the jaw dropping results of the customer test. The main details of the press release were:

In April, Cisco announced a sales milestone of 500 TelePresence units ordered since the product was launched a year and a half ago. That might not sound like a lot, but we aren’t talking about cellphones or Barbie dolls, but really big video conferencing rooms and equipment. It also makes Cisco the current front runner in selling really big telepresence solutions, and it speaks volumes about how important this type of technology is for business. Companies are investing in video conferencing.

In April, Blair Pleasant and I conducted a UC end user productivity study, under the UCStrategies.com brand. The study focuses on how end users use UC and how it impacts their productivity. Rather than targeting the IT managers who are responsible for implementing and running the UC systems and asking them what they felt the impacts of UC were, we surveyed and interviewed the real end users who use UC to find out how, or even if, UC is helping them be more productive and effective in their day-to-day jobs. The study focused on four different job types – executive/management, operations (including engineering and IT), sales and marketing, and back office operations, particularly human resources. Go to my home page to click on the download.